Drone Launcher

Details

It does not stack, so every spare copy costs an inventory slot. At 8,094,050 gold it is worth real money to a merchant.

Drone Launcher Crafting Recipe

Paloxite Ingot×140

World Tree Holy Water×80

AI Core×16

Ancient Civilization Core×10

Ancient Civilization Parts×10

What it really costs, once every sub-recipe is expanded

Wood×3,200Ore×1,520Pure Quartz×640Coal×576Crude Oil×480Soralite×460Flame Organ×448High Quality Pal Oil×320Paloxite×280Sulfur×224World Tree Holy Water×220Electric Organ×160Chromite×64Hexolite Quartz×64Venom Gland×64Ancient Civilization Core×26Ancient Civilization Parts×10

Crafting it takes 256 materials across 5 types.

Where to Find Drone Launcher

The recipe is not on the Technology tree — it is locked behind a schematic you have to find first. The best single source is fishing in the World Tree at 0.4% per container, and the table below lists every tier and where each one drops.

Using Drone Launcher Well

Nothing loads into it. Every other launcher in the game is tied to a crafted round — Beam Launcher Ammo, Rocket Ammo, Plasma Cartridge, Tactical Grenade Launcher Ammo — and this one's weapon blueprint carries no bullet entry at all, which is why the panel above shows no magazine and there is no ammunition table on this page. What it sends out instead are drones, up to nine airborne at once, picking targets on their own. Firing it costs nothing and never runs you dry mid-fight, and at 5 weight against the 30 every other launcher carries (50 for the Plasma Cannon) it is the only one you can keep slung without thinking about your carry limit.

Do not read the 240 attack against the Rocket Launcher's 14,000 or the Beam Launcher's 16,800. The game files put this weapon in the melee class — its blueprint hands the drone off through the same slot a sword uses for its blade — so it is ranked here beside Katanas and Laser Swords rather than beside launchers, and its damage arrives as sustained fire from up to nine units instead of one shot. That 240 is real for comparing one rarity of Drone Launcher against another and worthless for comparing it against anything else; the file simply does not hold a number that would make that second comparison.

Materials scale in a straight line with one exception. The Legendary is exactly double the tech-tree build on the bulk goods — 140 Paloxite Ingot, 80 World Tree Holy Water and 16 AI Core against 70, 40 and 8 — and asks 10 Ancient Civilization Cores against 5. The exception is Ancient Civilization Parts: the tech-tree version needs none, while the four schematic tiers want 7, 8, 9 and 10, so the boss-farmed material is the only wall the base build lets you walk around. Every rarity goes together at the Ancient Workbench, which arrives at level 67 for 50 Soralite Ingot, 5 AI Core and 20 Bio Battery and draws 2,000 power. That timing is worth knowing: research does not offer the plain Drone Launcher until level 77 for 4 points, so a schematic that turns up early gets you a better one ten levels ahead of the tree.

The rarity ladder buys durability, not damage. Attack goes 200, 210, 220, 230, 240 — twenty per cent across the whole climb — while durability goes 6,500, 9,750, 13,000, 19,500, 26,000, four times the base, and only the Plasma Rifle, Combat SMG and Laser Gatling Gun lines hold more. What you actually pay is bench time: 3,500,000 work for the tech-tree version against 112,000,000 for the Legendary, doubling at every step, and 112,000,000 is the ceiling for the entire game, shared with nine other Legendary Ancient-bench pieces. Put the other way, the plain version is a thirty-second of the labour for 83% of the attack, so the Legendary is a purchase of uptime between rebuilds rather than of killing power.

Relic grade makes no difference to your schematic odds. All five World Tree relics feed the recycler, and the schematic pool inside it is identical in all five tables: 28 entries covering seven Ancient gear families, 700 weight between them, of which the Drone Launcher's four tiers hold exactly 100, split 80 / 16 / 3 / 1 from Schematic 1 up to Schematic 4. Recycling a Glistening relic is no likelier to return the Legendary tier than recycling a Decayed one — the only thing the top grade adds is a separate pool of Pal passive-change consumables. Feed the machine whichever relic you have most of and bank the good ones for something else.

Count the fusions before you pick a route. Five copies of a tier make one of the next at the drafting table, so 125 Schematic 1s are worth one Schematic 4, and that 80 / 16 / 3 / 1 spread cashes out at roughly 2.9 Legendary copies for every 100 Drone Launcher schematics the recycler hands back — about 35 pulls of the family per finished weapon, whatever tiers they arrive in. Against that, the two fishing pools inside the World Tree are worth telling apart: ordinary water carries Schematic 4 as 0.14% of its loot roll, while the treasure spots, despite being the higher-grade pool, carry it at 0.08%, so the fancier fishing hole is the worse one for this specific hunt. A tier 5 treasure map dig is the best single roll of the three at 0.15%, but the map has to be found first, and the same dig cannot give you Schematic 1 at all.

Every Tier of Drone Launcher

The same piece exists at 5 rarities, and the gap is not cosmetic: attack runs 200 to 240, a 1.2x swing. Which one you end up with is decided by the rarity of the schematic you built from, not by the recipe — so a legendary copy of this is worth more than the next item up built from a common one.

Schematics That Unlock Drone Launcher

The Technology tree hands you the plain Drone Launcher at level 77 for 4 Technology points, but nothing above that base version — the rarer builds are schematic-only. One schematic grants the recipe, and they are world loot — chests, boss Pals and the late-game pools — rather than anything you research. Higher-rarity copies of the same schematic raise the quality of what you end up crafting.

Fastest route. The fastest route is fishing in the World Tree, and the reason is the ladder rather than the top rung: that pool stocks every tier, so the common copies it hands you fuse upward into the one you want. Counting them, a top-tier Drone Launcher schematic works out at roughly 125 containers against the 275 the 4★ drop rate alone suggests. Spare low tiers are progress, not clutter. Schematics fuse five-to-one, so a lower tier with better odds can beat the top tier outright. Counts are containers of that source, not time.

Schematic	Rarity	Where it comes from
Drone Launcher Schematic 4	4★	fishing in World Tree, World Tree fishing treasure spots, Treasure map digs (tier 5) +5 more — best 0.4% (grade 1/5/6)

Alternatives and Upgrades

Step up from here and you get Plasma Multicutter at 250 attack; step down and it is Drone Launcher at 230. Weigh the jump against what the next tier costs you before committing the resources.

Plasma Multicutter250Drone Launcher230

Other melee weapons at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:

Drone LauncherDrone LauncherLaser SwordDrone LauncherLaser SwordEnhanced Lily's SpearPlasma MulticutterNightglowTerraprismaTerra BladeBeam SwordLily's Spear