Trash Removal is a little too aggressive

[Ball Peen Hamburger]

I've run into this several times, want to hear some general opinion on the issue. I just finished building a small charging platform for my ship, it wasn't yet powered because I was running out to grab ice for its hydrogen engines. Once I had the ice, I was going to finish welding in the battery to kick on the O2/H2 generator and feed the hydrogen engines, so I would have minimal energy waste from the battery. So I build the whole thing, jetpack about 300 meters from my base, grab some ice, jetpack back, and my freshly built creation had been despawned. Go figure, I don't have autosave on (why does Never Surrender automatically disable this?) so I couldn't just jump back a few minutes and get it back.

Trash removal should not delete structures built within the last 10 minutes or so. I don't want to go nuclear and disable it, because I do need it for ACTUAL trash removal. Is there some trick I'm missing here to not having stuff despawn? I know if it's powered it won't disappear, but this seems like a very common situation to be in on a survival world - an unfinished craft is put on hold to run a few hundred meters and grab some ore. There has to be some way to prevent these things from despawning just because I'm not standing right next to them.

[Dan2D3D]

HI, there are some reports about it, I recommend to read, comment and vote on the most similar.

Looking at the community Testers reports =

Search Results (25) - "Trash Removal"

https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/general/search/Trash%20Removal

[DragoF1sh]

If you are the admin of your server, you can edit the trash removal settings. This includes block and power requirements, as well as ownership and grid type requirements. You can set the remover to delete everything if you wanted to, or set it to delete nothing and wait for your server to pile with space debris.

[Namaride]

On a official server i read too often from players they have to start over. Lost their pod when log back in. Or after a server restart. Lost their medical kit because of this. Telling them all how important it is to start with the power source. I got a faction member that joined my grid yesterday otherwise he had to start from scratch for a third time in a week.
This server has always a sim speed around 0.8. Maybe that this plays a important role.
No mods ofcourse.

[ShadedMJ]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Oyster (Smiling):

...it wasn't yet powered because I was running out to grab ice for its hydrogen engines. ... Trash removal should not delete structures built within the last 10 minutes or so.

Obligatory: Should have engineered a solution by having the ice on hand ready to be put in. Unpowered grids get remove and it has been that way for a really long time.

And if it were 10 minutes, you'd then get complaints asking wanting it to be 5 or 60 minutes, and if it were settable in options that would cause complaints as well.

[Pembroke]

Ursprungligen skrivet av ShadedMJ:

And if it were 10 minutes, you'd then get complaints asking wanting it to be 5 or 60 minutes, and if it were settable in options that would cause complaints as well.

Though, if you think about it, what we *really* want the trash removal algorithm to do is to remove junk pieces that no-one wants or cares about but leave alone those that are important to a player. This is what we would like and what's the goal. The technical problem is to come up with a rule that can tell to a machine what we actually mean by "interesting to a player". And that's a hard problem.

Currently, the logic is to equate unpowered grids or small grids with "uninteresting-no-one-cares". This works in some cases, maybe even most cases when we consider that most of the "unpowered small grids" are indeed pieces of wreckage resulting from battles and ship crashes. But it's far from perfect and what makes it unpleasant is that there are lots of very common game situations where you get false positives. Like the story in the OPs post.

So, how about this: Let the player's actions determine what he thinks is interesting and what is not.

The rule could simply be: "If an unpowered grid is more than X mins more than Y distance away from all players, remove it."

Any time a player comes near a grid the timer resets. If the player spends time in the vicinity of a grid then very likely that grid is important to him or at least he finds it interesting. So keep it. The player can leave and come back many times but as the timer always resets the grid stays there even if unpowered. OTOH if no player visits the grid before the timer elapses then very likely no-one cares about it and it indeed is some floating piece of wreckage that can and should be removed.

Wouldn't even affect the performance as it would be a simple attribute of a grid that gets updated with a time stamp when a player comes near. Trash removal would then just go through the list and compare the attribute to the current time and delete the ones that are past due.

This isn't fool-proof, either, and would sometimes make mistakes but I think it would make fewer of them.

[Ball Peen Hamburger]

Ursprungligen skrivet av ShadedMJ:

And if it were 10 minutes, you'd then get complaints asking wanting it to be 5 or 60 minutes, and if it were settable in options that would cause complaints as well.

