Right now it's really irritating trying to redecorate when you have a big pile of crates full of stuff stacked up somewhere. Doing it is almost a guarantee to lose some stuff to the despawn time limit thanks to the tedium of moving stuff back and forth. There needs to be a way to move them around without emptying them, even if it requires a mid-tier tool unlocked around the same time as drills to do it. This would go a long way towards smoothing over some of the minor irritations involved with keeping a bunch of containers around.
I think it's fine as is. Moving an empty thing is a lot easier than moving a thing with items inside of it, and this is reflected in the current mechanics. No need to change anything here.
If we're going to look at difficulty of moving things in the real world as a guide, I'll point out that when people move things from one point to another in a warehouse they don't set up a box at the destination, move things individually from the old box to the new box, then take down the old box. They just move the whole box from where it was to its new spot. No muss, no fuss. Also, even if a box in the real world is up-ended, the stuff that scatters on the floor doesn't disappear permanently after 30 seconds. I'm sure I'm not the only one that got that legendary bone club and accidentally used it inside their ship, only to end up losing half the stuff they've collected up to that point because no human could place containers and put stuff away fast enough to keep a couple hundred items from despawning. Thinking about it more, it might be easiest to just assign a value to each chest that says what's in it even if it breaks, so instead of all of the contents spilling out you just pick up each chest (of course, they wouldn't stack as long as they had stuff in them) and when they're re-placed they would have all the same stuff in them. EDIT: I suppose if there were balance concerns, maybe a chest with stuff in it could take up as much space in an inventory as its maximum storage space. And obviously, it shouldn't be possible to put a chest with stuff inside another chest with stuff. That could get messy fast.
I dunno, I think it would be very nice to have a lift mechanic with the MM where you can simple pick up an item that is not secured and put it back down elsewhere. In fact, I think that some objects should -have- to be picked up this way, and not be able to reduce down into your inventory. Crafting tables, as an example.
this is an interesting concept, one that oddly enough was discussed with me and my friends for Terraria. Our solution would be that you could carry a chest in your characters arms but be unable to move very fast at all, basically walking speed, and be limited to only being able to use grappling hooks, as your hotbar items would be unavailable to you. this could be done in a similar manner, as we have access to a wider array of options being that it is a sci-fi game and we already have the matter manipulator. the grappling hook in Terraria being a bit easier to get access to than in Starbound could cause issues with that direct translation.
