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Drone Miners

A Drone Miner is a ship module that does the mining loop for you. Instead of holding the beam yourself, you deploy an autonomous drone that flies out to a nearby asteroid, mines it, and hauls the ore back to your ship's ore hold while you do something else.

The drone is a real little ship, a lit copper craft, that everyone near the belt can see flying between the rocks. It's an AFK convenience, not a speed-up: a single drone mines slower than holding the beam by hand. The value is that it runs while your hands are free.

What it is

The module installs on a ship as a drone bay (a Lodestone block, the "Mining Drone Bay"). Each bay you install is its own unit: one bay deploys one drone, and the bay's tier sets that drone's reach and mining rate.

A deployed drone:

Flies from your ship to the nearest asteroid within its tier's range
Holds station off the rock's surface and mines on a timer
Deposits ore into your ship's ore hold (same hold the hand laser fills)
Rock-hops to the next asteroid when one is mined out
Returns home and recalls itself once the whole area is dry

How to use it

Fly your ship into space, near an asteroid belt.
Right-click the drone bay block to deploy. The drone lifts off and heads for the nearest rock in range.
Right-click the same block again to recall it.

The bay block shows its live status as a floating label: deploying, in transit, mining (with a running ore count), or idle. If you right-click and there's no belt in range, you get a chat message telling you to fly closer.

Rules and limits of the loop

Online only. A drone runs only while you (the owner who deployed it) are online and piloting the parent ship in space. Log out and it recalls.
Burns Drive Cells. AFK mining isn't free: each ore pull consumes Drive Cells (ammo.drive_cell) from your ship's general hold: 2 for a Mk I, 3 for a Mk II, 4 for a Mk III (see the tier table). The burn is more cells than ore yielded, by design. If the general hold runs out, the drone pauses (it parks, no ore lost) and resumes the moment you restock.
Normal space only. Drones can't deploy inside a wormhole pocket or rift; those are fast hand-mining spaces. Try to launch in one and you're told to mine by hand instead.
Slower than hand-mining. Per-drone rate stays under a hand laser by design. To mine faster, deploy several drones at once (within your hull's cap, below), not to replace active mining.
Auto-recall on relocate. If the parent ship moves more than 120 blocks from where you deployed, the drone flies home and despawns. Park, deploy, mine the local cluster, move, redeploy.
Auto-recall on dock / death / loss. Docking, ship destruction, or the bay itself being shot off all retire the drone so it never orphans in space.
Server restart recalls every drone (the loop is live-only, not saved); just redeploy after a restart.
Full hold. If the ore hold fills, the drone parks and stops mining (it won't lose ore); empty or expand the hold and it resumes.

Tiers

There are three drone-bay tiers. Higher tiers reach farther and mine faster (shorter pull interval and more ore per pull):

Tier	Module	Range	Pull interval	Ore per pull	Drive Cells per pull	Buy price
Mk I	`module.drone_miner_t1`	350 blocks	8 s	1	2	15,000 cr
Mk II	`module.drone_miner_t2`	600 blocks	6.5 s	2	3	35,000 cr
Mk III	`module.drone_miner_t3`	900 blocks	5.5 s	3	4	75,000 cr

Range is the operating radius around your parked ship: a Mk I sweeps a local cluster of a few rocks, a Mk III covers a whole belt. Drone transit speed is 45 blocks/sec across all tiers.

The ore a drone pulls is whatever the rock yields in that zone, so the same zone gates apply as hand mining: deeper zones mean better ore and a higher yield multiplier (see Mining). Drones also roll the same secondary drops as hand-mining (silica, flux, and NULL-only tritanium), so AFK mining no longer misses them. Those land in the general hold, so keep room there alongside your Drive Cells.

Per-hull-class limits

How many drones you can run at once depends on the hull class flying them. Big capital hulls can't run any; drone mining is a small/medium-ship activity:

Hull class	Max drones
Frigate	4
Destroyer	4
Cruiser	8
Battlecruiser	0
Colossal	0

The drone bay module itself installs on any ship (minimum hull class Frigate), but a Battlecruiser or Colossal won't deploy from it. Run your mining on a Cruiser-or-smaller and bring the capital for something else.

How to get one

Drone bays are both craftable and vendor-bought.

Buy from a module vendor for credits (the convenience price); the per-tier price is the Buy price column in the Tiers table above.

Craft at a fabricator if you'd rather build it from refined materials. The recipes climb the fabrication web: refined metals plus components like circuit boards, magnetic coils, and focusing lenses. See each drone bay's item page in the Crafting wiki for its exact, up-to-date recipe and build time.

See Fabrication for the full component tree, and the Crafting wiki for the bootstrap chain on any input.

Risk note

A drone loop is AFK by definition: you're parked and not watching the screen. That's fine in safe zones, but doing it in pirate or PvP space is risky: pirates will close on your parked ship, and in NULL (Wild Drift) another player can simply kill you while you're tabbed out. The deeper-zone payoff is real, but if you're going to walk away, do it where the lanes are patrolled, or keep one eye on the screen.