What it does
A protected area is a ring you place over somewhere that should stay intact — a gate, a garage, a workshop, a headquarters. Everything destructible standing inside it when the world loads is looked after.
Break one of those things and three things happen. The faction is charged, everyone on the server is told who did it and what it cost, and the object is rebuilt after a delay.
Driving through something is charged at a much lower rate than destroying it any other way. Clipping a barrier while reversing a truck should be embarrassing rather than expensive; putting a rocket into a hangar should not.
Keep going and it escalates. Wreck enough in one incident and that player is warned; carry on and they are removed from the server for a while. Nobody is removed without having been warned first.
Shooting civilians escalates on this same ladder. A player who wrecks the base and shoots the locals is one offender working towards one warning and one removal, rather than getting a fresh allowance for each.
Server staff are exempt by default. They are still told what they destroyed, which is useful on a server that logs Game Masters in automatically.
Placing one
The area is a placeable entity, so a Game Master can drop one from the content browser or you can author it into a layer in World Editor.
- Place Protected area where you want it.
- Size the ring on its area mesh component. The ring you can see is the boundary — there is no separate radius to keep in step with it.
- Give it a name on the protected area component. That name is what appears in the message everyone sees, so “the north gate” reads better than nothing.
- Optionally raise or lower its multiplier, which scales the charges for this area only. A hangar can cost more than a fence.
- Optionally turn rebuilding off for this area. It still bills for the damage and leaves the hole, which is the right setting somewhere a rebuilt object would come back on top of something players have since put there.
Set the name and radius on the placed copy, not on the prefab — otherwise every area you place afterwards inherits them.
What it protects, and when
The census is taken once, shortly after the world loads, and covers everything destructible inside the ring at that moment. Two consequences:
- Author permanent areas into a layer rather than dropping them mid-session. One placed live only protects what was standing when it initialised.
- Vehicles are not protected. They are not part of the census, so losing one anywhere is never charged here and never rebuilt here. That is deliberate — vehicle losses belong to the vehicle pads, which have their own cost and restock timer.
The server log lists exactly what each area caught when it loads, grouped by type. It is worth reading once after placing a new area — a ring that turns out to cover ninety-seven objects is usually larger than intended, and everything in it counts towards the warning and removal thresholds.
Rebuilding
A destroyed object comes back after m_iRepairDelaySec, in the place and at the
angle it originally stood.
A rebuild is deferred, not cancelled, while a player is standing where the object goes — materialising a concrete barrier inside somebody is worse than leaving the gap a little longer. It retries on each sweep until the way is clear, and says so in the log the first time it defers.
If a rebuilt object is destroyed again, it is charged and rebuilt again.
Settings
Every value above is configurable — see the base protection, charges and enforcement sections on Configuration.