When does loot respawn in DayZ?

In DayZ I'm checking a lot of the sites that people (on the internet) have recommended to me as having a high chance of spawning good weapons and loot, however most of the time I find nothing of interest, presumably because other people have gotten there first and taken all of the good stuff.

When will these loot piles "respawn" so I can pick up all the shiny toys that I see other players with?

Solution 1:

The best loot guide around that I know is backed up with code snippets. The executive summary:

• Each building is triggered individually, and has its own loot-spawn timer.
• Loot spawns as soon as a player is closer than 120m but farther than 30m from the building. The building's loot spawn timer also starts then.
• Every 10 minutes new loot will spawn if and only if there is a player in the 120–30m ring. A player in that ring will cause loot to spawn on the timer even if there is another player inside the 30m ring. If you're not inside that ring when the timer checks for a player, there will be no new loot.
• Each spawn location in a building has a 50% chance to populate whenever spawning is triggered, so emptying loot spots helps.
• Backpacks and ammo cases don't count when the code checks if there's already loot in a spot.
• Bonus: Zombies spawn when a player enters a 200m circle.

For a pretty picture of the trigger ranges and the code snippets to back these up, read the full guide.

Solution 2:

Loot respawns after a fairly short amount of time so long as there are no players near (I think it's about 100 meters) and the loot spot is empty (so pick up all the junk and move it at least 100 meters away).

The exact amount of time seems to work on a server wide 10 minute timer. Every ten minutes all eligible locations will have their loot updated. This could be 5 seconds from when you finish preparing the area (moving the junk and yourself 100 meters away), or 9 minutes.

The best bet is to move the junk from the area, and check back every 2-3 minutes.

Solution 3:

From my experience I believe loot spawns in a similar fashion to zombies. Once you get within a certain distance of the spawn site the game has a chance to spawn loot at predetermined locations in or near a building. Unlike zombies the loot only seems to spawn as you cross the threshold and doesn't continually spawn while you're in the area. Loot also seems to only spawn on an empty spawn location, so if someone's been through earlier the loot that spawned when they came through would still be there if they didn't pick it up or move it, thus leaving only the empty loot locations to check for loot on the relevant table. I know that zombies will only spawn within 200m of a player and I believe the same distance is the threshold for loot spawning as well. If this is all true then it's very possible to farm an area for loot by entering the area and picking up and moving the spawned loots outside of the loot spawn sites and then leaving the area and re-entering it causing the game to run the loot spawn routines as you cross the 200m threshold on your way back in. If you don't pick up and move the loot the locations that spawned the first time would be skipped as you re-entered the area.

I've yet to prove this conclusively, but I've tested a few things and I've repeatedly seen buildings that I know have multiple loot spawns only have 1 or 2 things in them the first time I ran through and as I make my rounds in the area (moving away from and then back to the building in question repeatedly over a 10-20min time span) the other spawn sites that were empty have slowly filled up till all the sites were full of loot. If I pick up the loot and move it just a few meters away from the spawn site and drop it the newly empty spawn site will often have loot in it when I come back around to the building. It's a bit tedious picking up and moving items like this, especially large objects like weapons and vehicle parts, but if you've got time and you feel secure in the area you're working in it certainly seems worth the effort if you're staying in a specific area for a decent length of time and you're moving around and expect to repeatedly revisit a building after moving far away from it.

You can find the loot tables for the different buildings at the DayZ wiki and they were recently also added to the DayZDB map (http://dayzdb.com/map for those that don't know about it). The tables will tell you how many spawn locations a given building has, and give you a breakdown of the rarity of loots by spawn chance.

Solution 4:

I am playing on 1.7.2.6. I have not messed around with the moving and dumping the junk loot, but that seems to match my observations. It seems to me that if a spot is empty, it may or may not spawn loot every few minutes. I do not think that you have to go very far away at all. I have literally walked out a door, and walked right back in to find the previously empty building filled. Also, if you leave unwanted loot in place, it stays there until you go quite some distance from the area.