I'm not sure how having it settable in options would cause complaints. Also, as I said above, it's an exceedingly common scenario to need to run out for ore while building a craft on Survival. Like Pembroke said, the band-aid solution is get what I need up front, but the root of the issue is the trash removal system does not do a good job of differentiating between actual garbage and unfinished construction projects.

[Dan2D3D]

and some have already reported, some have seen their station get deleted for no reasons on the Official servers so the best thing to do, if you want to help on finding/fixing this problem, is to create a porper bug report on the Portal

[Dan2D3D]

+

Use the Devs Guide on how to do a good bug report cause they need some important info in your report:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/discussions/1/523897653318639486/




EDIT

You may use one of my reports as example/template :

https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/general/topic/01_188_104-7000-blocks-station-not-falling-when-cut-in-half

STR = Steps To Reproduce the bug

[fabricator77]

It's not a technical problem to solve the trash removal issues.
First thing I'd recommend, change the distance to 5km. Usually things like ores or Unknown Signals are within that distance (on planets), so if the player runs out of something for their build, that is about how far they will go.

The issue is how the trash removal has been designed. It doesn't even consider who owns the grid, much less what lead to the grid being created.
Lets look at the following events.

log 1 - player builds ship
Large Ship 1234 created: 1 armour block, no owner
Large Ship 1234 updated: 7 armour block, no owner
Large Ship 1234 updated: 1 incomplete battery block, no owner
* at this point the engineer runs out of nickel to make the last few power cells*

log 2 - space trash
Large Ship 7001 created: 80 blocks, SPRT
Large Ship 7001 splits off new grid: Large Ship 7012
Large Ship 7012 created: 7 blocks, SPRT
Large Ship 7012 updated: 3 armour block, no owner

Now both of these look like unowned junk, unless you consider the history.
Grid gets bigger, player is building something.
Grid gets smaller, probably junk.

[ShadedMJ]

@Pembroke and Oyster :
The problems with settings are they end up to be "more settings" and that gets some players (and most developers) annoyed.

The whole theme of removing uranium from planets could have been a setting too, along with recovering powercells from batteries, and whole pile of other things. Developers don't want to have that many settings. There is already so much complaining when the setting is there and players didn't see it.

[Husky306]

I think it's not too hard to add a power source and plan ahead. This has always been one of the SE universe rules. So it's as silly as saying "my character jet-jumped 3 km high and died when landed. I played Borderlands 2 and there was no fall damage! Change that in SE the way I'm used to!" Although I agree that there should be a warning. Unfortunately Keen think it's best to add an "enable anonymous data gathering" question at every damn launch (no matter how many times I answered it) but never add a single time warning at the first game launch that unpowered grids will be erased. It would be a dumb warning but it would help thousands. I don't know why simple changes to the game become such a problem and why devs focus on AAA level patches that take a team similar to Rockstar instead.

[BurlsoL]

For large grids, always convert to static stations as this decreases the risk of unpowered grids being removed during cleanup unless left there of a long time.

Always attach a power source to anything you are building as one of the very first things you do. Even those tiny emergency batteries can do it for short term. For the long term, slap a solar panel or a landing gear and a wind generator on it.

[krzosu18]

Ursprungligen skrivet av BurlsoL:

For large grids, always convert to static stations as this decreases the risk of unpowered grids being removed during cleanup unless left there of a long time.

Always attach a power source to anything you are building as one of the very first things you do. Even those tiny emergency batteries can do it for short term. For the long term, slap a solar panel or a landing gear and a wind generator on it.

^ This - never leave unpowered grid unless you WANT it to be deleted ;P
Batteries and panels are dirt cheap and there is no reason to NOT slap at least one of both even temporarily on any new grids. Not making so its almost like a negligence on the part of the owner So its not the script fault for doing its work properly :)

[Namaride]

It still needs some tweaking. Unless some players in my server are lieing about but i doubt that.
They had placed solar planels and wind turbines yet when they log in a day later its gone. Not once but multiple times.

[Ball Peen Hamburger]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Husky306:

So it's as silly as saying "my character jet-jumped 3 km high and died when landed. I played Borderlands 2 and there was no fall damage! Change that in SE the way I'm used to!"

No offense, but that has to be the worst comparison I've ever heard. I have no idea how that's even relevant whatsoever.

I'm aware that building a power source circumvents this issue, but not everything goes as planned in SE survival, as I'm sure we all know. All I'm asking is for the trash removal to be a little more discerning, and I do plan to fill out the bug report as the dev requested. Thanks for the feedback and tips, everyone, especially from the dev for pointing me to the correct place to give feedback!