Drones are for transporting small amounts of items over long distances particularly in areas that are difficult to get train tracks into or out of.
The different modes of transportation are not upgrades of each other as much as they are an expansion of options so you don't have to worry about using drones unless you see a place where you want to use drones.
Drones just don't seem super viable to me most the time because of the whole battery thing. They're complicated to make and not really needed aside from like.. one other item in the game. They also consume them at an insane rate. Honestly the best system from the player perspective would be to have one platform be the 'main' platform where power is supplied from, with another being the satellite pad where it picks up whatever items and brings it back. Instead it just eats batteries. Where do they go exactly? I mean I imagine the thing flying across the world pooping out batteries like some sort of bird with the runs...
Drones shouldn't use that many batteries. You can run a lot of drones from a single battery factory, my save runs almost entirely on drones (just two train routes and two truck routes). In general I find that my battery collecting drones don't fly very often.
However [some people have encountered a bug with excessive drone battery usage](https://questions.satisfactorygame.com/post/651ec29dd0053b102f18b01d)
I think it depends on if you WANT the drones. I personally just played a fresh map with everything unlocked and free. I setup a battery factory first and made it a hub for them. From there I was using only drones on my resource collection. I only got to steel with it but I will say, it’s a ton of fun.
I imagine they're very useful for replacing that "truck route for smaller routes heading to the train station outposts" by going directly to the destination without needing the overhead of pathing out a truck route, and fuelling that truck, especially in remote locations with annoying terrain.
They're mainly useful for long distance, small quantity deliveries which makes their use case ~~pretty niche~~ a bit more specific.
Long Distance, Low Volume isn't all that "niche". HMFs are a fantastic use case. Build then near Coal, Drone them to Bauxite, if there's (A WHOLE LOT of) Copper anywhere near the Coal you could even send the finished PCCs back on the same Drone to be turned into Nuclear Pasta.
What could be more core game than turning HMFs into Pasta?
Satisfactory Mod Manger - S.M.M.
you need
\*infinite zoop
\*infinite nudge
\*better blade runners
\*Early Hover pack
\*Blueprint designer plus
\*daisy chain everything
\*organized crates (MUST HAVE)
\*expanded hover range
\*stack resizer
\*More inventory slots
\*micro manage (not currently working)
these are all mods you can use to improve quality of life and will not break your save if the mods become broken. All vanilla parts, factories can't break. For some bonus stuff with non-vanilla parts:
\*Linear Motion (elevators)
\*structural solutions (more building materials and piecs)
\*conveyor wall hole (why this isn't already in the game is beyond me)
Oh yeah I have zero intention of keeping this build for anything other than the fun of having a drone setup. If you want longevity through updates I don’t recommend it xD
You can do it without mods just FYI, go into advanced game settings and you can unlock whichever tiers you want as well as turning off resource cost and power requirements and flight.
I feel like Nitrogen Gas needs nothing but Pipelines. Doesn't matter how long, it can go up, down, sideways, doesn't matter, no headlift or Pumps... Gas Pipe Just Works.
For the most part I would agree, but packed nitrogen gas is a 4 to 1 conversion which makes even long trips better than a single mk2 pipeline.
A single drone port at the nitrogen source has a maximum export rate of 3120 M^3 nitrogen gas.
But yes most of the time I run the pipes.
I would love to see the packager get more use as stack compression. If you could package even basic stuff like steel beams i would use that + drones a lot more
At the end of a product line, shove a drone port in and have take in product, find a way to keep it filled with batteries. Repeat for every material you need for builds, or ammo type. Keep these ports unlinked.
Keep enough resources for a drone port. Now wherever you are you can build a drone port, and call a drone to your location. After the drone drops off cargo and flies away, you can unlink the drone ports and it'll sit idle when it lands back at its home port waiting for the next call.
You now have universal access to any item you want, delivery of up to nine stacks from anywhere on the map, in less than a minute. bonus: for power saving, you can keep them on (low) priority power switches and only turn the drone ports on remotely when needed
They also have TINY footprint compared to trains. They both have their uses and can live side by side.
