Early Drones Logistics

A factory without belts or drills.

Flying drones mine your ore patches and carry goods straight over the terrain — no belt spaghetti, no inserter chains. You pay for it in fuel, and later in electricity.

This mod replaces transport belts, mining drills and most inserters. It deliberately leaves the vanilla logistic network alone: roboports and bots still do what they always did.

How it works Mining Depot — place it next to an ore patch, add coal and drones. Mining drones bring ore back, transport drones move it onward. No drills.

Storage Pallet — a 2×2 container with 500 slots that holds a single item type. Each resource gets its own pallet, and the mod shares them out so one ore cannot claim them all.

Transport Station — two ways to work:

Area mode: the station finds donor and receiver pairs on its own, in both directions. Containers feed your furnaces, and furnaces hand finished plates back to containers. Point to point: pick a source, pick a target, pick an item. The drone flies that route and ignores everything else. Fuel Station — keeps every station and every vanilla burner machine in range stocked with fuel. It burns from the same supply it delivers, so nothing has to refuel it. One pallet of coal can power a whole base.

Tier 2: electric Researching Electric Drones unlocks electric versions of the Mining Depot and Transport Station. They are faster and carry more, but they draw power from the grid and their drones must stay within reach of your poles — at most 40 tiles between poles along a route.

Your factory graduates from fuel logistics to power logistics rather than getting the same thing twice.

Press ALT+Q to see station ranges and live drone routes. Type /drone_coverage 20 to see exactly where tier 2 drones can fly before you build anything.

Tier 3: long range and fluids Long Range Drones unlocks the third tier of both stations, plus two new things.

Tier 3 drones may stray 40 tiles from the network, twice as far as tier 2, so a single trunk line of big poles is enough to reach a distant outpost.

Fluid Station — hauls liquids with no pipes at all. It has no pipe connections and stores nothing: tanker drones draw straight out of storage tanks and machine outputs, and pour straight into whatever needs it. The station only decides which trip is worth making.

Fluids follow the same rules as items, so there is no second set to learn. A storage tank is the fluid equivalent of a chest and can both give and receive. A machine gives only from its outputs and takes only into its inputs, so nothing raids a machine's own feedstock. Tank to tank is refused in area mode — with the same fluid and room in both, a run either way scores identically and drones would pour it back and forth forever.

For exactly that case there is a fixed route: point the station at one sender and one receiver and it hauls between those two and nothing else. Tank to tank is allowed there, because you set the direction. That is how you get crude from a remote oil field back to base.

One thing worth knowing before you build: a vanilla machine holds only 100 units inside it while a tanker carries 1000, so put a storage tank before the machine and another after it, and point the station at the tanks. The station tells you this itself if you point it straight at a refinery.

Drones follow your power line Electric drones do not fly straight at their target. They route along the network, hopping from pole to pole, so one line of poles between two bases is enough — you never have to scatter poles across the map just so drones can travel. A station that cannot make a trip marks whichever end is off the network, or tells you the two ends sit on networks that are not joined.

What it costs Drones are not free throughput. A trip burns the same energy whether the drone is full or nearly empty, so the mod refuses pointless short hauls, and every station has a real running cost.

At tier 1 a mining drone costs about 400 kJ per ore — cheaper than a burner drill, noticeably more expensive than an electric one. You are buying the freedom to skip belts, not free resources.

Notes Furnaces only receive ingredients of the recipe they are already smelting, so the mod can never quietly switch your factory to a different product. Three settings let you turn off exhaust trails, cargo icons, and fade the drones themselves — a factory running thousands of them can otherwise hide underneath them. Full English and Polish translation. Settings on your buildings survive mod updates. Bug reports and balance feedback are very welcome — this mod has been played, but by one person with one playstyle.