User:GrayBeard Actual/Notebook/Finding Supply Crates
Update: As of A14 this no longer works. The "Floating crates" bug has been fixed as of A14.6 and at some point the range became less of a strict, 8-meter distance, and became more of a range.
I've found a pattern in how supply crates are distributed. In the server I currently play, I'm easily 15km away from other players' bases1 and I've found that supply crates fall within .8km of me.
The reason I mention that I'm relatively isolated from other players is because I don't know how the crates fall when multiple players are in the same region.
How To Utilize It
I've been spending a lot of time in my base building expansions and I can hear airdrops. To find those drops, I do this: while in my base and viewing the map, position the map so that my base is at the far right (east) edge of the map and then place a marker at .8km in a straight line west of my base (The capital "F" in the diagram below). Then I head out to that marker and when I reach it, I then open my map and put the marker directly on my base. This way I can see in the map my precise distance from the base/marker. Now I move along the same longitude in a north or south direction for .8km then I turn east and travel for 1.6km.
This method creates a search grid such as below, with the supply crates most-likely located along the path that creates a 6.4km radius around your base.
|-----------------------|
| |
.8km | |
| |
| |
| .8km |
F --------- B | 1.6km
| |
| |
.8km | |
| |
| |
|-----------------------|
1.6km
Note; this will locate those crates that were delivered while you were in your base but it has nothing to do with your base. The point about the base is only that that is where I was located when the crates dropped. The crates are delivered within a .8km radius from where you are at the time of the drop.
Locating Bases
I put this method to use the other day to 1) triangulate into what I later discovered was a city and 2) circle the city to find five crates.
How I did it; when I found the first crate, I placed a marker where I found the crate then started looking for more crates by traveling in a cardinal direction. When I found the second I began to wonder if I was near someone's base. I wanted to experiment with the method and find the base by triangulating from the locations of three discovered crates and it worked. What I found was a city, in which someone had previously made a temporary base.
In the image above, you can see what it looks like in the map. As I moved around the target I began to triangulate onto the target and eventually placed the marker on it and completed a full circle, finding five crates altogether. Then I went to look for what I thought was a players base and found it was a temporary base inside a city — a bonus, as the city was good looting with a hardware store, shotgun messiah, grocery, and a drug store. No wonder somone set up shop here for a few days!
Knowing this method works for homing in on a base, I'll now be doing a better job of keeping the area near my base free of crates as well as gore blocks, as the presence of many gore blocks was another indicator to me that someone frequented the area.
Wider Band
As of A13.8, it looks like crates are now dropped in a band of between roughly 400 and 800 meters.
Smoke On The Water
Crates that land on a body of water will maintain the chute as well as orange marker-smoke until the crate is retrieved.
Other crate images:
1 Major distance from center (0,0) is a great griefer counter-measure.