that may have been an old bug, I remember when even bases with solar had chunks just vanish, hasn't happened for a long time I have not had any issues with structure deletion at all(as long as my configs still have solar and count edits the only issues I thought was left is a lack of recalculation on ships, but as I was informed, the recalculation is SLOW(ie it takes a few minutes when parked to change)
I highly doubt it was fixed, more likely you're only playing single player and the bug maybe only happens on dedicated servers. Or you've just been lucky so far. But it's a risk that one should not ignore. Personally a random chance to have part of my ship straight up get deleted is unacceptable and therefore it's a change I would never risk making and I think it does a disservice to the community to suggest it as a viable option to others.
actually I host my own dedi(kinda the only way to have custom solar placement right?) I have not had any issues since like 2 years ago with disappearing blocks and all my breaks have been due to an update changing the "config version"(so it would not load the custom config) and only about a year ago the entire dedi would not launch, even in vanilla(I think it was near when DF was added, you could not launch the dedi at all, at least for someone who did not buy DF yet(it never stabilized the playfield exe's, they kept heartbeat crashing)) so yes still some occasional bugs, but the "selective deletion" appears to be a bug of the past granted about a year ago I also changed from a dying 4tb mirrored to a working raid-5 one(it had not shown signs yet, but the psu had previously died by brownouts causing drives to simply stop spinning and causing all kinds of OS corruption) so maybe the bug is finally gone, and the rest of my issues were actually related to my dying PSU? I can't remember the exact timing plus a month or so after I got my raid-5 I nearly lost it all, because the raid card overheated with write cache on without the IBBU module installed(dumb move, buy an old one, solder a new battery in, and stop worrying) yeah I know, hardware raid vs some other nas OS, but I don't need a petabyte project like LTT, 3 drives in a single raid-5 based on LSI standard will work for me forever, I would use my MOBO raid but I have heard that mobos tend to use non-standard raid metadata that can't be recovered easily when the board dies so now I have a fan in pci form factor sucking air over the raid, it never seems sad anymore TLDR: I guess the selective deletion bug is either fixed or is linked to a very specific improper shutdown of the game world, something I seldom ever have issues with because I warp-jumped into a black hole windows 10 into never rebooting without direct instruction from a human still can't stop it from rebooting my main rig or laptop without asking when I sleep, but they don't run reboot-intolerant game worlds like empyrion
You have a data point of 1. It took months, if not a year+ for us to finally track down the cause with thousands of players across dozens of servers. You can't say that it's safe now. It might be, the game has changed since then but testing it with a single player on a single server doesn't tell you that. Yes, I'd love if solar power could be used on ships as an actual game feature, but until the developers add it in then it's simply not feasible to use. If you want to edit the configs yourself and accept the risk, that's fine, but don't tell others that it's risk free when you cannot know that.
exactly kats, if it still exists as a bug it has become rare enough to not worry over still not an ideal solution to automated "fuel depots" that you can build and NOT have to trade for fuel packs or manually collect mined resources for hence rechargeable batteries, using nearly 100% existing systems actually if they added true automated logistics I could figure out EV's for my fleet, the problem is that I would need to add a texture to the map, and 2 new items, 2 blocks, a way to force extracted charge into a solar capacitor, a separate recipie class, and a method of detecting a threshold in a solar capacitor all things the devs have intimate knowledge of how to do, but I would have to reverse-engineer it could all be knocked out in an afternoon with the source-code(minus logistics), not sure why so many players are pushing against it, especially since it could still be an optional thing, and could be disabled simply by disabling the placement of the charge/discharge blocks if they hate it so much
