Still seems to be three in local. At least it was in A21 and I have 2 active in 1.0.
So I just tried it on a local game in 1.0 and you can just have one active LCB at a time.
Try clicking the Defaults button in your settings. That should change it to the default of 3. If it doesn't, I think you can change it in the serverconfig.xml file even if it's single player (untested).
In a single player game they have almost no meaning. The only thing they allow is to move workstations. In a network game, they indicate the player’s area. If the server is PvE, then the other player in this area cannot do anything.
They also affect spawns and chunk resets (if enabled or done manually) and region resets (these are only done manually). But yeah, the main issue use is for moving stuff.
This should really be it's own topic, but to answer your question, make sure you disable chunk reset if you don't want it, and check to make sure you don't have the value for saving data set to 0. I don't actually know where that is and maybe someone can look, but I saw a post where someone changed it to 0, which meant it couldn't save anything about changes to the world.
Thanks for helping hand. Disabling chunk reset has helped to save my occasional structures during explorations but now chunks seem to stay empty looted forever (not quite sure though). Anyway, since even 100 days of Chunk Reset Time doesn't seem to work at all this solution is better than immediate loosing of loot and structures.
Once you're used to no cans or jars, it really is better. The only thing that isn't is realism if you are really interested in that or needing to get water from dew collectors instead of all at once in the first couple of days for the entire game with jars. But those aren't really important imo and there are a lot of good changes in A21 and 1.0 that you miss out on, but that's up to you.