On Vulcanus, every time I load into the game, none of the collectors work until rebuilt.

If this is not the default behaviour, then my guess is an incompatibility with something like

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/TerrainEvolution2

ensure that pollution is over 50, default behaviour is that collectors stop when tile pollution is below that amount
this can be changed in the mod settings

I can't test this because vulcanus doesn't have pollution (even with that mod)

I had this also before and usual happens when robots place it. Seems it need to be placed by a player.
EDIT: Just tried it in my current game and all seems fine, this problem i had months ago and with very different mod-set. So this is prob something mod related. Only thing i remember was that i had Teams activated. so i was not in the normal "player" Team. But honestly all seems fine right now to me in my current game.

i don't see why, theres no difference in the logic for a player vs a drone placing it

@Schuby
Yes they begin to work until rebuilt by myself, drones placing them works too if the building is actually picked up through the deconstruction planner.

Pollution one could be a rampant or explosive biter mod feature, thank you for the help.

"Rewrote core parts of control.lua to improve stability and prevent crashes. The mod now initializes correctly on load. Added a system to force-refresh all collectors whenever you load your game; this scans all surfaces and re-registers the machines, which forces the game to wake up the pollution map for that chunk. This fixes the issue where collectors were previously inert on planets where the pollution map had not been initialized yet, such as Vulcanus. Pollution collection speed is now dynamic and affected by the atmosphere on the surface: it does not work in space, and it scales based on the planet's atmospheric pressure (higher pressure leads to faster collection, while thin atmospheres lead to slower collection). Also added support for Repair Tower 2 and updated event listeners so that buildings placed by robots or scripts register and function immediately."

Thanks Gemini pro 3.1 preview.

The pollution solutions mod folder with changes for you (mostly just control.lua changed): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1no8doWVHbmXKkn4V1ufRaLH8IXCm8jMJ?usp=sharing

Doesnt crash on load, my 40 ish collectors around my vulcanus base start working on load unlike before, building and deconstructing by hand, by bots, by repair tower in its range works. Unless there is a runtime crash after like 10 minutes ill keep using this version as it seems stable.

Now especially with https://mods.factorio.com/mod/pollution-visuals pollution has a nice visual feedback.
mod list: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kMcxNKLw8hA_OKHv27wZtQsi3yfCj5Td/view?usp=sharing
mod settings: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SF5d_aBjI5JBNC3pcOU-Kmsm1FcOw2Qk/view?usp=sharing

In the future, please submit a PR on the GitHub. I can’t merge this one as it’s missing a significant amount of functionality from the current version (including the entire loot system) and it introduces several game‑breaking bugs. For example, the logic for removing a tracked entity no longer checks the Y‑coordinate, which will leave ghost entities in the array and could cause crashes, and will cause it to leak memory over time (also increasing save file size).

It’s fine to use LLMs for code (I use them myself), but please make sure to verify what they’re doing before using or sending others their output.
I will not provide any support for people using this version