How much time is there before my loot disappears ?
Got this from http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?p=2083544...
There is no set time-limit for loot, though the PC's INI files contain a few setting for influencing it.
ShortLivedDropLifeSpan=600 LongLivedDropLifeSpan=1800 PickupShrinkDuration=15
The first two adjust the time certain loot is kept around, and it depends on whether an item is short-lived (money) or long-lived (Orange weapons).
The last one is the time-to-shrink setting. You have noticed that some loot starts to shrink before it disappears entirely, right? The default is 15 seconds, I believe. I have set it to 1 second at times, and the stuff shrinks and disappears very quickly.
My observations...
Each item type has a different setting for whether it's short-lived or long-lived. Money seems to disappear first. White weapons disappear before green which disappears before blue... and so on.
The overall lifetime of loot appears to adjust on an as-needed basis. If there is a ton of loot hanging around - hundreds of items - then loot will start to disappear sooner. I suspect this is done to keep the engine from over-loading.
When opening hundreds of chests in my test map, white weapons would disappear by the time I opened two more chests. By the time I opened the last chest, only purples and oranges remained, and only in about half the chests.
In the end, loot should stick around for at least 5 minutes as long as there isn't too much loot littering the ground.
Good loot, like Legendaries, should stick around for a half hour. Again, as long as there isn't too much loot littering the ground. But since all that other, lesser loot will disappear first, the good loot should remain for quite a while.
The time is dependent on two factors:
- the rarity of the items in question
- how many are on the battlefield.
The lower rarity an item has, the less time it will stay on the battlefield. Legendary and pearlescent items however, will stay indefinitely. Also the more loot there is on the ground, the quicker the items will disappear.