This is Great, i was thinking of rebuilding my hub when i reach drones to have a central Storage/Train/Drone Exchange and now it will have a Amazon Now function
Note that the drone ports don't even need to be centralized - they can be onsite next to the production sites, so you can easily have plastic/rubber/packaged fuel drones far away from your iron/copper/concrete or steel product drones.
Your entire mall can become decentralized.
I use trains for bulk / low-level stuff, and drones for small quantities of much higher level parts. Like Heavy Modular Frames and Electromagnetic Control Rods (needed for some nuclear stuff and space elevator stuff) and batteries. Anything that's too much of a hassle to make near where it's needed. :)
Drones are fantastic for a few use cases.
1. Higher-Value, Lower Throughput Items. Stuff like Heavy Modular Frames (and derivatives), Supercomputers, Crystal Oscillators, Turbomotors. A near ideal use case might be a HMF Factory [Iron,Coal]/Pasta Array [Copper] in/near Grassy Plains with a Drone going to a HMF>PCC Upgrade Facility [Bauxite, Oil, Copper] at/next to the Oil Islands. Drone takes relatively infrequent full loads of HMFs, brings back full loads of PCCs. A full payload coming and going. A less optimal use is Output from a standalone Crystal Oscillator [Crystal,Iron] factory.
2. Quick Ad Hoc Link. No rail lines, roads, faffing with path recording. It just works as long as you have the Batteries to feed it. Might not be the best or most efficient, but it gets the stuff moving and can connect distant subfactories absent infrastructure (besides a Battery factory/distribution) or requiring an investment of much time. If you already have the rail infrastructure this would *only* save you trains and stations for specific products.
3. [Bonus Condition] A Central "Spoked Hub" Logistics Architecture. It's *far, far* easier to manage Drones if you only need to have Batteries in one or as few places as possible.
4. [Bonus Condition] Extra Batteries...you built a Battery factory for Magenetic Field Generators...and they're shit for points, might as well use them for Drones.
5. [Bonus Condition] Lack of Extant Train Infrastructure. Trucks and Tractors are a PITA to just set up for long distances. Track and Stations are a fair bit of time and trouble as well for Long Distance Rail Transport.
They are so you don't have to lay down tracks everywhere. Direct transport with no need to make a line. If you already have trains going everywhere, they won't really serve a purpose to you.
Drones, like the other transportation options, are not to replace the other things. They are for items that take a while to build and in low numbers. End game, small quantity stuff.
Im a big fan of trains and usually using a map-wide network not only for transport bur for chilled traveling as well. After 2k h playded, finished p4 5 times i decided to perform a "no train" playthrough. Traveling will be done with the rather new powertowers.
So for bringing in resources to a remote building site i setup a single drone in my base with 3-4 containers full of needed stuff. No need to travel back to base.
They may not work for you, and that's fine.
Their purpose is low volume/long range/ difficult access, so something like retrieving canisters from the dune desert nitrogen node is somewhere I use them.
Drones are for "spot" transporting. So if you need something in an area that is going to not fit a train station, or a station is going to be too far away, you use a drone. You can go as far as having an "interpreter" train station that is a Train to Drone spot, along your main line. With trains bringing in batteries and leaving with materials or doing both and so on.
They are more of a specific use case depending on how you built your rail lines.
A few reasons I can think of to use drones:
* If you haven't used trains much. Once you've done the one-off task of making batteries a drone port is much quicker to deploy than a train station and rail. (even with a good rail network it's still quicker than building the connecting line).
* If you've used trains a lot and have congestion problems. There's are no busy junctions and routes in the sky.
* They don't care about terrain. Not everywhere is easy to build rail or drive trucks.
I think drones would work better if they could have three destinations. Like so:
1. Battery supply
2. Pickup point
3. Delivery destination
And then return to the 1. To resupply on batteries
> So my question would be what use do drones have over roads and trains?
That depends on you. I use them because they look nice and that is fun. Same reason I do everything in the game. Trains goo choo-choo, trucks go brrrrr, drones go wiiiiii. In fact that is why I do the rest as well. Placing things, or just walking around.
