Drone
A Drone is an aerial vehicle that flies items between its home and selected Drone Port.
Usage
Each Drone can only be assigned to 1 home Drone Port, and that home Drone Port can only be linked to 1 other Drone Port (that Drone Port, in turn, doesn't necessarily need to be linked back to this Drone Port). There is no limitation on the number of assigned Drones unloading on a Drone Port, but only one can unload at a time. Waiting Drones will circle above the Drone Port.
When flying from one Port to another, a Drone will show a take-off animation, wiggling around; rise vertically, turning mid-air then fly roughly in a straight line to the destination. It then descends, followed by some wiggling animation and finally docks. Drones will attempt to navigate around obstacles mid-flight. As the take-off and landing animation can take a considerable amount of time, the efficiency of Drones increases with distance.
Drones can potentially be used as a means of transportation. Pioneers can stand on the Drone for a ride, but fall protection equipment, such as a Jetpack, is highly recommended, as the Pioneer can fall off mid-air when the Drone starts accelerating forward or changes direction. It is recommended to stand on the wing near the circular hinge part close to the main body as it is the most consistent in preventing falls.
Fuel
Drones must use Batteries, Packaged Fuel, Packaged Turbofuel, Packaged Rocket Fuel, Packaged Ionized Fuel, Uranium Fuel Rods, or Plutonium Fuel Rods as fuel. Drones will use different fuels at different rates depending on their path, the given fuel's energy value, and the speed of the drone, which also varies based on fuel type.
Use this table below to compare the different fuels' energy density (and thus how long one lasts) to each other. The table also lists the approximate speeds Drones go with the different fuel types.
Fuel Type | Fuel Value (MJ) |
Speed (m/s) |
---|---|---|
Packaged Fuel | 750 | 25 |
Packaged Turbofuel | 2,000 | 30 |
Battery | 6,000 | 37 |
Packaged Rocket Fuel | 7,200 | 37 |
Packaged Ionized Fuel | 10,000 | 45 |
Uranium Fuel Rod | 750,000 | 42 |
Plutonium Fuel Rod | 1,500,000 | 45 |
Logistics
Drones can be used for long-range low-throughput transportation, such as of high-end products, which usually come in small per-minute quantities. Drones can only transport between two Drone Ports, the home Port and any other Port. At least one of the Drone Ports requires a steady supply of fuel to power the Drone(s). Unlike trains, Drones don't block the input of items during the cargo loading animation.
Behavior
Drones will try to fly from Drone Ports to other Drone Ports as straight as possible. When terrain is in the path, the Drone will try to avoid the object. Drones use a 64 x 64 grid of the world to generate their path.
Drones have only one home Port, which is the Port the Drone is built on. No additional Drones can be built onto a Drone Port, but multiple Drones can use it as their destination Port. If multiple Drones are awaiting to be unloaded at the same time, they will fly around the Port at a 20m radius, stacking vertically with an 8m gap in between.
A Drone will initially take the required amount of fuel for a round trip from its home Port, consuming the fuel immediately upon takeoff. If the Drone is being supplied with fuel at its destination (non-home) Port instead, it will take the required amount of fuel for a round trip, but not consume it until it returns to its home Port and takes off from it, taking no fuel from the home Port. Thus, it is possible to have 2 drones on a line with 2 drone ports, even if one of them doesn't have fuel. In this scenario, it has to be manually supplied with fuel for its first trip, as it would not take off from the home Port to start transporting otherwise. After that, fuel only needs to be supplied at one of the two drone ports for both drones to function.
Efficiency
After the first round trip is finished, the stack throughput of the Drone will be shown in the Drone's home Port, alongside its maximum throughput and fuel required per round trip. The efficiency of Drones increases with travel distance, as the landing and take-off animation takes 51 seconds. If the route is too short, most of it will be the landing animations; it would take 102 seconds to move items from two Drone Ports immediately next to each other.
External links
Trivia
- The development of Drones was vaguely alluded to on May 15th, 2020: "There's going to be a new vehicle in Tier 7 or 8".[1]
- The inclusion of Drones was jokingly "confirmed" on July 23rd, 2020, via Jace's high quality screenshots/mspaint art video.[2]
- During Update 5 and some of Update 6, the drones used the spirit of the portable miner in their recipe to drill straight under the ground, ignoring the world grid and flying under the map. This was fixed during Update 6's Experimental Period.
- The drones have a theoretically unlimited queue for the holding pattern on drone ports if the port is unpowered and can remain in the air in the holding pattern for an extremely long time
History
- Patch 1.0: Drones can now use multiple different fuel types
- Patch 0.8.2.0: Fixed a bug where drones would sometimes consume batteries multiple times when starting a new trip, especially when the player is far away
- Patch 0.8.0.0: Fixed a potential bug with drone queue processing
- Patch 0.6.0.12: Potential fix to a crash related to DroneAction
- Patch 0.6.0.7: Fixed flying through cliffs and similar terrain
- Patch 0.6.0.1: Potential fix when returning to the main menu when having built Drones
- Patch 0.4.3.1: Fixed minor issue related to the world grid
- Patch 0.4.0.11: Reduced default round-trip Battery cost for Drones to 4 (from 5) and reduced cost/distance from 1.66 to 1 Battery per kilometre.
- Patch 0.4.0.10: Fixed bug where the distance between Drone stations wouldn’t be calculated properly, causing incorrect round-trip time estimates and battery consumption, Battery consumption should now properly increase over larger distances.
- Patch 0.4.0.6:
- Drone Pathfinding and World Grid improvements. Drones will now fly to the closest cell if trying to pathfind outside of the grid instead of crashing. Building outside of the grid might have some weird behaviour but shouldn’t cause crashes anymore
- Removed an ensure that caused many crashes when loading a big save
- Fixed a bug where Drones would skip a station if saving when it’s docking, causing it to take off and bring the items back again when loading
- Patch 0.4.0.4:
- Potential fix for a scenario where the Drones would take a nonsensical path to their destination
- Fixed a bug where Drones would teleport when dismantling a Drone Station they are about to dock on
- Fixed a rare crash related to Drones
- Fixed Drone Ports allowing duplicate names
- Patch 0.4.0.0: Introduced