I tried this compared to the "Companion Drones for 2.0 WIP" by kubiix to see what you added, but the detractors I immediately encountered were so severe I had to revert back.

• One, the challenge mode version borders on useless. It's so tragically slow that it's literally faster to go mine rocks and pick stuff up. So I turned that off. Not a bug, just...it moved in a direction I didn't like.

• The big one is that the drones no longer unload when they fill up. As long as there's stuff to mine, they'll go out there and...then just sit there doing nothing. Clearing the opening zone on Vulcanus means basically following the drone around and clearing its inventory every few seconds.

• Off challenge mode, loading up one drone with 4 roboports (which I usually do on vulcanus start, or when I'm building) gives it so obscenely many contact points with such huge range that the UPS instantly tanks. Combined with the aforementioned getting stuck when the inventory fills up, and you have a bot that is immediately nonfunctional.

• In the mod setup options there's two mode toggles, one for 1-3, and another for "enable hard mode", which presumably the 1-3 already covers. It's unclear which one actually does this.

I'm not sure why you appear to be having unique issues that no one else seems to be having.

"The Big One" in particular is absolutely not normal behavior and that works perfectly fine on my machine, and likely also works on the other nine thousand downloads. And I have played extensively both with and without challenge mode. I use this mod in my own regular playthroughs. It should automatically return to the player to dump its inventory when it starts getting full. If it is not, then you have a bug. Have you tried disabling all other mods to check for conflicts?

As for adding 4 roboports... how about you just don't? If doing so adds an "obscene" number of contacts and range, then you don't NEED four roboports--1 is already fairly powerful and 2 or 3 should be more than enough. Try adjusting your behavior instead of proceeding with old-version assumptions and thinking the mod is wrong because now it behaves differently.

Oh and on challenge mode being useless... If you loaded a save, watched the bot for five minutes, then wrote it off, then yeah it seems pathetic. This is by design. It's supposed to be kinda crappy when you first start, because you literally just wrecked your ship--you're lucky the drone still even works. But I made the bot upgrade very soon and very fast because of this. Just research a few technologies and it should be much better very soon. For example, researching electronics will double its default travel speed, and then researching automobilism will nearly double it again. If you didn't want it to start out slow and crappy, then don't enable the mode that makes it start out slow and crappy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Finally, the two toggles, that's just something I forgot about and never bothered fixing. The checkbox does nothing. The number controls everything.