salvage eage mission, I think. accepted, it said it couldn't find the wreckage or something like that and canceled the mission.

for planet drop nest kill missions, it said kill one, the circle had 3 nests, and I had to kill all 3. suggest either using real number, or finishing when x are killed.

Also I dropped in the middle of a nest when I dropped from orbit. prefer maybe some kind of constructed concreted landing spot, at original spawn location or something.

All three noted — the first two are fixed in 0.9.113.

Salvage: that was a bug. The wreck site was picked once, and if the spot happened to be on ungenerated chunks the engine found no room and the accepted contract was cancelled. It now tries up to eight times and asks the engine to generate the ground first; cancelling is a last resort.

Nest clearing: also a bug, and your reading was exactly right. The required count was taken when the offer was posted, and progress was measured as "offered count minus nests still standing" — so if the hive grew between the offer and your landing, one nest on paper meant clearing all of them. The count is now snapshotted when you accept, and progress counts nests killed. Contracts already accepted fix themselves. A contract on an area that is already cleared is no longer offered.

Landing in a nest: already solvable. Build a cargo landing pad — you then land next to it, not at a random spot. So the landing site is something you choose and build; drop once wherever the pod puts you, place the pad somewhere sane, and every later drop goes there.

oh, you can place a landing pad? I assumed that was a building and thus forbidden.

side note. can you make sure it is flagged untargetable/invulnerable, since turrets are forbidden and I would be amused if biters decided to eat it.

Yes — the cargo landing pad is the one building allowed on planets, exactly because it's the anchor for your drops. Everything else stays forbidden.

On targeting: it's already safe by vanilla's own rules, on two counts. The pad emits nothing (pollution = 0, spores = 0), so it never gives nests a reason to send a wave; and it isn't a military target (is_military_target = false, same as an assembler — a gun turret is true), so units don't pick it as a target. I tested placing one right inside a nest and nothing touched it.

The only way it can take damage is a group already walking toward you smashing what's in its path, and that feels like a fair consequence rather.

good to know.

suggest adding info to tooltip or tips or w.e.

Took your suggestion — the mod now says this in three places instead of leaving you to guess.

The pad's own tooltip carries it (vanilla description kept, the note goes underneath, and the item gets it too since vanilla gives the item no description of its own). The "no building planetside" popup now names the exception outright, with the icon. And when you drop onto a planet that has no pad, you get one line saying drops land at the starting coordinates and that a pad is allowed here — once per planet, and never on a planet where a pad already stands.

release 0.9.116