Drones

“Man's best friend, the Daedalus. This drone can perform many tasks for you as well as actions similar to those of your crewmates. The Support drone allows you to complete the automated maintenance objective on Magellan; thanks to its Beta-Slave protocol, it can almost replace a real human being. Except for doing it.”

These onboard utility robots designed by Terrence assist the crew.

• They each have a name chosen at random, followed by a number to make duplicates unlikely.
• Essentially, they perform one action per cycle: attempt one of their skills if possible in the room, otherwise it will move to a random neighboring room.
• They start with the same success rate as a human without skills, with the same progress in case of failure. However, unlike humans, their success rate does not decrease after a failure and eventually reaches 99%.
• Each task has a distinct success: repairing, extinguishing, or shooting a hunter.

We can pick them up to move them or to protect them.

• Being in inventory does not prevent them from acting or moving.
• They can break in a fire or electrical overload, but not spontaneously nor can they be sabotaged.

Creation

There is a drone that appears in the Front Corridor at the start of the game.

The NERON Drone additional support project adds one to the Nexus.

3:pa: Assemble is possible thanks to the Plan starting from 1 Plastic Debris and 4 Metal Debris.  

• A copy may be on board or obtained by contacting Xyloph.
• One copy received by each Robotics character . Usually only Terrence, but also possible via Mage Book, Stephen 's Apprentice; and repeatable by resetting skills during a Transfer or by vaccinating a Mush with Retro-fungal Serum.    

Improvements

2:pa: Improve is available for any character with Robotics .

• Anyone can see what improvements are installed on the drones by examining them.
• You need to give the drone 2 × Metal Debris to give it a new skill from among:

Skill	Description
(Technician) Basic	“Try to repair the faulty equipment in the room before moving on.” Objects and equipment, in their order of creation. They can repair hidden or personal objects, revealing their presence but without making them visible.
Pilot	“Attempt to borrow a patrol ship and destroy all the hunters before moving. Has a 20% aiming bonus compared to humans.” See details in the following section
Firefighter	“Try to extinguish any fires in the room before moving. Also, become fireproof.” No longer at risk of breaking in a fire.
Turbo	“80% chance of acting a second time in each cycle.” Independent of the first. Not to be attempted a third time or more. Note : Any movement counts as an action for drones: changing parts, repairing or testing, taking off as a patrol drone, firing at a Hunter...
Sensor	“Intelligently heads towards the fire, broken equipment, or nearest patrol vehicle instead of moving randomly.” See details in the following section

Order of priority of actions: Turn off > Repair > Take off > Fire > Land > Move

Detailed operation

Drones perform one action per cycle by default: attempt one of their skills if possible in the room, otherwise move to a neighboring room at random.

They have three counters for the number of times they have failed to repair, turn off and pull .

• These three actions earn a multiplicative bonus of, X, for each failed attempt - with a maximum of 99%.
• Training for one action does not increase the success rate of another action.Therefore:
  • Only 4 failures are needed to reach 99% on fire extinguishing.
  • For repairs, it naturally depends on the base repair rate of the items:

Base repair percentage	50%	25%	12%	6%	3%	1%
Number of failures required	4	7	10	13	16	21

So, it is beneficial to "train" the drone on easy repairs so that it is more efficient later on.

• Drones have a 20% bonus to fire. They therefore start at 48%, instead of 40%.

since v0.25, drones are no longer buggy and have significantly improved their shooting capabilities

Sensor-Based Movement

For sensors, the priority order is Fires > Repairs > Hunters > Random Movement .  

• You obviously need to have the corresponding upgrades (and there need to be hunters outside if you're a Pilot).
• Next, the drone heads towards the nearest target. In case of a tie, it's not random; it uses the gate order defined in the game files. Therefore, if both front turrets are destroyed and the drone is at the bridge, it will see the one in Alpha first and go towards it.

Behavior if Pilot

The drones that pilot:

• They use an action to take off (or return on board if there are no more hunters).
• They fire twice per action (so 4 times with Turbo).
• They automatically return to the board when the Daedalus moves, even without a magnetic net!