Every job in your base carries a priority of 1 to 9, the way an errand does for a Duplicant
in Oxygen Not Included. Drones do the highest priority first, and the nearest job within it.
Mark the wall repairs 9 and the smelter expansion 2, and the wall gets fixed while the
smelter waits.

How it works

Factorio does not let a mod decide what a robot does next — job dispatch and pathfinding
live in the engine and are not exposed to Lua. So this mod brings its own drones and
retires both kinds of vanilla robot. The construction robot item places a construction
drone, the logistic robot item places a logistics drone, and each mines back into the item
it came from. Recipes and research are untouched: you unlock and craft robots exactly as
you always did, and get drones.

Roboports become Bays — the same construction and logistic coverage, the same network,
and room inside for drones as ordinary items. An idle drone flies home and docks, and the
doors open when one docks or deploys. Logistic chests are untouched, and so is the logistic
network itself: it is still how a job finds the materials it needs.

Setting priorities

Take the priority selection tool from the shortcut bar. Left-drag applies the priority
in the picker, right-drag resets to 5, and while the tool is in your hand every job in range
wears its current priority as a number painted over it. /pbot-priority <1-9> [radius] does
the same to a circle around you when a drag is too fiddly.

What the drones do

Seven kinds of work, all queued and prioritised together:

• ghosts, deconstruction orders, upgrade orders and cliffs
• damaged entities, repaired once the shooting stops
• the module requests a blueprint leaves behind
• requester and buffer chests that have gone short of what they asked for

Deliveries work: a logistics drone brings a chest the difference between what it asked for
and what is standing in it, a payload at a time. So does the verb backwards — draining an
active provider chest into storage, and emptying a character's trash slots. So does personal
logistics, for a character and for a spidertron, and a player who walks off mid-delivery is
followed rather than delivered to where they were standing.

Materials come from the logistic network. A job whose item nothing can supply leaves the
queue and waits, filed under that item, until a chest holds it again — rather than sending a
drone on an errand it cannot finish. Drones follow worker-robots-speed and
worker-robots-storage research, up to the four trunk slots the chassis has, and alt-mode
draws what a drone is carrying over the drone carrying it.

One setting

How long a drone hovers where it finished before it flies home. Nearly every other number
in the mod is the number vanilla uses — the payload, the flying speed, the repair rate — and
a dial on one of those would only be a way of making the mod quietly disagree with the game
it is imitating. The idle window is the exception because vanilla has no such window at all;
this one was picked by watching the fleet, which is a judgement you are as entitled to make
as I am.

Commands

/pbot-status for what the mod thinks is going on, /pbot-scan to register work that
already exists (the thing to try if something is not being picked up), /pbot-tool for the
selection tool, and /pbot-probe, /pbot-verify and /pbot-references for bug reports.
All plain commands — none of them disables achievements.

Before you install

• English only. No other locales yet.
• Single-player and single-force. Neither multiplayer nor a second force has been tested.
• Nothing has been run alongside another mod that adds a robot or a roboport. Expect a
  fight if you try.
• Vanilla robots already flying in an old save keep flying and do nothing. Only crafting
  new ones stops.
• Drones are minable, so they are deconstructable. A deconstruction planner dragged over
  your own fleet has the drones dismantle each other — handy for packing up, easy to do by
  accident.
• Mod state is disposable. An update may reset the fleet and the job queue rather than
  migrating them; /pbot-scan builds the queue back.

Bug reports and questions go to the issue tracker.
/pbot-status pasted into one is worth a paragraph of description. The
repository carries the design decisions and
why the rejected alternatives were rejected, if you want to know why it works the way it does.

Factorio is copyright Wube Software Ltd. This mod ships no artwork — every sprite you see is
the game's own.