Is there a bug with how things decay?

I’m not here to complain, I’m here to simply understand. For some time now certain things have been decaying on PVE officials but there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason. I have an ‘old’ main base which was sprawling. Last fall sometime half of it decayed even though the area I stayed mostly in was fine. For months/years, sticking to my side of the base and leaving my friends’ area alone was enough to keep it from decaying. Last fall, it decayed when I thought it was reset. No big deal, no one was using it, but found it strange that it decayed even though I was keeping up with resetting every few days when I wasn’t playing intensely. I missed not notification and lost hundreds of hours of work. Wasn’t my stuff, and I doubt my friends had any real interest left. So I’ve been notcing the decay timers aren’t in sync and have been acting odd lately.

This week, it seems only things of value decayed at my base, when i thought I had just refreshed it a couple of days ago:

  • Main structures are intact, the buildings themselves were fine - except for doors
  • Certain production benches decayed, and from what I can tell things not close to walls, except on the first floor of one of my towers
  • Certain chests and large boxes decayed - I have an attic with large boxes for storage but only steel fire and steel reinforcement decayed - all the other boxes were still intact, so out of roughly 20+ boxes only two random ones decayed in the attic.
  • All boxes on all other floors below what I described decayed (including around 700 feat points which is what I’m most salty about)
  • Some ornamental stuff decayed while other things right next to each other didn’t - I had a racks of weapons on display across a wall, some of that stuff decayed while others did not
  • My gold/silver rocknoses in animal pens and my wheels (which were all built on foundations which were still there) had decayed, while iceboxes right next to them were intact.

I could keep citing examples but wanted to paint a picture that it seems a lot of random things decayed for reasons™.

Here is my non-scientific and full conjecture analysis based on what I’ve witnessed in the past:

From the behavior, I think anything that has sandstone foundations underneath (or maybe a better framing is mixed tiers/set pieces) it is at risk for this disjointed decay timers. My t3 early bases have sandstone foundations underneath while my later bases are all solid t3.

Resetting decay timers don’t all happen all at once on each piece placed and are connected with each other, but I do believe certain pieces, like building pieces do update all at once if they are connected (and if they are of the same time type).

Patches cause some decay timers to erroneously speed up/change compared to other items. Patches are a big one for me. There are times after a patch download that my decay timers were ready to kick in when I had been playing the night before the patch. This is the one that scares me.

Has anybody run into this before? Are there known bugs as to decay timers and placement, or am I just an unlucky player here? I religiously refresh my bases before decay timers should be up if I’m not in full gaming mode with this game, and I’m in full mode quite often.

Loading range/reset decay timer range may not always work properly after a patch, or may be part of a silent patch change. Or the decay timers simply get disjointed after a patch.

Moral of the story - diversify where you store you stuff. Don’t group all your most valuable stuff in one box. Spread it around.

Also, no need to tell me to play on a private server. I had one, I enjoyed officials better. The temptation to spawn in everything is too great and felt like a dev sand box rather than a game. Also, after every patch, fixing/updating mods became a multiple hour/day chore. And this happens at such frequency, with mods never working right again, that it simply wasn’t fun. I could play on an unmodded server (which is close but not exact to official settings because some official settings aren’t exposed to the UI and can only be changed by mods), but then again I could play free on an official server. At least I know an official server I’m not paying for will be here as long as Funcom supports this game. So yeah, don’t tell me to play on a private server. It’s not a solution to decay timers, which is a fundamental part of the base game. I just want to know what the unwritten rules to decay timers actually are.

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Our stuff decayed too, full entire bases after server restarts. On private server with decay disabled. So yea… its bugged somehow.
My mate totally stopped playing coz he built the biggest base he ever did, with eewa and aoc content (imagine all that grind…) and one day as he logged in it went poof…
have now to live with creating daily backups and putting them on server before we play, otherwise more bases decay randomly.

I may have an answer for you, but I need to understand something first. I have never played Official PvE: are your storage containers and stations accessible by people not in your clan? Where I’m going with this… when something is in a decayed state, other players can dismantle it, thereby taking what they want from your decayed chests and stations. They can dismantle a decayed door to get into your base, and then go through what you have.

Regarding resetting your decay timer, make sure you have a repair hammer with you, pull it out, and make sure your timer resets. Just going to your base does not reset the timer right away. Depending on the size of your base and when you last visited it, it can take a few seconds to a minute before the decay timer actually resets. So having your repair hammer out to check the timer is a good idea.

I know some other stuff about decay, but I’ll stop there unless you’ve got more questions. Happy to help in any way I can.

This is exactly what happened. When I loot abandoned structures, I have to be careful to only destroy placeables. So I destroy doors, chests, benches and anything that might contain items of value. I’m sort of a jerk in that I’ll usually destroy the structure once I’m done.

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Hey thanks for your response - yes storage containers are accessible by clan members, but honestly, no one plays anymore and has been that way for at least a year really. And it’s all my gaming friends from other games so I don’t think it would have been anyone in the clan. The logs also say that the items decayed, not that they were dismantled. So I’m not sure if the messaging would be the same or not. This would be a different story too if it can be dismantled by random non clan players. But I don’t think it is since I’ve seen other player’s decayed stuff on the same server and could not dismantle it. There is an underlying pattern of certain things that do decay over other things here. For example I have a wheel in doors and out doors, both wheels decayed. Where as Ice boxes did not. These are placed items that are right next to each other.

But yeah, I definitely use a hammer to make sure the timers reset - but I don’t check 1000s of pieces building or ornamental. My assumption has been if the the thing I’m lookin at, typically a floor foundation reset to 168, the entire structure would have reset, including things within in render range, and all the items connected to the foundation I’m looking it.

What I don’t get is how random it seems. Like only 1/2 of the weapons on racks in teh same room. Or only some of the chests. And yet, the foundations weren’t even in a decayed state… The building itself had over 24 hours left.

You know what I think you’re right. The patterns make more sense if it was a heist. I didn’t think it was possible on officials though - I’ve come across decayed stuff I couldn’t touch. Server settings says that Containers aren’t accessible by anyone. That’s not checked off so if there is a trick or something, I’m not sure how that works.

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