Jey

and yes i know it is not currently possible, this is why this is a dev request. Its the kind of thing that should be a 5mins thing to implement so if they feel like it they could.

I assume it would be relatively simple from a coding perspective so ill ask in hope that a dev add it to the binary. The goal would be to give power for lua script to delay or prevent sector from unloading if needed (this way specific sector could be kept loaded permanently if the server owner desires it). The way i see it, there should be a lastactivity time variable in the sector that once "now - lastactivity > sectorUpdateTimeLimit" unload the sector. A way for a lua function to set lastactivity to now would be good enough. For all i know there may already be a function accessible from lua that happens to do it as a side-effect, but i haven't found any xD. I understand that keeping a ton of sectors loaded is bad, but the ability to designate a few specific sectors to remain open should be manageable (and in the host control so its on them anyway). Proper Out of sector idle would be ideal, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon (out of sector factory is great, but it doesnt cover mining ship, pirate attacks etc). My specific use case would be for a server that only me and a friend play on, wed like our mining ships and patrol to keep sector open without having the side effect of keeping dozens / hundreds of sector open by upping the sectorUpdateTimeLimit to a crazy number.

assuming you use a high sectorUpdateTimeLimit to force it open (which will cause lag if you travel a lot since all the sectors end up staying open) then the mining issue your referring to seem to be caused by weakUpdate=true, change it to false and everything continue normally in open sector with no players on (until the sector gets unloaded)