I'm a little confused, I think. If I want vehicles not to decay within range of a TC, does the player need to claim them (using the "Claim Vehicle Ownership" plugin)? I've already configured this plugin to keep vehicles from decaying within range of the TC. I just need to know if it will prevent this for all vehicles or just claimed vehicles.

No, they don't need to be claimed. The TC feature applies to all vehicles of that type. The following clauses in the plugin documentation should ideally have helped resolve any confusion.

The following clause hints that permission only applies to one of the decay protection types.

• Scale decay damage when a vehicle is near a tool cupboard
• Nullify decay damage for a configurable amount of time after a vehicle has been used
• Nullify decay damage if a vehicle is owned by a player with permission

The following clause states that the permission completely nullifies decay, hinting that those permissions are not relevant to the other types of decay protection (because otherwise the sentence would not make sense).

Granting the following permissions to a player will cause their owned vehicles to not decay under any circumstances.

The following clause states that the TC feature is not based on ownership (so how could it be based on permissions which apply based on ownership), and it explicitly states that it does not use any permission.

• DecayMultiplierNearTC -- Used to scale decay damage taken by vehicles near a tool cupboard, regardless of the vehicle owner or upkeep. Defaults to 1 which has no effect. Set to 0 to completely nullify decay damage near a tool cupboard.
  • Note: This is a global setting per vehicle type that does not use any permissions.

Since this isn't the first time somebody has been confused about this, I've gone ahead and made some additional updates to clarify this further, in both the Features and Permissions section.

My question now is, do you expect or desire the TC decay scaling to be based on permission of the vehicle owner (or the permissions of the TC-authorized players)? If so, then I can consider redesigning the plugin.

Thank you for the clarification. It doesn't matter to me if you change it. If anything, a setting you enable/disable claiming requirement would be ok to me. Requiring the vehicle to be claimed is another step my players need to be aware of in order to protect their vehicles so the less steps, the better. New players in particular might miss that step, so for me, I'd rather not require the claiming if it's not needed.