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."