How to Use Drones Effectively in The Planet Crafter!

Drones are an amazing automation tool in The Planet Crafter when you unlock the Drone Station. I personally find them super satisfying to get functioning. But they have a few quirks and nuances that if you understand will allow you to better leverage them, especially as you start really scaling up the size of your outfit.
Most notably when you have a ton of extractors you may find resources piled up in them even though your demand containers aren't full. I'll explain how to deal with this.

[@O_Obsidious]

love this system so much its so satisfying figuring everything out and realizing that you can compress most materials into rods using autocrafters and become rich like a goat lol

[@sigCrafts]

yea it's been so cool playing with this, it scratches the productiony/logistics itch but without being too mathy

[@stevenschlatter7497]

how do you deconstruct Tier 1 drones? I only want Tier 2 drones, thanks for the video, very helpful. I am really enjoying the game

[@iyaahn]

thanks this has been helpful x

[@sigCrafts]

glad it helped!

[@dabeamer42]

Very helpful. I kinda thought the food and algae worked that way (i.e. drones will pull from them even if they're not specifically set as supply), but I couldn't find anything to verify that. I just set up some farms and algae extractors, and suddenly I had big lockers full of them.

[@sigCrafts]

yea Im glad they did it that way since you can't otherwise set anything for them.

[@bixbysnyder-00]

You have the option to 'supply or demand' on farms, but not for algae. Algae is automatically brought to a demand source. Regardless of distance to an autocrafter, just would need a demand chest for algae nearby. Farms and food growers do have a supply and demand option so I use those just to be safe.

[@theiran]

So, if I build an auto crafter in a lake and surround it with algae generators, I can have it constantly produce bacteria, which the drones could take to storage and rockets to be sold?

[@sigCrafts]

yes! in fact that's a great way to start with token farming and one of the first things I did as well. Plop an auto crafter in the lake surrounded by water collectors & algae generators. Eventually you can start pulling in sulfur & eggplant to get fertilizer, and so on so forth...