[2020] Turrets target airdrops? Why?

You can just chop down the tree too.

For the OP's question, the supply crate is an entity. It's not flagged as "friendly", so your turret will target it as if it were hostile. If you could place a turret in the trader's shop, it would target the trader in a similar manner.

Sylen’s got the technical answer, but it does beg the question if the game should work this way. I’m with CoinSpin: seems like an oversight that’s never come up in formal testing. I’d file a bug on the official site - it should be an easy correction to make.

Originally posted by Seftak:

Originally posted by CoinSpin: I agree, Sylen hit the nail on the head with the way the game code treats the air drop.

Marking the air drop as an entity is fine, but it really needs to be tweaked to be treated like the inanimate object it is, not like a player/zombie/NPC. That makes no sense, it should be treated more like a storage box or something to that effect. Other unique loot piles that disappear after being emptied aren't shredded by your turrets, and the supply drop is just a specialized version of that, right? Just seems like an oversight that got lost in the shuffle with all of the other coding being worked on constantly.

i guess it "has" to be an entity for it to drop. since it is not a static object and is not affected by structural integrity.

Indeed. It literally is an animate object, since it moves when dropping from the sky. In the big picture, blocks and entities are the two options. A block has its location baked in, with calculations based off of that unchanging location like SI, AI, rendering considerations like occlusion, etc. So it does make sense to make the air drop crate an entity, the same as other non-character entities like dropped backpacks, vehicles, and deployed robotic weapons. The oversight is just that it needs that friend-or-foe tag to be set properly.

Originally posted by Crater Creator: Sylen’s got the technical answer, but it does beg the question if the game should work this way. I’m with CoinSpin: seems like an oversight that’s never come up in formal testing. I’d file a bug on the official site - it should be an easy correction to make.

IMHO it should not. Traders should not be hostile either. It's a little annoying to have to use a mod I wrote to make them non-hostile so server admins can use them in "hostile-free" zones that they set up using their server tools.