This is why I strongly think we need some kind of a system that stores at least some of your stuff when a beacon goes wild, the “I like finding abandoned places and looting them” isn’t so important to the health of the game as players not coming back. It’s easy to forget refueling once and it’s all gone. A “pay in advance if you want to return” solution isn’t ideal. I’d still pay for gc just to keep my builds in the world.
Purchase of the base game should be enough to grant you the ability to keep at least your storage contents and machines/coils. Losing your builds is punishment enough.
Store the item ids and counts, make a corridor in the sanctum that acts as a UI to retrieve stuff from there. Only retrieve. I don’t think the abuse potential is there, it’d be hella ineffective to move your stuff with this if you had to plan a month ahead, I know I wouldn’t. And even if somebody would, what’s does it matter, they saved maybe a day worth of oort that it would’ve taken them to move the stuff with a portal?
Can the game afford bleeding players for this mechanic? I wonder what the metrics say, how many players, who have invested time in-game and their beacons expire, actually return?