After being far away from the contraption, it stops moving/functioning.

can someone close this issue?

That makes sense, probably should have been able to figure that out. Normally I think longer about issues before posting them but there had been so many that day lol.

inherent thing with how minecraft handles chunk-loading. get far away enough and the game will stop everything in the contraption's location. create doesn't chunkload anything, so you will need another mod to do it, or use the /forceload command.