Drone Priority

[ember swan]

Drones need to have settable priorities. This needs to be a function of the drone controllers that incentivizes players to leave them powered on(when off they have default priorities of whatever garbage they do right now). If you have 3 possible options you could have a radial button that sets one of the special ones to the highest priority, the second special one to medium priority, and default behavior to bottom priority.

Regular Drones need to be able to prioritize construction, repair and default.
Hauling drones need to be able to prioritize cleaning up, moving stacks(specifically instead of just one item at a time when dozens of machines need stacks of available resources🤬 ) and default.
Mining drones need to be able to move one item but also prioritize mining megalith, basalt or default.

Maybe make these upgrades accessed through the tech tree and cost money just like upgrading everything else to higher tiers. Then you can also provide alerts that drones are complete with their highest priority behavior. Green alerts tell you they are done with highest priority, yellow with medium priority, and red is that they are doing nothing.

[tight tulip]

we do need drone priority, but specialized one should not be able to do general task.
but they should be able to get priority in their specific field.

[elfin marsh]

Yeah, it is really bothering that you need to deliver 20 units, 15 are delivered one by one by regular drone and then the remaining 5 by a hauler drone 🤣

It is really important for hauler drones to be able to distinguish between delivering material for contracts or buildings / picking up material from pods / surface / delivering materials to factories. In theory, this can be at least partially driven by building priorities and it might work well for contracts (landing pad, FCC), but boy ! how often I can see ice/regolith delivery to low priority storage while material pods are sitting untouched on the surface.... The pods issue in general might get sorted out with the planned FCC upgrade, but it does not solve the early game, where there is low research, low money and even low drones - but those are the only ones to do the job, actually.