How do you prevent despawning of a grid or an entity?

[Azor]

I want to try build sattelites with the goal of increasing broadcasting so that I can communicate with and control drones from a farther distance. But I'm afraid that having things so far apart from me my cause them to despawn.

Specifically, I'm planning to have a drone mining ice on the icy part of the moon which is around 14 km away from my base. Also planning to mine asteroids using remote control (or a script if I can confirm that it can safely land from space to moon and not crash due to gravity) some 20km to 100km away.

Also, I'm considering doing hauling contracts which can give from reasonably distant from ridiculously distant delivery points, so I'll very likely have to travel very far away from my base if I choose to complete those contracts.

Please answer considering these two scenarios: singleplayer, and 2-players (only I and a friend) multiplayer (hosted by my friend).

[Praeceptorem Poloniae]

General rule of thumb is that as long as grid is powered, there is no risk that cleaner would target that grid

[Dan2D3D]

Hi, I always create my world in Experimental mode + Offline mode > the very first time <, the option we see on creating the world and never lost any grids if they were properly powered.

I am able to do the contracts and nothing is deleted (stations and ships on all planets).

Happens more in MP worlds firstly created as "Friends only", "Public" or "Private".

[N0ma13]

You can also modify the trash collector settings and decrease the maximum block count so it will only delete unpowered grids of actually-insignificant size.
Default is 20 blocks, which is a bit much, especially for smaller drones and builds-in-progress.
Never disassemble your wrecks until you've emptied the cargo as well. That is an expensive 'trash' collection lesson to learn.

[EmberStar]

You can also just disable the trash removal routine entirely. It doesn't completely prevent it from deleting unpowered grids. At least, I've still had it delete the unpowered "debris" grids that come with some of the encounter ships. But it should prevent it from eating any of your ships the moment they run out of power.

I turned it off because I'm using Modular Encounters, which can create hostile NPC stations on the surface of planets and moons. And I wanted to have the chance / challenge of figuring out a way to collect the wreckage and scrap if I get attacked by drones.

[TaleBakes]

There should be a way to keep unpowered grids that you made. There are multiple instances where I ended up having to re-scrounge for resources from my base to a dig site because the game despawned what I had made, including equipment.
Last build I ended up having a ship that blew out power and I had to go to my home base to make power cells for a new battery, only to return to the crash site and find the game had cleaned it up.

2 hours of resourcing and building down the drain because the trash cleaner is dumber than a gumball machine. I’ve since stopped playing this game.

[ShadedMJ]

Originally posted by Drifter:

There should be a way to keep unpowered grids that you made. ...

1. Balance that with having damaged pirates and other blocks that need to be removed to free up game resources.
2. Start a new discussion instead of necro-ing an 18 month discussion

[Azor]

Originally posted by ShadedMJ:

Originally posted by Drifter:

There should be a way to keep unpowered grids that you made. ...

1. Balance that with having damaged pirates and other blocks that need to be removed to free up game resources.
2. Start a new discussion instead of necro-ing an 18 month discussion

lol that guy shouldn't create a new discussion either. "Stopped playing the game since"> he's just salty