Drones Explained (New Unified Combat)
Drones do the jobs you cannot do yourself. You have one pair of hands and one ship, and a drone is how you get a second gun firing, a shield rebuilt or a wreck stripped while you are busy with something else. A well stocked drone bay is worth more than a bigger gun, and it is usually cheaper.
The four bays
Combat drones break formation and go hunting whatever you have targeted. They stay on a leash, so they will never wander off across the zone and leave you uncovered. They are an escort, not a second fleet.
Mining Defence drones hold a slow ring around your hull and soak fire that was meant for you. They shoot back at anything that comes close. These are fitted to mining hulls, and they are the Extractor’s answer to only having the one gun.
Repair drones orbit you and mend you while you are being shot at. They come in three kinds for the three layers of your ship: shield, armour and hull.
Salvage drones strip wrecks on their own while you carry on fighting. They power down if they have been idle for thirty seconds.
There is also the Courier Drone, which is a different animal entirely. It takes cargo out of your hold and runs it to Commercial Storage, then it is gone. It costs you no bandwidth and it never joins the drone rows, so nothing in this guide about recall applies to it.
Bandwidth is your whole budget
Every drone in space is using some of your ship’s bandwidth, and your hull decides how much you have. The readout on the toolbar shows what you have and what is already spent. When it runs out, nothing else will launch until you recall something.
Two things fall out of that. A better drone is not free, so a bay full of Mk1s and a bay holding one Mk4 are genuinely different choices rather than one being strictly worse. And hull repair drones start dearer than the other two, because putting hull back is the hardest repair there is.
Left click launches, right click shows you the bay
What to launch first
If you are new and carrying anything at all, launch shield repair drones before anything else, and launch two. They rebuild your shields while you are being shot at, and that is the difference between a scare and a tow home. Shields are also the only layer that comes back on its own afterwards, so they are the cheapest thing on your ship to spend a fight burning through.
If you have no repair drones yet, get some. For five bandwidth a Mk1 is the single best thing a new captain can carry, and it will save you more credits in avoided repair bills than it costs.
Defence drones and the rule of three
Each defence drone pulls a quarter of incoming fire away from your hull. Two of them and half the damage aimed at you lands somewhere else. Three and it is three quarters.
That is where it stops. The protection is capped at three drones. A fourth will still fly and still shoot, but it will not soak anything more, and it is spending bandwidth you could have put into something that does.
Recall is manual, always
Every drone you have out has a row in its bay with a green recall arrow. Press it and that drone comes home to your inventory and gives you its bandwidth back. Nothing does this for you. Not leaving the field, not the end of a fight, not docking. Get into the habit now, while you are only losing Mk1s.
Recalling and relaunching also pays the normal deploy cooldown, so you cannot pull a combat drone off a target across the zone and drop it back on your hull instantly. Recall is a way home, not a teleport.
When a drone will not come home
Combat and defence drones take fire, because pirates shoot back at things that shoot them. A damaged drone shows a red no entry mark where the green arrow should be, and it cannot be recalled yet.
They mend themselves at about two percent of their health per second, but only once nothing has shot at you for ten seconds. That number is deliberate. It is long enough that you cannot top a drone up between two passes of the same pirate, and short enough that a captain who has genuinely broken off is not left staring at a bar wondering if it is broken.
So a hurt drone leaves you two choices. Sit still somewhere quiet and wait for it, or go without it.
Repair and salvage drones are never targeted by anything, so their recall arrow is never blocked. That buys them “no waiting”. It does not buy them “comes home on its own”. They still need pressing.
The mistake that costs Captains
Fly out of the zone with a drone still deployed and it is gone. You lose contact with it and it self-destructs. There is no warning, there is no grace period, and it applies to all four bays equally.
This is the one that catches experienced captains, not new ones. New captains are nervous and check everything. Experienced captains finish a good run, see a full hold, and hit exit while three Mk3s are still out there earning.
Mind the Red X
Next to each drone’s recall arrow there is a red X. That is not recall. That scuttles the drone and destroys it. It is there on purpose, for when a drone is too damaged to wait for. But it sits right beside the arrow that saves your drone, so look at what you are clicking.
The short version
– Watch the bandwidth readout. It is the only limit that matters.
– Right click to see what you actually own before you spend it.
– Defence drone protection stops improving after three.
– Damaged combat and defence drones need ten quiet seconds before they start mending.
– Recall everything before you exit. Nothing does it for you and there is no warning.
– Shield repair drones first, always, and two of them.
– Watch the bandwidth readout. It is the only limit that matters.
– Right click to see what you actually own before you spend it.
– Defence drone protection stops improving after three.
– Damaged combat and defence drones need ten quiet seconds before they start mending.
– Recall everything before you exit. Nothing does it for you and there is no warning.