Back when s.o.t first came out my crew had a bunch of loot and we were sunk near an island
so when we came back to the island the ship that sunk us was picking up our loot from the bottom of the island under the sea
does this still happen? does loot that sinks from your ship still stay at the bottom if you are close enough to islands?
or did they change it to automatically despawn when it reaches the bottom.
it's gone through multiple phases over time
for a while it didn't sink at all and just randomly disappeared or it stayed visible but wasn't there to grab. You'd see it but you couldn't touch it or save it
currently it's more in a phase of you see it sinking but it'll randomly disappear faster than it used to so it might not make it to the bottom and the times seem to vary.
Merchant stuff is staying up a lot longer in my experience but a lot of this may be server by server region by region and a lot of random so results may vary for you
I can't answer this 100% definitively but I can provide an anecdote... Recently (say a couple of weeks back maybe), I spawned in and I was stocking up my ship when I heard a familiar bubbling sound. So I jumped overboard and on the sea bank was a bunch of merchant cargo, including plants (the source of the bubbling), silks and rum bottles, as well a grade V flag. Clearly these were leftovers from the crew that had left the game at that outpost previously.
Loot that sinks and touches the ground will stay for a little while longer. Loot that sinks in the open sea will despawn after it hits a certain distance threshold.
@xultanis-dragon said in Sinking loot question:
Loot that sinks and touches the ground will stay for a little while longer. Loot that sinks in the open sea will despawn after it hits a certain distance threshold.
Is that just a placebo though?
I think that loot has a defined "sink depth" which is likely determined by the despawn process lifetime (ie. once it stops floating, it takes X seconds to despawn). When it reaches as far as it will sink during that lifetime it will despawn. Sinking loot that hits a sea floor stops because otherwise it would phase below the ground and be unreachable, but I think both still have the same lifetime.
@d3adst1ck said in Sinking loot question:
@xultanis-dragon said in Sinking loot question:
Loot that sinks and touches the ground will stay for a little while longer. Loot that sinks in the open sea will despawn after it hits a certain distance threshold.
Is that just a placebo though?
I think that loot has a defined "sink depth" which is likely determined by the despawn process lifetime (ie. once it stops floating, it takes X seconds to despawn). When it reaches as far as it will sink during that lifetime it will despawn. Sinking loot that hits a sea floor stops because otherwise it would phase below the ground and be unreachable, but I think both still have the same lifetime.
You could very right with that actually. Could be a timer from the moment it starts to sink to when it despawns.