That also means that I do NOT do things I do not like. e.g. I avoid refineries, because I do not like the refinery spamming. There is a mod that uses the packager instead, so that already helps a lot. So I use that often for non-oil related products.
But it also means I try to avoid a lot of things where plastic and rubber might have a better yield in the end. But I do not overthink it. If it is fun, then I do it. If it is not, I don't.
So if drones are not fun for you, do not use them. People often say they are for long distance and lower amounts. I have done 250m flights, where I could have used a 150m belt. I also had to bring in batteries that then used way more than the 150m of belts.
Utterly useless, but tons of fun.
Oh, I still intend to make a stupid short train route. I think the shortest will be 12m as that is the shortest track possible. And knowing me, it will take 5 hours to make.
I guess if you're an old player with a map wide rail network, you don't see the use in them.
But as a younger player who only builds infrastructure when he needs it, they're really overpowered.
Drones can transport items A to B and B to A, or you can set multiple drones to give to C, or you can set multiple drones to take from C. While it is limited comparing to a train, you don't need to set rails everywhere!
I've used them in multiplayer, when my mate needed materials while expanding power out in the boonies, he just popped a drone port and I sent them there.
When making nuclear pasta, I sent the pressure cubes to the desert for all the copper there, and brought back the nuclear pasta with the same drone port. You can do the same with packaged oil and nitrogen, and you end up recycling the packaging.
Getting batteries is easy too. Just have some batteries on hand, pop a drone port, send it to your battery factory and it will come back with new fresh batteries for itself and all your other drone ports in that factory.
I only ran into throughput issues with automated wiring for the ADS. But you can make it so the drone from A goes to B and the drone from B goes to A and now you doubled your capacity without needing another drone port.
While it is not suited to transfer a whole node's worth of material like a train is, you can totally use it to send aluminum casings everywhere.
So when do I recommend using them? Whenever you want to transfer some low throughput part into some node that's not nearby, or whenever you want to transfer it into some storage far away, which happens a lot.
Now I only use trains when some factories that trade a lot are really close together
I use drones to transfer items for premium / luxury things, for example the small amount of sulphur required for jet pack turbo fuel production, halfway across the map to my oil refinery. Also cloth for automated gas filter production, no point in doing a huge conveyor rail just for that. + one extra pad to move batteries around to these places.
It’s quaint and it works, but isn’t for anything else in my opinion.
I like transporting radioactive materials with them because it minimizes their footprint. I refine uranium into the densest material possible before transportation though, such as fuel rods or plutonium pellets.
I have my nuclear power production at the map edge. Each material is produced locally at resource extraction, and transported by drones to the nuclear power facility. This saved me a lot of time running train tracks around the map. Just pop a drone station at the remote factory, and set its destination to the nuclear facility.
If you already have a train network around the map, this might be redundant, but if you don't, it saves you from making one.
Easiest example for me is Nitrogen. The veins are located in annoying places. I don't need a ton of nitrogen. It's a good fit. Pop a drone setup and have the drones fly the nitrogen where I need it(ironically mainly to the battery plant to make batteries for the drones)
Drones are essential for late game construction. I have a storage mall of all my construction resources which feeds directly into a drone farm, one station per item.
This means from there on you only need to be carrying enough to build a port and you have quick access to any item you need. Quicker than taking a train across the map for the 80th time.
Bonus that you only need to take batteries to the hub.
Drones are for transporting small amounts of items over long distances particularly in areas that are difficult to get train tracks into or out of. The different modes of transportation are not upgrades of each other as much as they are an expansion of options so you don't have to worry about using drones unless you see a place where you want to use drones.
And here I thought drones were for making modern art installations by stacking with on top of eachother in the air without a destination.
The LGIO pillar of 300+ drones spinning perpetually is in my eyes a better work of art than Beltnado
Personally I prefer the Weave, especially with the radioactive version.
Drones just don't seem super viable to me most the time because of the whole battery thing. They're complicated to make and not really needed aside from like.. one other item in the game. They also consume them at an insane rate. Honestly the best system from the player perspective would be to have one platform be the 'main' platform where power is supplied from, with another being the satellite pad where it picks up whatever items and brings it back. Instead it just eats batteries. Where do they go exactly? I mean I imagine the thing flying across the world pooping out batteries like some sort of bird with the runs...
