Agren

So Galatea and I were yakking about the new journals (to teach fish finding) that would be inside fished up crates. I pointed out that you could determine at what point loot was determined by opening crates gotten before the patch after the journals were added. Galatea predicted they would use lazy evaluation and not determine loot until it was opened. I predicted that loot would be determined when the container was generated, as since almost all of these crates are opened and looted immediately, there would be no point to not doing so.

After much theoretical jawing about all this, I said, "Fine, I'm going to save my crates until after the patch and then open them, and we'll see." The results? Neither of us was entirely correct.

I saved 100 Curious Crates, and since I was fishing the Steam Pump Debris nodes, I also saved 100 Heavy Supply Crates (which data out at the time pegged at a much lower drop rate of journals). Since it is much easier to get Heavy Supply Crates, and I got that 100 before I got the 100 Curious Crates, I saved another 100 Heavy Supply Crates, but I looked inside them before mailing them to an alt. I opened them all this afternoon after the servers came up.

The results:
100 Curious Crates - 17 journals
100 Heavy Supply Crates - 17 journals
100 Heavy Supply Crates that had already been looked in - 14 journals!

My guess is that a seed is assigned to a container which is used to generate the loot, and that the actual contents aren't stored unless you disturb the contents by looting something from them. Up until this point, these crates have always contained a single item in them. I intend to get my hands on some rogue lockboxes to make sure that the contents are actually saved once something is looted from the container. If it isn't that could be an interesting exploit.