Do weapons left on the ground despawn? How quickly?

[Ratbatboo]

I was attacking a bear with bronze javelins, lobbing all five of mine at it, running a bit, then circling around to pick them up...Lather, rinse, repeat. Pretty reliable.

Unfortunately, it does not take into account the mystical bear power of SECOND BEAR. I was ambushed right after my first five throws and almost immediately killed (I got about forty feet from where I was ambushed but grizz don't play around).

Unfortunately, at the same time, I got a temporal storm warning...And I was killed far enough from my base that I wouldn't have gotten even halfway back home, so I did what I thought was the smart thing and stayed home (yes, I have since realized that I could've run out with a bunch of blocks to recover my gear, then built a closet on the open plains to weather the storm, but I figured this out too late).

So at this point, my question is 'Are those javelins still there?' They weren't in my inventory when I died, they lay wherever they hit, and they've spent several hours out in a temporal storm, all alone in the open, with no one to look after them.

Poor little things.

Edited February 19 by Ratbatboo

[LadyWYT]

53 minutes ago, Ratbatboo said:

So at this point, my question is 'Are those javelins still there?' They weren't in my inventory when I died, they lay wherever they hit, and they've spent several hours out in a temporal storm, all alone in the open, with no one to look after them.

Maybe. It depends, I think, on whether or not the chunk was loaded. Otherwise, fired projectiles have the same expiration timer as dropped items, to my knowledge. 

Personally, I wouldn't really expect them to be there, since generally I assume that things that have been sitting like that for a while have despawned. However, it doesn't hurt to check. Worst case scenario, you can always "find" it in the bushes or behind a tree.

[V1ncent]

From my experience, projectiles do despawn quite fast. If you keep an eye on those bone arrows fired by the mindless bowtown greeting from the other side of your fortification, those arrows disappear in less than half a day.