How to Use Drones in Slime Rancher 2

Robots are going to be the future of this world and let’s hope that we don’t get dominated by them. Jokes aside, in futuristic games like Slime Rancher 2, there is always going to be exciting tech involved and one such exciting piece of equipment is Drones.

Drones are a huge help when it comes to carrying out operations on your ranch and there are several different types of Drones in Slime Rancher 2. We are going to be learning about all of them in this guide along with how to access the archived information using the Drone Archive Key. And in case you missed out on the best slimes tier list, you might want to check it out first.

Contents hide

1 How to Craft Drones in Slime Rancher 2

2 How to Use Drones in Slime Rancher 2

3 Advanced Drone in Slime Rancher 2

4 How to Get Drone Archive Key for Research Drone in Slime Rancher 2

5 How to Use the Drone Archive Key in Slime Rancher 2

How to Craft Drones in Slime Rancher 2

We are all familiar with task automation and The Drone is Slimes Rancher 2’s version of it. The drone is a craftable utility that can be programmed to perform certain tasks on the ranch that will make your life much easier and simpler.

A drone is a gadget that will perform a lot of tasks for you within the ranch limits. Before you can start using a drone or even craft it, you will have to acquire the blueprint for the drone from the lab for 2000 Newbucks.

Once you have the blueprint, head over to the Fabricator with the following materials to craft a drone.

18x Honey Plort
12x Quantum Plort
6x Hunter Plort
6x Wild Honey
6x Jellystone
2x Hexacomb

After that, you will have the drone in your hand and ready to be used.

How to Use Drones in Slime Rancher 2

Drones make your life easier by doing the tasks that normally you would be doing by hand. Drones can be used within each expansion of the ranch with the only limitation that they will work only within the ranch bounds.

Drones need to be programmed before they can do anything. If you don’t program a drone, it will just stay idle. To program the drone, you will need to give it three pieces of information.

Target: What it needs to collect. Could be anything from Plorts, Vegetables, etc. The instructions can be more specific than this such as targeting a specific plort.
Source: Where the item needs to be collected from. Could be a corral, silo, pond, etc.
Destination: Where the item needs to be taken. Could deposit an item, sell an item if you want, and do a variety of other tasks.

The drone will normally be stationed at its flower when it is not performing any task and that is where you will be doing the programming at.

It must be kept in mind that the program you are feeding into the system has all the required spots within the current expansion because if a target or a destination is not in the current expansion, the drone won’t be able to complete the task and will sit idle.

Drones don’t work indefinitely. They will run out of battery and return to their flower where you can splash them with water to instantly recharge their energy. The usual time that a drone can work for a single charge is one day.

Two drones can be placed in one expansion and since there are 8 possible expansions so you can have a total of 16 drones on your ranch.

Advanced Drone in Slime Rancher 2

Just like the name suggests, the Advanced drone is just the upgraded version of the simple drone and instead of one task, the advanced drone can perform two tasks simultaneously.

The procedure to acquire an Advanced Drone is quite similar to the simple drone with the only exception that you will have to acquire the blueprint from Viktor at Viktor’s Workshop.

It can’t be bought with money so you will need a total of 460 Bug Reports to trade them with an Advanced Drone Blueprint. Once you have the blueprint in your hand, you can use the following materials and craft the drone at the Fabricator.

18x Honey Plort
12x Quantum Plort
6x Hunter Plort
6x Manifold Cube
1x Royal Jelly
1x Hexacomb

Once you have the Advanced Drone, you can program it just like the Simple Drone but now instead of one task, you can program it to do two task.

Everything else is the same as the Simple Drone.

How to Get Drone Archive Key for Research Drone in Slime Rancher 2

Research Drones are mystery drones that are wandering all around the map in Slime Rancher 2, collecting data. These drones are said to be made by a mystery person and the identity of that person is still unknown.

The data saved on these research drones can be accessed to know more about the world that seems to have more mysteries than actual facts. You can access the drone’s archive using the Drone Archine Key.

Let’s look at how we can get the Drone Archive Key in Slime Rancher 2. To get yourself a shiny new Drone Archive Key you will have to follow the following steps.

Go to South of Starlight Strand where you will find Flutter Gordo Slime.
Feed the slime with 25 Moondew Nectar to make it explode.
When the Gordo explodes, behind it will be a cave with a pod containing the starlight strand portal.
Go back to your Conservatory where you will see messages from Mochi Miles on your Comm Station.
She will give you the blueprint and you can head to the Fabricator with the following materials to craft the Drone Archive Key.