Drones

Redesign note: the Drone Port is the current drone block — standalone, RF-powered, with import/export modes, drones-as-lanes, name/Auto routing, and the unrendered Hyperspeed upgrade. The Drone Hub below is the legacy Stage-3 block, kept for migration. New setups should use Drone Ports.

Drones carry items point-to-point without conduits or wireless links.

Drone Hub (legacy)#

The hub stocks an item buffer (fill it with ducts/hoppers) and dispatches delivery drones to wireless cargo terminals on its channel within range. Right-click to cycle the hub's channel.

• It holds a hard-capped pool of live drones (dronesPerHub); it never dispatches beyond the cap.
• Each dispatch charges the hub's energy buffer (droneEnergyPerDelivery); power it with cables.
• Targets come from the cheap wireless-channel membership list — no world scan.
• Toggle the whole system with the enableDrones config (no progression unlock required).

Delivery Drone#

A lightweight non-living entity. It flies in a straight line from its hub to the target, deposits its cargo into the destination inventory (dropping any overflow), then despawns. A failsafe age bounds its lifetime so a stranded drone never lingers.

Note: the delivery drone's detailed animated model is part of a deferred visual/art pass and will land in a later release. Drone-port Hyperspeed transfers deliberately spawn no drone entity at all, for performance.

See also#

• Drone Ports · Terminals · Configuration