[Cargo persistence:] You go down to a derelict and pick up a cargo box, fly it back to Port Olisar and land. You don't sell it; you walk it back in through the airlock, drop it in the middle of the ASOP terminals, and log out. What happens to that cargo?
TL;DRCargo dropped outside a ship is cleaned up after a while and only visible in the same instance, while cargo left in your ship persists, with better persistence only being explored and not promised.
It stays there for a period of time until it gets cleaned up automatically if there's no one around, which will be pretty fast for a small object like that. If you log in again, it depends on which instance you go into. If you end up in the same instance, you could see the cargo again. If you end up in a different instance, you won't see it. If you leave the piece of cargo in your ship, you leave the ship at ATC, you log off, log back on, it will be in your ship, the last place you left it, because that's something that is part of your account and it travels with you whenever you go into different instances. So the moment you take it out of your ship, it kind of becomes free game. So that's because we have instancing in the game right now. Whenever we eventually move to a more server mesh based technology, we'll be able to have either large or single representation of the universe. That means that if I leave something on a planet by a certain rock, it's there for everybody that plays the game. We're not there yet, because that's going to take some rather tremendous work to get us there. But for things that are part of your player account, like your ships, your loadout, your attachments, those things follow you whenever you log off and log back on. I don't want to promise too much. We're exploring currently ways that we can make that experience better, so that if I do happen to leave something somewhere and I log off and log back on, it may be there. But it's still early days for that kind of stuff.