Synthetic Swarm
Spawnable Drone Swarm Factories
The self-replicating robot swarm is upon us! Who built all those factories? They appear to grow stronger every second! How will we stop them? Could we make use of that technology to fight back? So many questions and so little time… Get back to work!
Huge thanks to Ethanol for the Drones and Factory models.
SPAWNABLES
– Drones Factory (autonomous): A fully automatic factory producing Enemy Drones on its own.
– Drones Factory (player-controlled): A manual factory where you can pick what Friendly Drones to produce and when.
– Drones Mini Factory (autonomous): Same as above, but 4x smaller.
– Drones Mini Factory (player-controlled): Same as above, but 4x smaller.
(see each drone characteristics below)
– Enemy Fighter Drone MK1.
– Enemy Fighter Drone MK2.
– Enemy Fighter Drone MK3.
– Enemy Miner Drone MK1.
– Enemy Miner Drone MK2.
– Enemy Miner Drone MK3.
– Friendly Fighter Drone MK1.
– Friendly Fighter Drone MK2.
– Friendly Fighter Drone MK3.
– Friendly Miner Drone MK1.
– Friendly Miner Drone MK2.
– Friendly Miner Drone MK3.
KEYBOARD CONTROLS
– [1]: Build Miner Drone MK1
– [2]: Build Fighter Drone MK1
– [3]: Build Miner Drone MK2
– [4]: Build Fighter Drone MK2
– [5]: Build Miner Drone MK3
– [6]: Build Fighter Drone MK3
– [7]: Enable/Disable auto-build
CHARACTERISTICS
– Energy shields can only be damaged by regular bullets or rockets/explosions because of a limitation of the current modding API (any weapon using MakeHole() for damages won’t work on them), hopefully a game update will let me detect those too one day…
– A Drone Factory will slowly produce voxels and build Drones out of it when it has enough.
– A Factory produces 2 types of Drones:
— Miner Drones: Will drill voxels from the land and bring them back to the Factory.
— Fighter Drones: Will defend the Factory and Drones from threats.
– Two types of Factory can be found in the spawn menu:
— Autonomous Factory: Will produce Enemy Drones automatically.
— Player-controlled Factory: Player can chose when and what type of Friendly Drone to produce.
– Only Fighter Drones produced by an Autonomous Factory will attack the player.
– A Drone Factory is protected by an energy shield making it invulnerable until it is broken.
– The Factory energy shield will recharge faster based on the number and level of drones it has.
– When a Factory is destroyed, it will implode into a black hole and all of its Drones will shutdown.
– Miner Drones can be produced at 3 different levels:
— Miner Drone MK1: Can drill only soft materials.
— Miner Drone MK2: Can drill up to medium materials.
— Miner Drone MK3: Can drill up to hard materials.
– Fighter Drones can be produced at 3 different levels:
— Fighter Drone MK1: Will attack using bullets.
— Fighter Drone MK2: Will attack using rockets.
— Fighter Drone MK3: Will attack using laser.
– A Drone is protected by an energy shield making it invulnerable until it is broken.
– Drones of higher level have a stronger energy shield.
– Miner Drones of higher level can carry more voxels.
– Fighter Drones will select their targets based on their threat level.
– Fighter Drones will consider other Factories and the Drones they produced as enemies.
– Friendly Drones spawned by the player will act as their own faction (attaching any other Drone or Factory but not each other).
– Enemy Drones spawned by the player will act as their own faction (attaching any other Drone or Factory or player but not each other).
– Miner Drones spawned by the player will drill any voxel they find and discard their cargo when it’s full.
– Friendly Fighter Drones spawned by the player will patrol near the player.
KNOWN BUGS
– Digging holes into a Factory can be quite laggy (might be optimized in the future).
– Destroying a Factory lags a lot: that’s what the black hole implosion is for, wait a little and it will clear the Factory debris.
– Drones may look like they are stuck doing nothing: they should get unstuck after some time passes.
– Fighter Drones may stop attacking a target before it is completely dead.
– Miner Drones may fail to drill some materials: they will not attempt to drill it twice though.
DEV NOTES
Description was too long, so I moved it here
