If I'm in an instance and decide to jettison my cargo out of sight before I enter combat, but nobody survives, what happens to the cargo?asked by SilentRuin

What will generally happen is they'll persist for a small amount of time, but if say there's no-one in an instance for a preallocated time period that instance will be closed. So at that point if there was cargo floating around in it, it would go away. So if you barely survive, or if someone else came along before the instance is shut down that cargo would be there, but once it closes it'll be gone. But we can't really start to simulate every piece of cargo and have it have it's own persistence to keep these instances open independent of you, because that could get pretty sticky pretty quickly. In this case I'd say if you decided to "hide" it somewhere, try not to die or perhaps have some friends nearby to come and grab it for you before the instance closes.