Norse C0de
Refugee
I have a cunning plan...
What if the drones could carry things to/from your friends? You load the drone up with loot or maybe all the wood you're collecting for your new base, then tell the drone to deliver the goods to a specific friend. When it gets to him, it says something like, "I have a package for you". It then follows your friend around and beeps at him until he interacts with the drone. When he does, it opens an interface which allows him to take or add any cargo he wishes. Then maybe have a button at the bottom of the inventory window that says "return to master". When your friend is done loading/unloading it, he clicks that button and it flies back to you. Also, you could add storage chests with little radios on them that the drone can interact with. That way you can tell the drone to deliver all the car parts you've scavenged back to the box in your base labeled "car parts", or whatever. You could also make it so that you can remotely request items from those chests and order the drone to go fetch them for you.
The only issue might be as it flies across unloaded chunks. But I think an easy way to deal with that is to have the drone fly to the edge of the loaded chunk and then poof out of existence. Then the theoretical estimated travel time across the unloaded chunks would be calculated. Once that time has past, the drone is loaded back into the destination chunk where a player is that it's going to. That way it uses minimum resources and it looks seemless from the players' perspectives. Since the drone doesn't fly so fast, it would also give a good reason for you to make a jet engine mod for it that makes it faster. I believe that this would make the drone MUCH more useful and add another fun element to the game.
What if the drones could carry things to/from your friends? You load the drone up with loot or maybe all the wood you're collecting for your new base, then tell the drone to deliver the goods to a specific friend. When it gets to him, it says something like, "I have a package for you". It then follows your friend around and beeps at him until he interacts with the drone. When he does, it opens an interface which allows him to take or add any cargo he wishes. Then maybe have a button at the bottom of the inventory window that says "return to master". When your friend is done loading/unloading it, he clicks that button and it flies back to you. Also, you could add storage chests with little radios on them that the drone can interact with. That way you can tell the drone to deliver all the car parts you've scavenged back to the box in your base labeled "car parts", or whatever. You could also make it so that you can remotely request items from those chests and order the drone to go fetch them for you.
The only issue might be as it flies across unloaded chunks. But I think an easy way to deal with that is to have the drone fly to the edge of the loaded chunk and then poof out of existence. Then the theoretical estimated travel time across the unloaded chunks would be calculated. Once that time has past, the drone is loaded back into the destination chunk where a player is that it's going to. That way it uses minimum resources and it looks seemless from the players' perspectives. Since the drone doesn't fly so fast, it would also give a good reason for you to make a jet engine mod for it that makes it faster. I believe that this would make the drone MUCH more useful and add another fun element to the game.