ROOT CAUSE FOUND (custom map issue, not vanilla) Our CE Tool project's usages catalog was missing "SeasonalEvent" and "Historical" (added to cfglimitsdefinition.xml after our project was created, never backfilled in the tool).

Since the CE Tool assigns each usage a bit value based on catalog position (2^position), this shifted ContaminatedArea's exported bit by one: our zones were being exported as usage_flags="16384" (bit 14 = SeasonalEvent) instead of the correct "32768" (bit 15 = ContaminatedArea). Items never found a match because the bit they check for was never actually set anywhere on the map.

Fix: added the missing catalog entries, corrected the layer's stored usage_flags from 16384 to 32768, re-exported areaflags.map. Result: ContaminatedArea-exclusive items now spawn correctly inside painted zones, confirmed in-game. Likely affects any custom map whose CE Tool project predates "SeasonalEvent"/"Historical" being added to the catalog - the mismatch is invisible in the tool's own UI. Might be worth a consistency check between a project's catalog and the current cfglimitsdefinition.xml.

from the CE Editor:

Follow-up:

tried increasing RespawnAttempt (2→4), RespawnLimit (20→50), and RespawnTypes (12→30) in globals.xml, since our very large modded item count (3400+ types across 13 files) meant most types never got a chance per CE cycle. Tested over roughly 16 hours (four consecutive ~4h server sessions, 2026-08-24 04:01-20:01).

Total placement attempts logged for our ContaminatedArea-restricted test items over that period:

AK101_Black (800 "search overtime"/"hard to place" combined).

AK101_Green (776 "search overtime"/"hard to place" combined).

M4A1_Green (1007 "search overtime"/"hard to place" combined).

Ammo_40mm_ChemGas (1885 "search overtime"/"hard to place" combined).

None of the successful spawns accumulated across that same 16h period landed inside any of our 7 painted ContaminatedArea zones.

So increasing the CE's per-cycle throughput did not fix the underlying issue. Our original questions from the initial report still stand and are, if anything, more clearly demonstrated by this data: items appear to spawn at locations that don't match their configured usage/area-flag requirement at all, rather than being constrained to (or evenly competing for) the painted zones.

i only painted Tierzones and now the contaimation:

I've spent multiple days trying to properly configure contaminated-zone loot on my server, but despite following the documented setup, it still isn't spawning reliably. Regular loot at these locations gets prioritized over items with ContaminatedArea usage, rather than the other way around.

i analyzed in some relevant discords that a lot admins have the same issues regadring this topic.