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Decay timer question: destroyed under my feet!


jenea

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I'm hoping someone can explain a mystery. In reviewing our tribe logs we noticed that we had some structures that were destroyed because of the decay timer. Being new to official servers, we weren't aware that decay timers were a thing. Our play style involves building a lot of small structures so that we never have all of our eggs in one structure, so to speak, and we don't spend a lot of time at any of them. In order to avoid losing any of our structures, we decided to take a bed-hopping tour to reset all of the timers.

Two of the beds were really just emergency recovery spots with a single bed on a single thatch foundation. I was able to spawn at these beds, but was very surprised to discover that the bed and the foundation disappeared as soon as I spawned. I would have expected either that the thatch platform would decay and disappear, taking the bed with it and making it so that I could not spawn there, or that the decay timer would reset when I arrived. But the foundation disappearing under my naked spawn... well that was unexpected.

Is this the expected behavior? And does this mean that my "timer reset tour" of beds will be ineffective, and we can expect more disappearing structures?

Thanks for any wisdom you can provide!

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A lone pillar or foundation with nothing else attached to it has a 12 hour timer. Due to how Ark works with render distances, the things you got note of being auto demod another player must of rendered, and when you TP'd to your bed's that where on single foundations, they demo'd. Best bet is two foundations side by side. It's what I had to do for cave beds on legacy.

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13 hours ago, jenea said:

Two of the beds were really just emergency recovery spots with a single bed on a single thatch foundation. I was able to spawn at these beds, but was very surprised to discover that the bed and the foundation disappeared as soon as I spawned. I would have expected either that the thatch platform would decay and disappear, taking the bed with it and making it so that I could not spawn there, or that the decay timer would reset when I arrived. But the foundation disappearing under my naked spawn... well that was unexpected.

Is this the expected behavior? And does this mean that my "timer reset tour" of beds will be ineffective, and we can expect more disappearing structures?

Unless timers are messed up, the situation you described is an expected behavior: timer runs out, but buildings dont get destroyed asap - it is being done as soon as you enter its render range or on server restart.

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4 hours ago, Fealthion said:

changed a while ago iirc - foundation is the worst - pillar/ceiling slightly better - pillar/ladder or fencefoundation is best. But as they are trying to place beds pillar/ceiling is better than a foundation

So far spawns have been ok with pillar/ladder around my base. So I second this setup. A guy on the far west side of the island server I'm on has stone foundations with pillars. There is no rocks or trees there. Apparently he must have put those foundations where the foliage spawns. Dinos seem to still spawn there, surprisingly. Although I'm not sure how much the spawn was effected.

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On 9/11/2017 at 2:56 PM, jenea said:

I'm hoping someone can explain a mystery. In reviewing our tribe logs we noticed that we had some structures that were destroyed because of the decay timer. Being new to official servers, we weren't aware that decay timers were a thing. Our play style involves building a lot of small structures so that we never have all of our eggs in one structure, so to speak, and we don't spend a lot of time at any of them. In order to avoid losing any of our structures, we decided to take a bed-hopping tour to reset all of the timers.

Two of the beds were really just emergency recovery spots with a single bed on a single thatch foundation. I was able to spawn at these beds, but was very surprised to discover that the bed and the foundation disappeared as soon as I spawned. I would have expected either that the thatch platform would decay and disappear, taking the bed with it and making it so that I could not spawn there, or that the decay timer would reset when I arrived. But the foundation disappearing under my naked spawn... well that was unexpected.

Is this the expected behavior? And does this mean that my "timer reset tour" of beds will be ineffective, and we can expect more disappearing structures?

Thanks for any wisdom you can provide!

Problem is in the way in which the game loads things. 

The game loads the structure then loads the player. So, your item with a timer down to 0, gets loaded, and gets destroyed before you get loaded in the game (its maybe just a millisecond but still, it's enough for it to destroy the structures before it detects its you resetting timers). 

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In the real world, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to witness it, it still makes a sounds because it still falls. Regarding structures in Ark (and in a few other aspects of the game), nothing happens unless someone is there to witness it happening. For the same reason dinos won't lay eggs when you aren't in the area, a structure will not self-demolish at the end of a timer until you are in the area. The moment someone shows up to witness it, the action that was scheduled to occur will occur immediately. 

So basically, what you (OP) experienced, while not necessarily optimal, is normal in the game.

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