Greetings!
I was watching a couple of videos, but I am still not sure how de decay system will affect my buildings. I play on official PvE servers.
How close do I have to be to my buildings to reset the decay timer?
Is there a way to know the decay timer on console?
If a building with no connection is inside my walls and I “visit” my walls, will it also reset the building’s timer?
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For starters, here’s a relatively detailed explanation of the decay mechanics:
Now, on to your questions:
I don’t know for sure. What I always do is go right up to the building and actually look at the decay timer until I can see it has been reset to its maximum value.
Yes. All you need to do is craft a repair hammer and equip it. If you’re wielding it and you come close enough to a building piece or a placeable, you will see its decay timer.
I covered that in my post about the decay mechanics, but I’ll answer the question directly: it depends on whether it shares the decay timer with your walls.
There are a couple of ways to make sure a building or a placeable shares the decay timer with another. The easiest and most straightforward way is to connect the building pieces, but there are others.
Proximity is one of the ways: for example, if you want to place a wheel of pain but you don’t want to spend resources on additional foundations connected to your walls, you have to make sure the wheel is as close to the walls as it can be. When you place it, check its decay timer. If it’s not the same as the walls, pick it up and place it closer.
Another way is to build it as a connected build first, and then either destroy or pick up the connecting pieces. That way, the game will assign the same building ID to all the pieces, and that building ID will remain the same even if you break the connection.
I hope that helps.
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It has to do with the settings of the server, however playing in official servers my range was quite big. You have to understand however that in tier one you need more than 85 building pieces to have correct timers. However I will summon the great @CodeMage here, his answers will be 100% correct, I cannot explain like he can.
For us, Playstation, we check the decay timers with a repair hammer (in case you don’t know 
) .
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Equip a repair hammer and point to the building to see the building’s decay timer. Usually if you are within your land claim area (about 20 blocks) it will reset the timers but it is always safer to check the timer with a hammer to be sure.
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Until I type 10 words you typed 100 
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Never forget that decay timmers sometimes get bugged and they do not refresh at all…
My advice is check with repair hammer AFTER making a minor change in ur base (move a placeable or torch)…
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Every building piece (chest, vaults etc too) has a decaytimer. The decaytimer starts the second you are placing a building piece. As long as you are close to this building piece the decaytimer will refresh every couple seconds. When you are offline or out of your buildings renderdistance it starts ticking down until you either log in again or come close to that building piece.
One building piece of its own has a very low decay timer. But the more building pieces you connect/link with eachother the higher the decaytimer gets. This goes until the set decaytimer of that server reaches its max. The decaytimer can be set to a server owners liking. So different server can have different decaytimer. Some server have set a very low decaytimer so people need to login in at least every couple of days or the building will start decaying.
Decaying has three stages. In the first stage the timer ticks slowy down. If you log off or go out of renderdistance. Second stage accures if you did not log in in time to reset the timer. Then other people can start destroying pieces. Most people take out the doors and destroy the chests, so they can take the loot. People are able to see another persons building decaytimer with the repair hammer. The second stage has a decaytimer too. If that decaytimer went down it goes into stage three which means building pieces will delete on its own until every building piece is gone.
One tool to check your decay timer (as mentioned before) is your repair hammer. If you aim with the hammer at your building piece it will show you several information about that building piece, including the decaytimer.
Whats important to know is, that building pieces that are not connected/linked together have each their own decaytimer. This means a small building, for example a fishing hut next to your mainbuilding, will decay faster then your mainbuilding, since it has less buildingpieces and is not connected to your main base. So it has a decaytimer of its own.
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Yep. Just recognized I lost a map room this AM that I used Sunday because I assumed that the timer got refreshed in the time it took to teleport away. This morning…no map room and checked the log and sure enough it timed away about 30 seconds before I got there.
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On 3728 I lost in the past more than 30 map rooms this way. So at the end I placed a damn repair hammer to each dancer. If I happen to forget mine, I was renting it from my dancer!
My each dancer had the name of the position of the map room. So if I didn’t have the time to instantly replace, I was taking her back home until the job is done (like I didn’t had a chest full with dancers only ).
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main reason this happens is that event log does not record the player/clan base when u destroy placeables , whilst it does when u destroy building pieces like foundations…
keeps looter anonymized
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I never knew that I didn’t show up on the log if I decay placeables! Well dang…that encourages me to grave rob more often…not that it stopped me before.
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This explains a question I had years now, thank you both @Winthor and @Ragnaguard!
2 times in the same spot that I oftenly build in the mount of the dead I had a base wipe, only a door missing and my whole belongings, the building was untouched!!! Once on 3504 and once on 3740. The funny part is that my last visit was 4 days before 
. I double checked it in my event log and I was omg, what the f… I knew it it was decay chasers, I just couldn’t prove it because my event log had only my log in and log out, nothing else!
Tbh, I didn’t really care about it, it was servers that I was playing to help others, but still if this thing happens to a person that cares for what he looses it can become really frustrating! These actions from other players should had a place on Zendesk files, people should be able to read these actions on their event logs and report these m… f… s!
They are nothing but pathetic players!
Thank you guys, really!
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I don´t know if this ever got fixed. It wasn´t the last I played. But if you have problems with your maprooms decaying too fast, link them to another building or build your maproom foundations and then extend one side of the maproom (add more foundations) until you reach max server decay timer. If you then remove the additional foundations, the maproom should still have the full decay timer.
If it got fixed by now, another thing you could do is, make the maproom higher and add stairs to reach the top. You can lower your first foundations so they are almost at groundlevel and then build another set of foundations on top. It may not look that pretty but it will help extend your decay timer without making the actually maproom too large.
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