https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2293797994 As in the picture. What are the rules that govern how this works, and is it configurable. If not why is this so hard to describe as an unexpected and as a deflating experience.
No. The fact that if you build anything with lit textures in survival or creative mode, not all of the textures will light up until you re-log.
That may be one of many simple glitches that happen sometimes when putting lots of blocks at once on a build. Did you try powering the structure off then back on before logging out and back in game ? I did not see that problem when adding some elevator blocks to a powered-on structure and same with adding some textures with lights, and they follow the on/off state accordingly.
Only ever tried this in a single player game, and powering it off and on did not fix it, so I've always just defaulted to re-loading to fix it. From the screenshot, you can see that it's a very deliberate edge case in the implementation/code. The effect stops getting applied outside of a defined "chunk", but it's not centered on the CORE nor on the generators, which is why I am guessing that it's a bug that could be found by doing a simple bit of code review.
Since this is not a normal usage of the elevator block, which also affects gravity in its volume, I doubt this will even be considered as a "bug" worthy of attention, frankly...
Not a serious bug, but based on how re-loading fixed the bug; my experience at software defect finding , which is what I do; tells me this is a bug that could improve stability of the game if the devs fixed it. Because it's a class of bug around object initialisation, and it's probably a recurring kind of bug in other places, and these are often easy to fix, and end up uncovering and leading to other fixes. I'm assuming the game is architected here, and not just C# code added spaghetti-style around Unity - was EGS always using unity... Anyway. At least it's only an issue at build time.
Well it could be anything, because the objects do appear but some effects are not applied past a certain number. I tried counting how many "lit" blocks there are in your image, but my estimate is that it's roughly over 256, and that may point to a database update problem. Also you would have to check if the gravity is affected or not in the unlit blocks, to see if this is only a display glitch, or if all properties are left aside for these blocks. I did some changes to items yesterday, and while it worked the first time, all following attempts (loading a new game) refused to update the items with my changes. I'm not even going to waste time checking files and all that circus. I may be more interested after the Christmas patch, as I know that a zillion things can change if the proper fixes are done at this point.
My experience has been that for the things that bug me most ; at least half of them do get fixed over time. Which has not been to bad going.