Decay

Decay is a feature added to the game because of the mass amounts of player-made structures on the map, which the servers can't handle.

Decay works by slowly decreasing the health of the foundations of a structure. If left unattended, the decaying structures will break and, in co-ordination with the stability system, the rest of the building will soon fall apart as well, ultimately leading to the total destruction of a structure. Unlike in earlier builds, decay now affects any and all structures, no matter what the tier or location. Higher tiered structures will generally decay slower, and after a longer delay.

Repairing Decay

If a certain part of your base has been partly decayed, then you need to repair it with the resource used to create it. Metal Fragments fix metal structures, Wood fixes wood structures, and so on. To repair, take the Hammer tool, and ensure you have the relevant resources in your inventory. Hit the structure by left clicking, and on each successful hit, the health of the structure will visibly and physically increase until it is repaired fully. If a structure has already collapsed, it is not repairable and must be rebuilt.

Preventing Decay

You can prevent your base from decaying by being active and constantly using your base as much as possible. Every time you open or close a locked door, a timer is reset. If the timer counts all the way down to zero, the damaging decay process begins. Even when the decay is active, the interaction between a player and a locked door will stop the decay and once again reset the timer.

So if you place a twig wall and run away, after 6 hours it'll start taking damage, and after a further 6 hours it'll be fully destroyed. With armored walls, it means after 24 hours it will begin taking decay damage, and after 5 days it will be destroyed. If at any point a locked door is opened or closed, the delay resets and objects in a 40m radius will have to wait for their decay delay again before taking decay damage. If you haven't played in a few days and your base is half destroyed from decay, you'll still have to repair it but maybe next time have a friend log on and open a door and check the base out so it counts as active and doesn't decay!

Here are some stats:

• Twigs
  • 6 Hour Delay
  • 6 Hour Duration
• Wood
  • 12 Hour Delay
  • 24 Hour Duration
• Stone
  • 18 Hour Delay
  • 48 Hour Duration
• Sheet Metal
  • 18 Hour Delay
  • 72 Hour Duration
• Armored
  • 24 hour Delay
  • 120 hour Duration

Server Settings (Legacy)

There were two server variables that were relevant for controlling the decay speed of structures in Legacy:

decay.decaytickrate (default 300)

This controls the inverval in which all outstanding decay on the server is performed. The faster (shorter) the interval, the more often decay is applied to structures.

decay.deploy_maxhealth_sec (default N/A)

Maxhealth controls how much damage will be dealt per second. However, the values for these variables are not straight forward to set. Changing the decay time of structures should be done by changing the deploy_maxhealth_sec setting. Changing decaytickrate is only necessary if there are too many structures on the server that cause lag every time the damage is applied.

To estimate the time a structure needs to decay with given decay settings the following formula can be used:

Damager per Time unit = Structure Max Health / (deploy_maxhealth_sec / decaytickrate)

This can be used to calculate the amount of time needed for an untouched structure to fully decay:

Days until complete decay = Structure Max Health / (Damage per Time unit / decaytickrate) / 60 / 60 / 24

Example

deploytickrate = 300
deploy_maxhealth_sec = 432500

This setting will result in the decay of a normal 1000 hp Wood Wall

1000 hp / (432500 hp / 300 s) = 1000 hp / 1441.66 parts of hp per 300 seconds = 0.6936448261 hp per 300 seconds

1000 hp / (0.6936448261 hp per 300 seconds / 300 seconds) / 60s / 60m / 24h = 1000 hp / 0.00231214942 hp/s / 60s / 60m / 24h

= 432498 s / 60s / 60m / 24h = 5 days until 100% decay

With the above settings a standard 1000 hp Wooden Wall will take 5 days until is has decayed completely and take 0.693645 hp damage every 300 / 60 = 5 minutes after 24 hours of idle.

This graph will show the decay time in days by deploy_maxhealth_sec with deploytickrate at 300 for a structure with 1000 hp (e.g. Wood Wall).

Decay time in days by MaxHealth at 300s/tick for 1000hp structures