The shovel disappears from your hand if you press SHIFT.

I have now run into a few instances that this does not happen so I believe it is server or connection related? I've been playing on the official NY Conflict Arland server in which I have roughly 95ms ping.

Also Kanas, I was not pressing shift, this was happening to multiple players as we were all building up a base. I would hold the "F" key and get reset and have to re-equip the shovel.

I have not experienced this in the current version of the game. 1.1.0.34.
I think you can close this task.

What OP is trying to explain:

Temporary fixes: Respawning (suicide).

When it happens for the first time it keeps happening for the longest time making building a fatiguing and frustrating task. I find myself stopping building entirely when such thing happens as I know that something that should take 2 minutes will take ~10 minutes.
Steps to reproduce are unknown now, happens at random times.

Happens a lot to me on a non-official vanilla online server.

What I know about that (tested on 1.2.0.70 OFFICIAL full everon conflict servers) :

• happens "randomly"
• bug stays until you die/respawn or disconnect/reconnect
• You can play 10 hours long on a full server and nothing happens. And sometimes it happens on the first building attempt on a low pop server. (i don't think it's related to server performance, I've joined empty server sometimes to test so I had to build everything and it happened too.)
• I'm having this bug since a long time (at least one stable version before and 2 experimental before), and maybe even since the first time I installed the game ~ a year ago.
• You don't even need to start the building action to have the problem. Having only the shovel in hands near a building to construct reproduces the issue.
• Each time you have this issue, the game selects automatically one of your weapon despite you not actually doing it. Even if you don't have any weapon in your inventory, the game reset your character animation like if you did'nt select the shovel.
• Each time the issue happens, when I selected again my shovel, the default selected action is "dissassembly" and I have to scroll up again to select "Build ..." instead of "disassembly".

I think it might be related to the animation processes. Because when you are near something to build and have your shovel in hands, the game remove the shovel of your hands anytime your start running. Each time you stop after that running, the shovel is placed again automatically in your hands, but somehow I think that sometimes, something might be corrupted with the current client player state with all that things resulting in this issue.

A video showing the problem not touching anything (except selecting automatically the shovel after the issue happens with the dedicated hotkey and showing the inventory in the beginning) :

And here a video that shows the issue happening even if you don't have any weapon in your inventory :

This bug is present in vanilla since a year or so!
When will you finally fix it?!?