when ever you move away from a chunk or log off in smp the robots that are on thier stations turn into items this is annoying and cause you to lose them if any one goes near your base while you are logged off

Also if robots are not on thier base when you log off or move away they often just disapear and never come back

Is the crash still happening in the latest version?, if so please provide crash logs. I've pinpointed the issue of the robots dropping and leaving the stations locked, but I've not run into any crash.

It crash when you break the station manualy but ill have to test with the lates version final got me quite busy

This is a confirmed problem. One solution might be to create a Robot Docking station block.
Think dispenser with a inventory.
Cost would be same as 4 docking stations as the Robot Docking Station should only hold 4 robots. Provided you can place a gate on a pipe that connects to it and controls it. Then when you tell the the robots to return to dock they will be stored and not effected by chunk unloading. Can't really change the chunk unloading issue when they are not docked (that I know of) but at least this way you can recall the robots (return to dock function) and they will be safe till they are needed again.

That is already what i'm doing it's cool and all but when you get accidently dced or something else you don't control you can lose your whole robot fleet even worst when robots are destroyed this way they don't seem to properly release their base or the stations they reserved to work on

This can lead to a glitched robot fleet that does not know what to do anymore or worst a block that will clash the server when broken

Yeh I noticed, found the robots on the ground and picked them up,
Docking station still showing red but empty even when activated, so removed them and ended up with duplicate robots.

that is when you are lucky I had several cases where breaking the block cashed the server

@grannyte - I fixed the bug which might have caused robots to despawn, however from what I can infer from the code, robots will commit suicide if they run out of power. In other words: robots are not made to be automated as they constantly eat power, unless you chunkload their entire area of work.

but is it realy intended that they commit suicide then? it could also have been spacetoad's way of making sure buggy robots got removed from the world if they get stuck, i think they should then just land so they can be picked up later

the thing is they bug the world by breaking they never release nethier their base nor their last reserved station
and as I told earlier if you are lucky this only cause your robot fleet to bug out and avoid those station if you are not it cause a server crash when you break the bugged station

also if the robots are ment to break down there should be some way to know where an when they break so we can recover them cause currently a robot can decide to break down in the depth of your cave leaving you to wonder why you have a red station where no robot ever comes back

how can we charge them ? I have several docking station on power pipes and they don't ever seem to go to them like they did in the preview