I love this mod so far! I especially like how the drones send ominous (and sometimes funny) messages to taunt us. Really keeps me on my toes with all the various tactics the drones use, including the hacker drone.

I haven't had any troubles with the hacker drone yet, but that might change once we build more ships (and therefor have more active antennas). We're thinking of creating remote controlled drones and the hacker drone would be an interesting challenge to contend with. Gotta kill it quick or lose control of our own drones!

How about having the hacker drone only working if it is within range of your antenna, therefore I need to have a low range on my antenna (say ~500 metre) or I wont be able to defend against hackers?

That's the way it already works. If your antenna range doesn't extend to its position, it cannot hack you

To clarify further, think of it like remote control of a ship - both antennas need to be within range of eachother to communicate. If one is out of range, proper connection cannot be made.

Thanks for doing this. I love the threat of corruption drones, but I had built a 5k+ base with at least four 500+ block ships that all got hacked at once and the HUD clutter and the loss of any sense of block names and identity ( I'd built a closed-loop production system with sorters and and tons of cargo tubes and containers ) frustrated me to the point that I'd abandoned the game ( my very first survival world ).

I appreciate you providing us with tools to alleviate some of the horror for less experienced players such as myself.

so I understand it'll never be removed, fair enough... but is there a way to disable it from my game then? Because no one likes it and it is the only reason I am never playing with this mod on, despite it being a great mod :(

So if my antenna is set to 10km, it will remote connect and gradually take over systems using a script?
The only way i know how to "hack" is to grind then re weld a block past the blue line haha
Edit: Just want to know so i can plan some defensive options, thanks! :)

Originally posted by S7G String:

So if my antenna is set to 10km, it will remote connect and gradually take over systems using a script?
The only way i know how to "hack" is to grind then re weld a block past the blue line haha
Edit: Just want to know so i can plan some defensive options, thanks! :)

only way to defend is to set your antennas to 700meters (within turrret range) which means you'll have to spam antennas and lose game performance. or you have to go out of your way, drop EVERYTHING you're doing and just go take care of the drone yourself IMMEDIATELY. thats why it's annoying.

Is there a way to lower the spawn rate of the hacker drone? I like the concept, but I keep running into one every 5 minutes or so. :p

Been using GPS markers and laser antenna, been doing good so far!

This is a great mod!

That said...

I feel that I should mention something here that happened to us and basically destroyed our entire server. Your hacker drone changed the names and ownerships of the medical bays while at the same time ramping the thrusters on a very large mining ship up to max and sending it spinning out of control all over an indoor complex, destroying everything.

Unfortunately the vast majority of us were either AFK or offline :(

We logged in to a server where players were immediately killed by the atmosphere of the now no longer airtight base and discovered they couldn't respawn anywhere nearby. The base itself was almost totally destroyed by the spinning mining ship that was equipped with structural integrity shields.

Luckily we have an awesome server admin that pulled the backups and restored everything minus the last 24 or so hours.

I get the idea of the hacker drone, it's a cool concept but perhaps a warning of its existance somewhere more prominent than a half visible line on the mod page might be needed? We lost a lot of good stuff that night and the admin was extremely angry over the situation to the point that he started ripping your mod apart to remove the hacking drone from it.

When you make a mod that contains a drone that powerful, you have accept responsibility for its actions. It either needs to be toned down and sorely limited in what it can do, or you need to provide a defence against it, and no turning off antennas and a quick script to rename blocks isn't enough.

Antagonising players is one thing, causing outright server damage and wasting peoples time is entirely another.

(A side note, I began renaming the blocks on one of our ships to undo the drones damage, I lasted about 2 minutes before losing the will to live, grinding up the ship and ordering the printer to just rebuild it, this was before another player pointed out the rename script, that isn't a fun mechanic either).

Seriously man, A+ for creativity but a C- for implementation.

[Edit]: Far be it from me to complain without offering solutions.

A) Make the drones potency based on range. Outside weapons range, an annoyance, inside weapons range, a real threat.

B) No offline shenanigans, it's not fair for a player to be totally obliterated while offline.

C) A firewall style computer block that is able to counter exactly what the drone can do, so you can at least have a chance of fighting back.

D) Remove the component that takes over and alters the thrust vectors of ships, that's a bad mechanic to deal with in a space engineers environment and in our case was what caused the majority of the damage and the angry feelings.

Sorry for the negative post dude, just telling it how it is.

@rockstede.

You can blacklist the drone if you want. I forget where the file is becaseu I ahven't palyed in 2 months after a 650 hour binge.
But IT can be black listed. I decided to black list it since I would go AFK at times and come back to eferything being destroyed.
I decieded to re-add the drone after tryinmg OP's scrips.

They hack through anntenas. if you turn all of that off they are blind and will leave

There is a script he made that automates this.

Also download this mod. IT has a firewall and a hacking chip. I got the author to radd some features like hacking through subgrids. SO you can attach it to a landing gear. MAke a missle and send it off remotly to attach to a ship to take. But it can take a lotta time.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1569153726 GET THE FIREWALL AT A MINIMUM.

Also your A solution is based on your own antennas ranges.
It has weaknesses. Thoguh you have to dig throuhg info to find it.

Some people have also said to set your ant ranges withing your gun rnage. So it has to come within range of your weapons, modded or not.

as for modded waeapons. This was one of my favorite systems. Adds "conveyor" stle tubes to power laser systesm. The laser heads can fit into any shpae possible. They have ranges up to 2.5k. But are power hungry and you have to route laser tubes to send power from your power suppy to the laser.


Over all it's badass and I love this particualr weapon mod

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1276445455&searchtext=lasers

Yeah you're right about the range of the antennas in my A description.

Don't get me wrong man I love the mod but the issue was that many players were very upset due to the work and time they lost through not knowing about the drones capabilities.

I'll forward that mod suggestion to the server admin, though we aren't a pvp server really, occasionally we have silly fights amongst our selves but mostly it's just a social thing. If the firewall can prevent the hacker drone from succeeding then it's worth it.

As for the shutting down the the antennas via the script, the issue there is that it also shuts down a significant number of other projects we have that rely on this antennas functioning normally.