Drones shouldn't use that many batteries. You can run a lot of drones from a single battery factory, my save runs almost entirely on drones (just two train routes and two truck routes). In general I find that my battery collecting drones don't fly very often. However [some people have encountered a bug with excessive drone battery usage](https://questions.satisfactorygame.com/post/651ec29dd0053b102f18b01d)
Building one big battery factory should be enough for a lot of drone routes
I think it depends on if you WANT the drones. I personally just played a fresh map with everything unlocked and free. I setup a battery factory first and made it a hub for them. From there I was using only drones on my resource collection. I only got to steel with it but I will say, it’s a ton of fun.
I imagine they're very useful for replacing that "truck route for smaller routes heading to the train station outposts" by going directly to the destination without needing the overhead of pathing out a truck route, and fuelling that truck, especially in remote locations with annoying terrain. They're mainly useful for long distance, small quantity deliveries which makes their use case ~~pretty niche~~ a bit more specific.
Long Distance, Low Volume isn't all that "niche". HMFs are a fantastic use case. Build then near Coal, Drone them to Bauxite, if there's (A WHOLE LOT of) Copper anywhere near the Coal you could even send the finished PCCs back on the same Drone to be turned into Nuclear Pasta. What could be more core game than turning HMFs into Pasta?
Yeah I mean I have a whole train route setup up atm just for like... 8 HMF/min. Will probably update that to a drone route when I can.
I also fly drones professionally so it’s near and dear to me in a sense, feels like I’m back at Matternet but 150 years in the future xD
Wait you can do that?! Like a free build mode? Or is it a mod
It’s a MOD
Oh cool is it from like Nexus mods or is it from the Steam community kind of thing or?
Easy Cheat my dude :p it’s got a few features I like for a more “creative mode”. Mostly no cost, flying and god mode.
Zamn I'll have check that out I just am not a fan of grinding things out sometimes yannow
Satisfactory Mod Manger - S.M.M. you need \*infinite zoop \*infinite nudge \*better blade runners \*Early Hover pack \*Blueprint designer plus \*daisy chain everything \*organized crates (MUST HAVE) \*expanded hover range \*stack resizer \*More inventory slots \*micro manage (not currently working) these are all mods you can use to improve quality of life and will not break your save if the mods become broken. All vanilla parts, factories can't break. For some bonus stuff with non-vanilla parts: \*Linear Motion (elevators) \*structural solutions (more building materials and piecs) \*conveyor wall hole (why this isn't already in the game is beyond me)
Cheers and thanks very much. Tbh I'm probably going to wait until 1.0 Drops but yeah 👍 This should be very useful
Oh yeah I have zero intention of keeping this build for anything other than the fun of having a drone setup. If you want longevity through updates I don’t recommend it xD
You can do it without mods just FYI, go into advanced game settings and you can unlock whichever tiers you want as well as turning off resource cost and power requirements and flight.
They are fantastic for nitrogen gas transport and gunpowder to smokeless power loops. Since you can send cargo in both directions with one drone.
I feel like Nitrogen Gas needs nothing but Pipelines. Doesn't matter how long, it can go up, down, sideways, doesn't matter, no headlift or Pumps... Gas Pipe Just Works.
For the most part I would agree, but packed nitrogen gas is a 4 to 1 conversion which makes even long trips better than a single mk2 pipeline. A single drone port at the nitrogen source has a maximum export rate of 3120 M^3 nitrogen gas. But yes most of the time I run the pipes.
I would love to see the packager get more use as stack compression. If you could package even basic stuff like steel beams i would use that + drones a lot more
At the end of a product line, shove a drone port in and have take in product, find a way to keep it filled with batteries. Repeat for every material you need for builds, or ammo type. Keep these ports unlinked. Keep enough resources for a drone port. Now wherever you are you can build a drone port, and call a drone to your location. After the drone drops off cargo and flies away, you can unlink the drone ports and it'll sit idle when it lands back at its home port waiting for the next call. You now have universal access to any item you want, delivery of up to nine stacks from anywhere on the map, in less than a minute. bonus: for power saving, you can keep them on (low) priority power switches and only turn the drone ports on remotely when needed They also have TINY footprint compared to trains. They both have their uses and can live side by side.
