Digtron Chest Inventory Loss with Vertical Movement

[Pivert]

Description

When a Digtron operates vertically downward or moves over long distances without the player nearby, there is a mismatch between the physical position of its blocks and the internal management of their contents and programming. This can result in the chest inventories being lost or becoming inaccessible (gray area in formspec). The settings of placement blocks are sometimes transferred to the block below, making the Digtron unusable until completely rebuilt. The contents of the chests are then permanently lost.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Build a Digtron.
2. Start digging vertically downward or move the Digtron over a long distance.
3. Do not stay close to the Digtron during operation.
4. After the operation, open the chest formspecs of the Digtron.

Expected Behavior

• The contents of the Digtron’s chests should be preserved and accessible.
• The block settings should remain correctly assigned.

Actual Behavior

• The formspecs of the chests show an empty gray area.
• The block settings are misaligned (e.g., placement block settings transferred to the block below).
• The Digtron must be completely rebuilt to restore functionality, leading to permanent loss of chest contents.

Additional Information

• The bug is not specific to a single server and has been reported multiple times across different servers.
• The issue is more frequent during vertical digging or long-distance movement without player supervision and may be triggered by lag or dynamic world generation.
• Luanti 5.14.0 stable server - Digtron version 0.8 from ContentDB
• Did not find any clue in the server logs - But I'll be more careful and especially take the exact time if possible.

[BuckarooBanzay]

had that issue a couple times too but had problems reproducing it, might even be an engine bug somehow

[j-r]

I think this is the same as #35 and #57.

FWIW I can no longer reproduce this after changing the code to aggressively emerge large areas around the digtron on each cycle.