I would love to see DRONES in the future !! Little Q&A towards drones.

Question

Why drones ?

Imagine a factory where drones fly around and pick up and unload stuff just like the trucks do, that would look so cool and could be so helpfull. You could do so much stuff with them, for example just normal delivery missions like the truck system already does. But you could also add for example a remote control, you can control the drone with. Imagine your building off base and you forgot an item, just use the remote control to tell a drone that is stationed at your warehouse to bring you a certain item. 

So far the idea of adding drones and why.

How to add them ?

- Run by Electricity, need a charging station, a limit of 10drones per charging station

- Can hold up to 10 Items (less than the truck), but they are faster than the truck because they can fly over obstacles

How should they look ?

-They could have up to 4 rotors or more depending on the drone level, there could be mk1 , mk2 and so on  

-Smaller than the player 

-Maybe even with the ability to change their color with the paint gun 

How about the sound ?

- Not too loud not to quiet ! 

- You should notice the drones and the sound of them but when the sound of them gets too loud it will be just annoying.

AND MOST IMPORTANT HOW ABOUT YOU GUYS ?

- What do you think about the idea of adding drones to satisfactory in mid/late game  

Comments

The one thing that I would like to have is a construction drone.

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Yes I also thought of that, it would make building so much easier and faster.

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I love your idea of adding drones. The only thing which was really annoying in my opinion(in general this game is just perfect and lovely), were the movement abilitys of the trucks. This kind of drones could solve that problem completely.
Fantastic idea.
You can be sure, that you got my support.

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Awesome idea! The drones would be awesome to have and they would be super useful for something like a mine that is far away from the hub.

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Yeah, an aerial delivery drone would be great. Alternately they need to be supplied with Fuel (real fuel, not biofuel or coal) and can't carry as much, but ignore terrain, so you can have one delivering stuff up a cliff that a normal Truck wouldn't be able to get to (without you building a huge ramp complex or something)

Answer 1

Love the idea. My coal location would be perfect for a drone route. I would add that the drone needs to be slower than the truck (it will be faster because it goes over obstacle but on a straight linne I mean)

Comments

Yeah thats the reason I want them ^^

Answer 2

A nice suggestion, though you have to remember; this is not factorio.
If you had 1 drone carrying 10 items, that would be 45 drones to fill a mk4 conveyer (a minute). My truck is actually driving in a pretty straight line, and takes about 7 minutes for a round. Even if the drones are flying twice as fast, you'll still need more than 150-160 drones (some extra to recharge, reload etc) to replace a truck. In a 3D game this would require an intense amount of CPU and GPU power because of all the collision boxes, and possible even make the game unplayable/crashing.
I agree that drones would be awesome, but i'd rather use drones for exploration than transportation.
If there should be some drones, make them big and carry a lot. It could even be something like the transporter from the hub.

Comments

Yeah I dont know that much about game develepoment so I cant really tell how hard this is to realize ingame but I agree that maybe one very big drone could be better than smaller ones.

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That is why later you unlock conveyer lift (which is supposed to come with late april patch.) if you have one big drole to balance with the truck, then the lifters become irrelevant. Drones would simply allow to go up and down early in the game without having the conveyor lift being irrelevant. It would also allow for some wirder shape of circuit and also let's say you've split a conveyor in 3 because you need the 2/3 of that mine to feed 2 two foundry, but don't know what to do with the exceed that come out of the third line, and you kind of stuck yourself according to your design tastes so you can't make it go to the other side of you factory  where your third foundry is without doing major modification to your already setup factory

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I believe the idea would be to use the Trucks and Tractors for Mass resource relocation operations. And the drones would he for shorter distances or to maintain a set flow of minimal resources to a specific location.

If it only would have a capacity of 10 slots, then that (in my opinion) would he a great way to set it on a rather large route for a main hub of item production for their unlocks and upgrades. Instead of having a huge main factory to sift through for all your materials.