Barrels and Persistence

[Freight_Train 0]

Hey guys, just started playing DayZ standalone, long time Arma 2 mod player here.

Running into an issue with persistence of barrels.

I'm playing on Steam, stable version, no mods, nothing unusual, just the buy game, download, install it type setup.

I have a character, he plays on 2-3 different servers that list themselves as 'Persistence Enabled'.

I have 3 times now found a barrel, waddled off with it, placed it, put items in it, and closed it. Seems like all the options I have with it. But after the next server reboot, it never comes back. Barrel is not there, items are just lost. 

I've tried this on 3 different servers, and repeated the attempt 3 times in the past 2 days. These are low player count, heck the place I am getting the barrels is pretty well known and popular and I have NEVER seen a player or been shot at there. These servers are pretty dead right now, and they are official servers.

Does Barrel persistence not work right now - or am I missing a step in making the server save my stash?

[IMT 3190]

Where are you placing them? I believe that placing a barrel in (certain) buildings will make them despawn. When placing a barrel, make sure it doesn't stick in the ground.

[drgullen 596]

You might be better off burying a sea chest.  I had a server going earlier this year and I can confirm that persistence was working for that -- a chest that I buried was still there almost a month later.  I had a backup system in place though that was restoring persistence files in the event of a server crash.  Many community servers do this (backup, that is), but I don't believe any of the official servers do, meaning that a server crash could be wiping parts of the persistence files, including your barrel.

Cars can sometimes despawn if the radiator is in place, but ruined -- could it be that something you placed in the barrel was ruined?  Perhaps the same thing is happening with barrels as it does with cars?

[Freight_Train 0]

I suppose it could be a ruined item - stupid bug if thats the case, though.

Where was I placing them? somewhat hidden by 2 trees. Used the placement tool and it snapped in place. I put a few items in it. did this 3 times trying to get a barrel to 'stick'. One of them the server crashed after I placed a barrel, another the server ran fine for at least 2 hours after I placed the barrel, On another I placed the barrel, went back to my house Im camping at, logged out. Came back - barrel was still there! but when I logged onto that character the next day(max 10 hours after placing the barrel), it was gone.

[Freight_Train 0]

By the way I'm over 80% sure I've never placed a ruined item in a barrel because, I am hand picking things I would want to get me started with, if I get whacked and have to find the barrel as a freshie 🙂 So I look over the items fairly well, and I've read how barrels work so I'm sure I'm not doing something obviously wrong.

Will say that it seems the official servers crash multiple times a day though? I consistently get kicked out at LEAST once a day and often 3-4 times a day, no matter where I play. And 90% of the time if I lose connection to server (with no server warning for restart or anything), when I return, I'm in a queue of other players - meaning they all got kicked too because the only time I see a queue is after this unannounced reboot. There will be new loot in houses I recently looted too - so seems like a server crash and reboot to me since its unannounced?

[drgullen 596]

17 hours ago, Freight_Train said:

so seems like a server crash and reboot to me since its unannounced? 

If you get the red error message "No message received..." on your screen during game play, that's a crash.  If you get booted back to the menu screen with the message "You were kicked from the game", that's either a scheduled restart or perhaps a server admin shutting down the server at an unscheduled time for some reason.  The first being an ungraceful termination of the server exe which could potentially (not always) cause persistence issues.  The second being a graceful termination of the exe which (in theory, at least) should never cause persistence issues, since the exe writes any unwritten persistence updates to the files in the storage_1 folder before terminating itself.