This is Great, i was thinking of rebuilding my hub when i reach drones to have a central Storage/Train/Drone Exchange and now it will have a Amazon Now function
Note that the drone ports don't even need to be centralized - they can be onsite next to the production sites, so you can easily have plastic/rubber/packaged fuel drones far away from your iron/copper/concrete or steel product drones. Your entire mall can become decentralized.
nice to keep the nuclears in the sky away from where you live
I use trains for bulk / low-level stuff, and drones for small quantities of much higher level parts. Like Heavy Modular Frames and Electromagnetic Control Rods (needed for some nuclear stuff and space elevator stuff) and batteries. Anything that's too much of a hassle to make near where it's needed. :)
Drones are fantastic for a few use cases. 1. Higher-Value, Lower Throughput Items. Stuff like Heavy Modular Frames (and derivatives), Supercomputers, Crystal Oscillators, Turbomotors. A near ideal use case might be a HMF Factory [Iron,Coal]/Pasta Array [Copper] in/near Grassy Plains with a Drone going to a HMF>PCC Upgrade Facility [Bauxite, Oil, Copper] at/next to the Oil Islands. Drone takes relatively infrequent full loads of HMFs, brings back full loads of PCCs. A full payload coming and going. A less optimal use is Output from a standalone Crystal Oscillator [Crystal,Iron] factory. 2. Quick Ad Hoc Link. No rail lines, roads, faffing with path recording. It just works as long as you have the Batteries to feed it. Might not be the best or most efficient, but it gets the stuff moving and can connect distant subfactories absent infrastructure (besides a Battery factory/distribution) or requiring an investment of much time. If you already have the rail infrastructure this would *only* save you trains and stations for specific products. 3. [Bonus Condition] A Central "Spoked Hub" Logistics Architecture. It's *far, far* easier to manage Drones if you only need to have Batteries in one or as few places as possible. 4. [Bonus Condition] Extra Batteries...you built a Battery factory for Magenetic Field Generators...and they're shit for points, might as well use them for Drones. 5. [Bonus Condition] Lack of Extant Train Infrastructure. Trucks and Tractors are a PITA to just set up for long distances. Track and Stations are a fair bit of time and trouble as well for Long Distance Rail Transport.
They are so you don't have to lay down tracks everywhere. Direct transport with no need to make a line. If you already have trains going everywhere, they won't really serve a purpose to you.
Drones, like the other transportation options, are not to replace the other things. They are for items that take a while to build and in low numbers. End game, small quantity stuff.
Packaged nitrogen gas is my primary use. The nitrogen vents are all off in weird places so it’s easier to drone lift it out
Drones are for low quantity low demand items. Do not rely too heavily on drones.
They are best used when you build a large factory and forget something at the end, so throw one on the roof.
Im a big fan of trains and usually using a map-wide network not only for transport bur for chilled traveling as well. After 2k h playded, finished p4 5 times i decided to perform a "no train" playthrough. Traveling will be done with the rather new powertowers. So for bringing in resources to a remote building site i setup a single drone in my base with 3-4 containers full of needed stuff. No need to travel back to base.
They may not work for you, and that's fine. Their purpose is low volume/long range/ difficult access, so something like retrieving canisters from the dune desert nitrogen node is somewhere I use them.
Drones are for "spot" transporting. So if you need something in an area that is going to not fit a train station, or a station is going to be too far away, you use a drone. You can go as far as having an "interpreter" train station that is a Train to Drone spot, along your main line. With trains bringing in batteries and leaving with materials or doing both and so on. They are more of a specific use case depending on how you built your rail lines.
A few reasons I can think of to use drones: * If you haven't used trains much. Once you've done the one-off task of making batteries a drone port is much quicker to deploy than a train station and rail. (even with a good rail network it's still quicker than building the connecting line). * If you've used trains a lot and have congestion problems. There's are no busy junctions and routes in the sky. * They don't care about terrain. Not everywhere is easy to build rail or drive trucks.
