Decay

Wolfram — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 02:04:37 +0000

There is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about all the various ways that decay can be slowed or minimised, so here’s everything you need to know about it.

Buildings and fences:

Materials used: Buildings made from stone decay slower than buildings made from wood. Wood types have no effect on decay.
Deeds: Buildings on deeds with less than 28 days of upkeep benefit from slower decay. Buildings with more than 28 days have no decay at all.
Kingdom areas: Buildings built where there are no kingdom influences suffer from a penalty to decay.
Quality: The quality of the walls effects how fast buildings decay.

Items:

Materials used:
Metal: Items made from metal decay the slowest.
Stone: Items made from stone decay slower than wood and faster than metal.
Wood: Items made from cedar wood decay slower than other wood types. Items made from Oak take less damage when used.

Location:

Buildings: Leaving items inside a building will slow decay.
Mines: Mines get the same bonuses as buildings where decay is concerned, but a cave in will completely destroy an item.
Containers: Leaving items inside containers will slow decay. The material used to create the container has no effect on the items inside. Multiple containers do not stack.
inventories: With the exception of food and lit light sources, items in inventories take no damage at all.
Bank: Items in banks take no damage at all.
Deeds: There is no bonus or penalty for item decay rates from deeds. Deeds only affect fences and buildings.

Other:

Time: Items left untouched for some unknown and probably random time start to decay. In theory if you pick up and drop an item every day, it should not begin decaying.
Quality: the higher the quality of an item is, the slower it decays. Note that decay lowers the effective QL of an item, so the decay will accelerate as the DMG accumulates.

Notes:

Decay is the DMG that items take over time when they are left unused.

Damage is the DMG that an item takes when it is being used.

Items made from multiple materials get their decay from whatever material the finished item is considered. A longsword for example is made from metal, and the fact that the handle is made from wood has no effect on the decay or damage of the item.

Multiple containers do not stack. So, having an item in a backpack that is in a chest does not give it a bonus from both containers, it can only get a bonus once.

In theory, an item in a container that is in a house should get 2 bonuses to decay since the bonuses are different, but this has never been confirmed. However, at the very least, the container gets the building bonus, so it’s not a total loss if building and container bonuses do not stack.

Whilst the above tells how decay is supposed to function, it is extremely difficult to tell whether everything is working as intended since the algorithms for decay include a fair amount of randomness.

Here is the link to the server release notes where wood types began affecting decay:

http://wurmonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Wurm_Server_Release_Notes_2005#050419

Wurm Team Blog » decay