⏳ Persistence

Persistence is how long an item stays in the world without any player interaction. For most items this is measured in hours, but storage and base structures need to hang around far longer, so they have much longer life timers.

We've left the life timer at its vanilla value for the majority of items, but changed a few things. The headline one:

• Any base structure — a wall, gate, door and so on — lasts 45 days without interaction.

What counts as interaction

Interaction means going up to an item and attaching something to it, or moving things around in its inventory — nails or planks on a wall, for example. Opening and closing a gate or door does not count. You can automate this by building a flag, which refreshes everything around it once every 5 days. A flag keeps refreshing while it's at least partly raised, but it slowly drops down the pole and stops working once it reaches the bottom — a vanilla drop rate that takes around 40–45 days.

Storage and vehicles

All storage persists for 45 days, with two vanilla exceptions: shelters last 7 days, and underground stashes last 2 weeks. It doesn't matter what container you bury — once buried, it lasts the 2 weeks.

For vehicles:

• Helicopters last 45 days without a flag.
• Cars and boats use vanilla persistence.

Note that these are life-timer rules. Vehicles are also subject to our separate vehicle maintenance system, which is a different mechanic.