The idea is pretty neat, but the problem I'd run into is with the spawning system. This mod piggy-backs on the vanilla cargo ship spawning system to make drones appear, and that system doesn't have a lot of flexibility. To get variable spawn rates like that, I'd essentially need to build a custom spawn system from the ground up.

At some point though, I do want to add large station encounters that can spit out other ships - I can likely pull that off using a smaller custom spawner I already have in place for some of the ships (Hive Ship with the recent update being a good example).

i made a all vanilla version......i just REALLY want to see them try and get past 12 rocket launchers and 32 gattling guns if you are willing http://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1290752021

If you ever decide to start adding ships that are brutally powerful and split it into a separate hardcore version (Like W4stedspace talked about in his last stream). I would love to see it, some of us love having to ward off Improbably difficult hostiles. On a diffrent note I would love to see a large grinder style attack ship. Primarily because it would bypass all shield defenses.

For me if its possible (not insane dev works) i would love to have 1 settings in xml : Radar detection : when this is enabled drones will seek after radar signal and only attack players on visual or close range (say 200meters). Then disabling all antenna and hidding inside rocks or deep place with avoid player detection.

Was thinking a interesting defense against the Hacker drone's would be if you could somehow give a gift to the "Glitchy Drone" which would then have a chance to give you access to a script you could dump into a programming block (some basic functionality ideally ability to have the glitchy lcd, some enemy detection and alert capiabilitys built in)

In addition the Hacker drone would detect the script on the grid and would call in a elimination squad rather than risk hacking and being infected with Glitchy

Is it possible for the mod to reconise what items a player has a shortage of (say cued in an assembler but not being produced) and "offer" some of that resource to them, for a price (or an occasional trap)?

When a Hacker drone is disabled or destroyed many of it's effects remain. I would suggest that on destruction any changes made to the players grid should be reverted to their normal values main issue is when the drone turns show on hud on for all blocks undoing this by hand can take a very long time. Essentially Anything the hacker drone does should be temporary and end upon destruction

I suggest a way to chance the spawnrate on the drones, because as soon as i deal with one of them another spawns.

There are other mods in the same collection that reduce spawn rates of ships spawned in space.

I want to once again point out the fact that hacker drone effects are permanent and to be honest corrupting terminal names can actually be more damaging than physically shooting a ship. The problem here is that in the real world there exists something called a backup however in SE there is no option to reboot your systems and no way to restore the ship once its corrupted. As i stated before a mechanism must be implemented to recover ship functionality.

I had several idea on how to do this the first one is just automatically restore functionality on the drones destruction.

The other idea I had was after the drone is destroyed the ship can be Reset by powering down the grid for 30 seconds (kinda like how you reset most electronics)

Other option would be a script that allows you to "Save" your terminal configuration as a snapshot and than reload it later.

Al in all the hacker drone is a neat idea however you need to show respect for the time and effort players put into their ships. Physical damage can often be easily repaired however the damage done in the terminal cannot because a lot of times the blocks that get effected may not be in an area the player can even access thus there is no reasonable method of restoring the ship by hand without literally hours of manual editing.

Please provide proper methods for restoring ship functionality after the hacker drone is dealt with. I don't mind if my ship gets messed up but a reasonable and somewhat sane method of restoring normal functionality is required for sanity sake.

Although part of the problem is the deficiencies in the way keen set up the terminal in the first place with no way to copy and paste block settings or save configurations.

Again I am not saying the hacker drone should be removed or nerfed I am just saying a reset button is needed for dealing with the aftermath

I don't plan to include a method to reset the hacker drone damaged blocks to the way they were prior to the attack. My opinion is that if you were targeted and affected by its attack, then you weren't being vigilant enough with a hostile presence nearby.

I've thrown in compromise though. I've uploaded a script that will allow you to reset ALL of your terminal blocks to their default names. Note that this, again, does not revert them to what they were prior to the attack - it only makes them readable again. I'll concede that the renaming of blocks is a bit excessive. Beyond that, I believe everything else is fair game.

I've posted all the details in a dedicated Discussion thread on this workshop page.

I actually tried to set up the hacker drone defence script but the problem is performance settings on the server keep disabling PB at regular intervals making it hard to keep the system running.

I am actually looking into learning some more advanced scripting eventually I am hoping to make a script that will leverage Storage to create snapshots of block configurations. the question at this point is wether or not its possible to even do that but some of the modders on discord seem to think it is

Speaking of which I wanted to modify the the hacker drone defense script to re-enable antennas after the drone leaves however I have no way to detect the hacker drones departure. Is there a specific argument transmitted when the drone leaves ? can a departure announcement be added if one does not exist ?

I won't be adding a departure argument. In all honesty I have regrets about adding the announce argument in the first place - so that's as easy as its going to get.

After w4sted mentioned in his pvp vs pvp vs pvp steam he was after a jump drive interdiction mod I tested this mod 478423031 Jump Drive inhibitor and it still works if you try to power the drive whilst in the inhibitor field it damages your jump drive.

I would be a good drone feature but on a limited range so have to out run the drone to get out of its field of influence before you could jump possibly a child drone of a boss drone or one of a small weaker group of drones like the horsefly drones or possibly a feature when you get around to your making your larger encounters.

Please consider removing the ramming BS for drone, at least a majority of situations. It overshadows all the interesting bits in this mod. It's like someone throwing a rolex watch at an ant.