Schedule DayZ Server Restarts with Warnings

Updated 18 October 2026

Most DayZ servers restart every few hours, and players want to know before it happens. Law's KillFeed restarts your Nitrado server on a schedule from Discord and posts a warning beforehand. For a countdown on players' screens, DayZ's own messages.xml does the rest.

Schedule a restart

1. Open your server in the dashboard and go to Auto Tasks. You can also run /autotasks in Discord and choose Add Task.
2. Pick Restart Server(s) and set Every (min): 240 restarts every four hours, 180 every three.
3. In the dashboard, set Notify (min), such as 15, and a notify channel. The bot posts a restart warning there that many minutes before each restart. Put your own words in Message before running, and anything to add to the restart post in Message when running.
4. Tick the servers the task restarts and save. The schedule counts from when the task is created, so create it at a time that suits your restart cycle.

The free plan allows 2 tasks per server, restarting at most every 30 minutes. The paid plan allows 12 tasks, as often as every 5 minutes, and adds raid on and off tasks for raid weekends.

To restart right away, /server restart and /server stop work from Discord on the free plan. Give them to staff through a permission group linked to a Discord role.

Warn players in game with messages.xml

The Discord warning reaches your community, but not players who are only in game. For a message on their screen, use messages.xml in the mission's db folder. DayZ shows these messages itself, on every platform. Each message can use these settings:

What a message can do

• text: the message. #tmin becomes the minutes left in a countdown, #name the server name.
• delay: minutes after the server starts before it first shows.
• repeat: minutes between repeats; 0 shows it once.
• deadline: the countdown, in minutes.
• onconnect: 1 shows it to each player as they join.
• shutdown: 1 shuts the server down when the countdown ends. Leave it at 0 when the bot does the restarting.

For a restart countdown, set deadline to the length of your restart cycle, such as 240 minutes for a four-hour schedule, put #tmin in the text and leave shutdown at 0. The free messages.xml Generator builds the file for you. On Xbox, PlayStation and Switch, /server messages edits the file from Discord: add a welcome note, a repeating message or a restart countdown, which it fills in from your restart task. The dashboard's Server Files page checks the file before you upload it, and on the paid plan edits it with a simple form.

Bring the server back when it goes down

On the paid plan, auto-start checks your server every 5 minutes. If Nitrado reports it stopped twice in a row, the bot starts it again and posts a notice in your Bot Logs channel. Turn it on with /server autostart or in the dashboard. Stopping the server with /server stop or the DayZ Hub pauses auto-start until the server runs again (24 hours at most); /server autostart On ends the pause at once. A stop in the Nitrado panel does not pause it, so turn auto-start off first there.