Dropped Blocks and Items Place Themselves into the World After Timeout Instead of Being Deleted

[littleterrapin]

One of my favorite mods for Minecraft is a mod called 'Lingering Loot' and I think it would be an awesome fit as a vanilla feature for Vintage Story for realism and immersion reasons. Link to Lingering Loot on CurseForge

Sometimes you just don't end up picking up every block or item while digging, mining, or chopping trees down, because you didn't see it on the ground, so you leave and miss it, or the object ended up in an awkward spot away from your position in-game and becomes too much a hassle to go and retrieve it. Well, with 'Lingering Loot', those dropped objects, even as combined stacks, would place themselves in the empty 'air' or water block spaces they find themselves in after they timeout. Multiple dropped objects sharing the same empty block space would simply clip through and move to the nearest empty block space when the first object timeout happens, explosively if they share the same timeout. You can observe what I mean when for example, when you place a dirt block in a spot where a dropped dirt block happens to be, the in-game physics makes the dropped dirt block just clip and squeeze over to an available empty space.

With 'Lingering Loot', dropped or abandoned blocks and ground-storage items would never disappear, even stuff dropped after death, with maybe exceptions to items dropped in lava-magma. Also maybe make dropped blocks in lava-magma clip to an empty space to preserve the lava-magma. I don't know the behavior of lava-magma in Vintage Story, so just I'm spitballing here. Chopping down trees could drop their seeds and timeout results in planted saplings to replace the fallen tree. Want a quick dirt mound or dirt hill? Just toss stacks of dirt and wait. Want to fill-in that deep, scary hole? Just toss stacks of dirt and wait. I haven't played on any public Vintage Story server, so I don't know what that's like, but I do remember some Minecraft servers having their worlds absolutely stripped of dirt blocks and other stuff with 2b2t's spawn area being a good example. Perhaps a feature like 'Lingering Loot' would help mitigate that.

Video Demo of Lingering Loot

Edited August 7, 2025 by littleterrapin
Added link to a video that demos the minecraft mod, Lingering Loot.

[Echo Weaver]

How would you discard items you actually want to despawn?

[littleterrapin]

For items that are technically infinite and would trash the place like mob drops, a feature like another Minecraft mod called TrashSlot comes to mind. Link to TrashSlot on CurseForge. Wood and trees are also infinite, but the conditions for disposing/deleting them should just be burning it in-game, same goes for anything else that's burnable. Soil and dirt is an example of something that shouldn't just disappear or thrown in a trash/despawner slot. Blocks that make up the world should just get displaced, recycled, be converted between forms, meaning they were used to craft something complex and can be converted back to simpler forms. Unwanted worldgen blocks can be stored away in containers like chests or you could start making piles or a landfill somewhere with them. I think it would be really neat.

Edited August 4, 2025 by littleterrapin

[Echo Weaver]

40 minutes ago, littleterrapin said:

For items that are technically infinite and would trash the place like mob drops, a feature like another Minecraft mod called TrashSlot comes to mind. Link to TrashSlot on CurseForge. Wood and trees are also infinite, but the conditions for disposing/deleting them should just be burning it in-game, same goes for anything else that's burnable. Soil and dirt is an example of something that shouldn't just disappear or thrown in a trash/despawner slot. Blocks that make up the world should just get displaced, recycled, be converted between forms, meaning they were used to craft something complex and can be converted back to simpler forms. Unwanted worldgen blocks can be stored away in containers like chests or you could start making piles or a landfill somewhere with them. I think it would be really neat.

Well, there's still a steady stream of one-off stuff one wants to get rid of -- your copper tools when you upgrade to bronze, items picked up in ruins that turned out not to be useful, etc.

I would love to have a trash can in VS. I don't know if there is a modded one, though I haven't seen it browsing the mod database. Yeah, in Minecraft, where lava is available midgame, I dug a hole in the floor of my house, dropped lava in it, and put a trap door over it.

ETA: OK, there's this one, but it's not immersive: https://mods.vintagestory.at/vstrashcancontinued

Edited August 4, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[Mrozak]

12 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

I would love to have a trash can in VS

The mod Still Necessaries has a trashcan.
I used it on my server some time ago and it worked perfectly, 9 out of 10 garbage men recommend (the remaining one who wouldn't is a moron, obviously).

[Facethief]

I’d rather not go on a quest to find lava just to get rid of an extra flax.

[Mrozak]

I partially like the idea, provided of course that it would be possible to switch the feature Off in the world config (should be Off by default).

I would want the feature to affect only various rocks/dirt/etc. that are normally part of the terrain.
So when it comes to items like flax and whatnot, those would still disappear after some time as it is now.

It could even be a useful feature.
Need to fill a hole? Just gather a stack of dirt, throw it in the hole and wait (or rather, go about your usual business, instead of having to manually fill the hole block by block).
And watching the mentioned "explosive expansion" of the blocks would be fun too - i can see myself doing it a few times just for the giggles.

[Mrozak]

LOL, or you know... just throw a bunch of stacks of dirt into a friends house!
Aaaah, that would sooo evil, but i don't think i could resist 

Edited August 5, 2025 by Mrozak

[Katherine K]

There would really need to be more fine control for this. Like, distance blocks can go, types of blocks this can affect, etc. Like, would I turn on this feature for items that can be stored on a floor in a pile, limited to a 3x3x3 area around the drop spot? Sure. It might be useful to just dump a bunch of nuggets while mining and pick them back up later. Blocks like sand and gravel showing up in a limited height tower and collapsing? Yeah that can be fun for hole filling, etc. Solid blocks? Probably not. Everything in my inventory in arbitrary radius on death? Absolutely not! I don't want to be on my way to build something, get jumped by a bear, and now have several stacks of stone and cobble to mine through to get my stuff back!

The solution to death drops should just be a container, honestly. There are already mods that do this. IMO, this should be an option in vanilla and probably on by default.

[littleterrapin]

I'm glad y'all are finding the flaws, but also figured out solutions on making it work, particularly Echo Weaver, Mrozak, and Katherine K's posts.

Making certain items and blocks keep a despawn timeout, be deleteable via a trash slot,  a trashcan, and burnable all seems ideal.

Making items get put in a container on death is also great, to prevent your stacks of cobblestone and dirt from self-placing so you don't have to dig to get to your stuff. I do use the GraveStone Mod on CurseForge to do just that in my modded Minecraft. A gravestone that drops all your contained stuff after you break it.

Edited August 5, 2025 by littleterrapin

[Echo Weaver]

2 minutes ago, littleterrapin said:

I do use the GraveStone Mod on CurseForge to do just that in my modded Minecraft. A gravestone that drops all your contained stuff after you break it.

The VS analogue to this mod is Player Corpse.

[littleterrapin]

Hey y'all, I uploaded a video to show what Lingering Loot does in my modded Minecraft. Had technical difficulties trying to capture footage due to Steam's jank game recording feature. I played this on my Steam Deck is why I didn't use something like OBS, which would have been easier. It's a miracle that I got what footage I could get, otherwise I would have showed a bunch of stacks thrown all at once or some other stuff. Tree saplings plant themselves on dirt and seeds on tilled dirt. Couldn't show that though. Another mod provides block models for items in-game that don't have one, like buckets or iron ingots for example.

Video Demo of Lingering Loot

'Falling' sand, gravel, and other weird things is explained in the video description.