Drone Chargers

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What is this mod?

Have you ever thought about the fact that batteries when used by Drones can't be recharged? You probably did. Even more, in some languages "Battery" is translated as "Accumulator" meaning that they can be recharged by definition. The long awaited solution for battery chargers is here! Recharge exausted batteries with energy from your power grid!

At Tier 8 there is a new milestone - Drone Recharging Semi-Automation. It grants access to Drone Chargers.

It is a module you need to plug into your Drone Port, providing it with new functionality:

• Whenever docked Drone consumes batteries, they get pushed into the Port's Drone Charger. So, yes, you still need to provide initial amount of batteries to the Port on your own. Note: There is no discarged battery item, if you try dismantling Drone Charger while it still has batteries to recharge in it, you will lose them.
• While Drone Charger recharges batteries it consumes 10000 MW of power.
• Recharge rate is based on Energy Value of the item. Recharge rate is 1000 MJ/s. So since Batteries in vanilla have Energy Value of 6000 MJ, one will need 6 seconds to get back into Drone Port's fuel inventory. So, Battery Charge rate is 10/min.
• In addition these things may cause you lose not recharged batteries:
• Dismantling a connected Drone Port.
• Swapping one battery fuel type to another (won't happen on standalone since Battery is the only battery-like item in the game).
• For relevant info on Drone Charger's work you can interact with it to find out more about current recharge progress or if there are any issues present which prevent the building from working as expected.

TLDR: Build Drone Charger by snapping it to Drone Port and put a reasonable amount of batteries into the port's fuel inventory slot. After a Drone consumes them, they will return back into that slot over time.

What is the point of such complications for a single in-game item?

That is the point, it is meant to work with other mods which add battery-like Drone fuels!

For developers: If you wish your Drone fuel be considered a battery, use Content Tags. Add an Item.Battery tag to your corresponding item descriptor and the item will get recognized by the mod.

Lithium mod has been updated for its Lithium Battery and Versatile Accumulator items be considered as batterries so they can get recharged by Drone Charger.

Compatibility

The mod is most likely fully compatible with other mods and multiplayer. If issues occur, report them.

In addidion, Drone Charger is designed to be compatible with modded Drone Ports which have an input conveyor connection which is internally tagged as a Fuel one.

Recommended Mods

Lithium: The mod made by me which adds two more battery items! Drone Chargers mod was originally meant to be a part of this one, but I decided to make it a standalone. Even though Lithium will alter Drone Charger's recipe and put it into one of its own schematics.

Drone Ports Plus: The mod made by me which enhances Drone Port UI. I haven't made it a part of this mod either due to different natures of those two.

Conclusion

If you have any suggestions, ideas or issues you are free to contact me via:

• GitHub (Source code link).
• Discord (@AniMouse), I am on Satisfactory Modding Server and Ficsit Labs.
• Any of my other social media [under maintainance].

Thanks for reading through all of this!