Do leaves placed then broken by hand cause adjacent leaves to decay?

That is, if I were to place a 2x2x2 cube of leaves in an empty world and then break a Leaves block manually, would the other leaves decay or would they remain forever?

I seem to recall that they would decay, but the Minecraft wiki disagrees and it's possible my memory is failing me.

Solution 1:

I tested this using a debug stick, leaf blocks have a "persistent"-tag and it is set to true, when the leaf block is placed by a player. Breaking a leaf block next to it does not change this, so they stay persistent.

You can place leaf blocks that will break using one of these:

/setblock <pos> minecraft:oak_leaves{persistent:0}
/fill <from> <to> minecraft:oak_leaves{persistent:0}

You can get a debug stick with this command:

/give @s minecraft:debug_stick

Leaf blocks also have a "distance"-tag, which is used to determin if it will decay. Leaf blocks with a distance of 7 do not count as part of a tree and will decay, unless they are "persistent".

A leaf block that touches a log block will have a "distance" of 1, any leaf block that touches the first leaf block, but no log block, will have a "distance" of 2, and so on.

The distance cannot be greater than 7. The persistence does not get updated when you as the player break nearby leaf blocks, the distance does get updated though

Solution 2:

Leaves placed by the player will never decay. Only naturally spawned leaves, once the "tree" they are associated with is destroyed, or if they are separated from the "tree" they are associated with, will they decay.