Built a field chest/trunk to hold all my Silver (I actually had 4 veins overlapping each other! Which made it hard to find since the wishbone puleses were constantly confused!)
Put a field chest with all my silver and built rockpiles with all the stone.
Logged on with my friends later to "lug it home" and the rock piles were still there, and silver and the chest was fully gone. 300 Silver lost.

100% certain it wasn't a friend theft.

Thinking a wolf/drake/golem may have smashed the chest while a friend was idled in base doing the upkeep chores. Whats the despawn timer of items?

This is the first I've heard about particular things missing from chests. If it's just food I would suggest you're either looking in the wrong chests OR your friend got hungry and hasn't replaced what they took.

If you're running mods, that would be the first thing I would check to make sure they are running ok after the recent updates, especially if you've got a mod which makes food that is not native game stuff.

Not saying it's not possible, just highly unlikely.

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Originally posted by _I_:

any mods?

Very insightful! Mods render any and all arguments about whether (and how) vanilla mechanics work utterly moot.

Mods aren't a total black box. They do specific things, and if the person who uses them doesn't know what those specific things are, or think about what might go wrong when those things stop working, then it's on them.

If the specific thing happened to be expanding chest inventory, and if a person loaded a save file without that mod in working order, then anything stored at the bottom of the chest might not have any place to exist. Then, poof. (That's the only time any of my stuff has disappeared from chests, and I back tracked and realized what I did wrong, then just shrugged and recrafted or mined back the stuff I still needed.)

The other time I thought stuff had disappeared, it really hadn't. Another mod had the smelter helpfully put my ingots in a chest other then the one I had intended for ingots. Nothing was actually missing. The smelter just decided that my food chest was closer to it than the ingot chest.

That's just the risk of modding and I don't sweat too much over a few lost items here and there. But anyway, to answer your question, things do not despawn from chests without an actual reason behind it. In multiplayer, the answer is almost always "other people."

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Originally posted by _I_:

any mods?

Very insightful! Mods render any and all arguments about whether (and how) vanilla mechanics work utterly moot.

I mean, yes. That is how it works.
Items don't just vanish. There can be errors such as the world failing to save properly. In that case a chest may have forgotten the latest change to its contents. Items do not delete on their own, however.

If you're playing with friends, 9 times out of 10 look out for their smug grin.

Seems pretty simple to me. Your friend got hungry.

we don't use any mods, and i think we checked all of the chests but we can try again just in case. if not we can just remake what we lost, its just strange how they all disappeared like that

food disappeared... mmh... I wonder what happened...

any mods?

Originally posted by _I_:

any mods?

Very insightful! Mods render any and all arguments about whether (and how) vanilla mechanics work utterly moot.

I've lost entire chests before (unsecured, outdoors, monster must have gotten) but never specific items from INSIDE chests.

I do have a bad tendency to "I'm going to store this here temporarily" and then completely forget about it.

I have also had the opposite happen, one time playing on a dedicated server, I removed a bunch of items from a chest to my inventory, the server crashed and rolled back to a time before I took the items. I still had the items in inventory and now they were back in the chest!

It's a world on your machine? That's the only way I could be certain about whether or not food was taken in the meantime.

... and to be honest I wouldn't even be certain then, with the number of times I have built/rebuilt/moved my base(s).

i'm not the host, but it is a private game with just the 2 of us and its protected with a password so nobody else could have gotten in

If you didn't take it, then your buddy did. Stuff doesn't just "despawn" from chests.

That being said, look around and see if maybe it's in a different chest, or something. The number of times I've moved stuff around or dumped what I'm carrying in a chest in a weird place is beyond counting; at this point, I'm surprised my wife doesn't slap me in the back of the head every time she walks by my desk, just on principle.

And all of that being said... just make some more. It's not difficult, and only barely time-consuming... unless you haven't bothered marking all the foraging spots on your map when you're wandering around, so you have no idea where to get more blueberries or whatever... and even then, that's on you for not prepping correctly.

Don't get bent out of shape over a few stacks of food; stuff happens.

I lost a bunch of Copper ore from chests and I am a solo player...

Originally posted by helowl:

I lost a bunch of Copper ore from chests and I am a solo player...

"Lost" can just as easily mean "misplaced". I have yet to see anyone else complaining about items despawning from chests, and mechanically it makes no sense for it to ever do so.

I'm willing to bet that copper went to another world, another base, or a chest on the other side of the house. Check the storage in your karve, too; it's surprisingly easy to toss something in there and forget it exists.