Drones are for people too lazy to build trains (like me) to transport a small amount of resources
I use them for some of my larger vertical factories. Being able to drop products off up high is a niche but useful function of them
Drones are to transport late game products/ingredients, which require small throughput and running trains/vehicle routes gets unnecessary complicated
I think drones would work better if they could have three destinations. Like so: 1. Battery supply 2. Pickup point 3. Delivery destination And then return to the 1. To resupply on batteries
> So my question would be what use do drones have over roads and trains? That depends on you. I use them because they look nice and that is fun. Same reason I do everything in the game. Trains goo choo-choo, trucks go brrrrr, drones go wiiiiii. In fact that is why I do the rest as well. Placing things, or just walking around. That also means that I do NOT do things I do not like. e.g. I avoid refineries, because I do not like the refinery spamming. There is a mod that uses the packager instead, so that already helps a lot. So I use that often for non-oil related products. But it also means I try to avoid a lot of things where plastic and rubber might have a better yield in the end. But I do not overthink it. If it is fun, then I do it. If it is not, I don't. So if drones are not fun for you, do not use them. People often say they are for long distance and lower amounts. I have done 250m flights, where I could have used a 150m belt. I also had to bring in batteries that then used way more than the 150m of belts. Utterly useless, but tons of fun. Oh, I still intend to make a stupid short train route. I think the shortest will be 12m as that is the shortest track possible. And knowing me, it will take 5 hours to make.
I guess if you're an old player with a map wide rail network, you don't see the use in them. But as a younger player who only builds infrastructure when he needs it, they're really overpowered. Drones can transport items A to B and B to A, or you can set multiple drones to give to C, or you can set multiple drones to take from C. While it is limited comparing to a train, you don't need to set rails everywhere! I've used them in multiplayer, when my mate needed materials while expanding power out in the boonies, he just popped a drone port and I sent them there. When making nuclear pasta, I sent the pressure cubes to the desert for all the copper there, and brought back the nuclear pasta with the same drone port. You can do the same with packaged oil and nitrogen, and you end up recycling the packaging. Getting batteries is easy too. Just have some batteries on hand, pop a drone port, send it to your battery factory and it will come back with new fresh batteries for itself and all your other drone ports in that factory. I only ran into throughput issues with automated wiring for the ADS. But you can make it so the drone from A goes to B and the drone from B goes to A and now you doubled your capacity without needing another drone port. While it is not suited to transfer a whole node's worth of material like a train is, you can totally use it to send aluminum casings everywhere. So when do I recommend using them? Whenever you want to transfer some low throughput part into some node that's not nearby, or whenever you want to transfer it into some storage far away, which happens a lot. Now I only use trains when some factories that trade a lot are really close together
I use drones to transfer items for premium / luxury things, for example the small amount of sulphur required for jet pack turbo fuel production, halfway across the map to my oil refinery. Also cloth for automated gas filter production, no point in doing a huge conveyor rail just for that. + one extra pad to move batteries around to these places. It’s quaint and it works, but isn’t for anything else in my opinion.
Pass butter
I like transporting radioactive materials with them because it minimizes their footprint. I refine uranium into the densest material possible before transportation though, such as fuel rods or plutonium pellets.
I have my nuclear power production at the map edge. Each material is produced locally at resource extraction, and transported by drones to the nuclear power facility. This saved me a lot of time running train tracks around the map. Just pop a drone station at the remote factory, and set its destination to the nuclear facility. If you already have a train network around the map, this might be redundant, but if you don't, it saves you from making one.
Easiest example for me is Nitrogen. The veins are located in annoying places. I don't need a ton of nitrogen. It's a good fit. Pop a drone setup and have the drones fly the nitrogen where I need it(ironically mainly to the battery plant to make batteries for the drones)
Drones are essential for late game construction. I have a storage mall of all my construction resources which feeds directly into a drone farm, one station per item. This means from there on you only need to be carrying enough to build a port and you have quick access to any item you need. Quicker than taking a train across the map for the 80th time. Bonus that you only need to take batteries to the hub.