While I was working on the crafting system upgrade to the Distro (Yes. I am still working on it.) I had dropped 2 barracuda on the ground. One decayed as expected. One, however, remains after more than a week. I found this puzzling. Tonight I checked the value of the decayat member and it was 0. This, of course, tells the decay system to leave the item in the world. I still do not know how the member was cleared. I will have to look further into that because both fish were dropped within seconds of each other.

Anyway, that is not my question. Tonight I picked up the fish and dropped it in my backpack and then dropped it on the ground again. I checked the decayat member and it was still set to 0. I thought that an item's decayat member was reset if it was picked up and dropped on the ground again. Is it only reset if it is not 0?

Yes decay_at with the value of 0 means disabled decay, so once it's 0 the core will never touch it again.

Ok. Good to know. That means that if I have an item I want to set decayat 0 then I will need to attach a control script to reset the decayat if I want the item to decay later.

This behavior seems a bit inconsistent. I would think POL would reset decayat upon dropping the item in the world.