STAR WARS Minecraft...HELP?

Playing with kiddo and seems like when I put a chest down on our ship's bridge...then change locations, the chest is gone.....until we "fly" back to the original location. The inconsistent nature of things like this is making it frustrating to figure out how to establish a base of operations etc. Is this a bug or how it's intended to be? Like I put an extra bed on the ship...but it's only there when we're in a certain port. Can someone help me figure this out?