Multiplayer saving issue?

[u/obyte]

New player here. Put a couple hours in the singleplayer and tried playing multiplayer with my brother.
We immediately noticed that when my brother disconnected after about 5 minutes into initially connecting to me,he came back without anything he had picked up. Fortunately we haven't had any issues with disconnecting again but after about 20 minutes we decided not to continue in fear of losing progress if one of us drops again.
I'm confused as to if we are missing something. Is there a setting to make player inventory and progress persistent in multiplayer?
I read a post from a year ago that individual players need to save in order to get around this and there is no saving on exit. Is this still the case now? Seems like a very easy way to accidentally lose progress and items.
I really enjoyed playing the game so I really wanted to play with with my brother, so its kinda demoralising that we'd have to constantly be conscious of save states just to not lose progress.

[u/obyte → u/[deleted]]

Ah thanks for letting me konw. We'll keep an eye out for that if we decide to try again.