🛸 WePlay: Radar Probe Drone Launcher

It's scary out there. You sit, we scan. 📡

Tired of driving into the fog to see what's out there? Build a launch pad, load it with survey drones, and let them do the scouting. Each drone flies out to the nearest uncharted land, lands, and deploys into a radar probe that slowly sweeps the area before shutting down. It's an early-game alternative to scouting by car! 🚗➡️🛸

✨ Features

• 🏗️ Drone Launcher: a 5×5 launch pad. Feed it drones with inserters and it launches one every 30 seconds.
• ✈️ Survey Drones: one-way scouts that fly toward the nearest uncharted land, spreading out so they don't scout the same spot twice.
• 📡 Survey Probes: when a drone lands, it deploys into a probe with a spinning dish that sweeps an 8-chunk radius (256 tiles) over a few minutes, then powers down.
• 🛟 Survey Buoys: land on water? The probe inflates a raft and scans from there. Great for ocean-heavy planets!
• 🔁 Never idle: once everything in range is charted, drones keep flying out to refresh the map, so there's always something in the air.
• 🗺️ Map links: every finished sweep posts a clickable map location in chat.
• 👾 Watch out: probes are your structures, so biters may come knocking.
• 🪐 Works on every planet.

🔬 Research

Drones start with a 1,024-tile range.

🛠️ Recipes

• Survey Drone: 1 radar, 1 engine unit, 4 steel plates, 4 electronic circuits
• Drone Launcher: 50 steel plates, 50 stone bricks, 20 electronic circuits, 10 engine units, 4 radars

⚙️ Mod Settings

Startup
- ⏱️ Launch interval: seconds between launches (default 30)
- 📏 Drone base range: default 1,024 tiles
- 📈 First range research bonus: default 1,024 tiles; each later level doubles it

Map (change anytime)
- 💨 Drone flight speed: default 30 tiles/s. Lower it to watch them fly!
- 👀 Show drones on the map: drone icons in map view plus a narrow charted trail along each flight path, so you can follow a drone from launch to landing
- 🎯 Landing mode:
- Nudge (default): bad landings slide to the nearest valid spot
- Fail: landing on lava, cliffs or buildings destroys the drone 💥
- Risky: nudges, but with a random chance of malfunction 🎲
- 🎲 Risky failure chance: default 10%
- 💬 Announce finished probes: turn the chat messages on or off

📦 Compatibility

• Requires Factorio 2.1
• Space Age is not required, but drones and buoys work great on the new planets 🌍⚡🌋🌿❄️

💛 Credits

Part of the WePlay mod collection. Bug reports and ideas are welcome in the discussion tab! 🐛✨

✈️ Want more planes?

Can't get enough of watching drones take off? 🛫 Check out WePlay: Long Haul Logistics Drones for even more planes zooming around your factory! 💛

🏭 More from WePlay

Like what you see? Find the rest of the WePlay collection on my mod portal page. Turrets, buildings, quality-of-life mods and more! 🎀✨