Maintenance drone

Wear and tear

Every device takes wear over time, at a rate that depends on what it's doing and where it is. Mining drones grinding through a belt wear faster than a survey drone parked at a Lagrange point. As devices lose operational capacity, they slow down - whether that's mining speed, scan duration, cruise engine power - devices will eventually degrade to stop working.

Patrol mode

Once you've printed a maintenance_drone, put it into patrol mode and it'll run autonomously - cruising to any of your damaged devices in the system and repairing them in turn.

# put a freshly printed maintenance drone on patrol
$ curl -X POST https://api.replicant.space/v1/devices/M0123456 \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
    -d '{"command": "set_directive", "directive": "patrol"}'

The drone picks a damaged target, cruises to it, and begins repair. The device being repaired pauses whatever it was doing until its operational capacity is back to 100%, at which point the maintenance drone releases it and moves on to the next one.

Service bots

There's a faster variant called the service bot, with a smarter repair algorithm and a higher throughput. The blueprint isn't on the standard print catalogue - you'll need to track down the Bill NPC to get hold of it.

System hubs

System Hubs have special maintenance requirements. Once deployed and activated, they require regular supply of specific resources to help with maintenance. The high power requirements and heavy equipment take a lot of damage over time. See the documentation on system hubs for more details on the mechanics behind this.