Drone

XENOMORPH - TIER 1
Drone	Evolves From: Larva Evolves To: Burrower, Hivelord, Carrier, Queen Role: Build the Hive and expand it with new weed nodes. Support fellow Xenomorphs with your pheromones. Occasionally plant weeds aggressively to support pushes. Use your acid to help the Hive break into places. Guides: Guide to Hive Building, Guide to Pheromones

General Information

The Drone is the humble worker of the Hive. While most other castes make themselves useful in their combat prowess, the Drone finds its vocation in building and maintaining the Hive. Relatively fast, the Drone can also build on the move. It is equipped with corrosive acid capable of melting through anything that gets in the way of their constructions. Its attacks are fairly weak, and it is not intended to engage hostile targets unless another caste has them suppressed. Its health can hold itself together, however.

The Drone can help out with building the main Hive, spread weeds around aggressively using its mobility, or even attempt to build forward hives. In all cases, their skills will be needed to make nests to secure new captures, and to make the colony more habitable to Xenomorphs, one weeded tile at a time. To help with this, the Drones have a massive plasma reserve and a respectable plasma regeneration.

Pheromones play a big role in the Drone's arsenal. A Drone can be an incredible supplement to an ambush group, making it faster, better, stronger, and providing them with weeds to rest on as they advance.

Playing as a Drone

A weed node can cover a 7x7 area so spread out when planting them

As a Drone, your job is to assist the Queen by building, growing and reinforcing the hive, and eventually extending it using the mobility other building castes lack. To this end, the Drone has the ability to shape structures out of resin it can secrete with Plasma. The Drone is otherwise patently average in all regards, with a relatively underwhelming attack but a decent speed and health. All and all, building above fighting unless desperate.

It will usually be critical for you to build the main core of the Hive as soon as the Queen has picked a spot to nest in, if she allows construction. If not, beg her to allow construction until she does. Then, build these in this order as soon as the hivecore makes hive weeds: a spawn pool, five evolution pods, nests, and an egg morpher, while begging your sisters to assist you in filling them with plasma.

Afterwards, you may designate yourself to these jobs as you wish:

MAINTAIN THE HIVE

Maintain the hive by planting eggs near nests, pooling burst bodies, filling egg morphers, and providing plasma to the queen. It cannot be overemphasized how important these tasks are to your hive's survival: planting eggs near nests ensures hosts will be instantly-hugged if a sister regurgitates a host on top of a pile of eggs; pooling burst bodies allows xenos to boost and replenish their numbers; filling egg morphers is a must when the hive runs out of eggs; and most importantly, providing the Queen with plasma ensures she will always be able to use her ovi'd abilities, including providing leaders, making announcements, and providing heals and plasmas to your sisters.

BUILD THE HIVE

Weed EVERYWHERE possible, even in the little nooks and crannies you think may not matter. Weeds are the foundation of your hive! They allow you to create structures, they allow all members of the hive to move more quickly whilest slowing down marines, and they help xenos regenerate plasma and health many times more quickly than on any other surface. Also, build defenses. Build doors anywhere you can find natural horizontal or vertical gaps of one to three spaces and build sticky resins in front of them to slow the marines down. Finally, build walls. Lots of walls, especially on the frontlines and places you want to make extra doors in. However, build only enough to make it difficult for marines to navigate, not for you and your sisters to navigate.

SABOTAGE THE MARINES

Make the hive as unfriendly to marines as possible! Slash and melt anything in your way, especially shocked door! Slash APCs until the box flips open, then slash them again to release a rain of sparks and shroud the building in darkness, just to your mother's liking! Slash and structures and melt down everything you can vomit your corrosive acid on, including metal and plasteel weapons, ammo, gear, food, and mostly anything in research, medical, engineering, security, and the cabinets the intelligence officers want to stick their hands in. After melting down doors, make your own, and maybe make checkerboard sticky resin in front of them. Attrition warfare at its finest.

In conclusion, Don't underestimate how much work a single building caste can do. Trying to excuse yourself of the responsibility of building the Hive on other Drones is a high way to total and utter failure. Two drones per ten xenos should be the absolute maximum needed in the hive.

Abilities

Abilities:	Description:
Rest	Used to rest and get up. Xenos heal faster when resting on weeds.
Regurgitate	To devour, grab a host with Ctrl + Click or Grab intent (3 in hotkey mode) then click yourself, standstill. To stop the host from getting up and running away, you can switch to an empty hand (X in hotkey mode) and keep tackling them using Disarm intent (2 in hotkey mode) when you are devouring them. Xenos with devoured humans inside them can not vent crawl but Xenos with devoured monkeys can. Hosts with boot knives can injure the Xenomorph they are inside if they are conscious. (Edit this template)
Plant Purple Sac	Can't be planted if there is already a sac on the tile or if it's on unsuitable ground to plant it on. An example would be grass or water. Can be removed by one slash with harm intent for re-plant. Costs 75 plasma.
Choose Resin Structure	Click to choose what resin structure to make. The default structure is a Resin Wall.
Secrete Resin	Secrete the chosen Resin Structure on your tile. Costs 75 plasma.
Order Construction	Orders the construction of a hive structure to be built. Costs 500 plasma.
Transfer Plasma	Transfer 50 Plasma to any target within 2 tiles. You have to stand still when transferring, and the target must not be out of range when the transfer is made.
Corrosive Acid	Vomit a glob of acid on item to dissolve it. Multiple items can be clicked at once as long as you are standing still. Costs 75 plasma.
Emit Pheromones	Emit one of the three Pheromones. It is advised to emit the pheromone that are not already being emitted, as pheromones don't stack except for Frenzy pheromone. Your pheromones will grow stronger as you mature.

Attainable Strains

Strain:
Healer

Strain Abilities

Healer

Abilities:	Description:
Transfer Health	Transfer Health to another Xenomorph at the cost of your own health. Costs 0 plasma.

Building Tactics

• Build Hives with narrow corridors and fairly small chambers. The Marines are fast and have powerful ranged weapons, so force them to fight in tight, cramped spaces and on your terms. Covering floors with sticky resin adds to your advantage by making it virtually impossible to maneuver tactically. In large open areas, build resin walls to block lines of sight and for your sisters to hide behind.

• Always build multiple layers. A single layer can easily be shot through, and once your back line is exposed, your Drones are prone to getting wounded, which will slow down repairs.

• Avoid using multiple layers of resin doors or making the Hive too tight and confusing. The goal is for the humans to suffer should they enter your Hive, not for Xenomorphs to suffer from living in the same Hive as you.

• Keep in mind that Boilers need an unobstructed line of sight to the enemy in order to bombard properly. If you are building fortifications in the field, ask them if they can shoot properly or they'd rather have less walls in front.

• In open spaces, a 2x2 wall can take a beating while providing enough cover for xenos to retreat and regenerate their health. This wall design is important since they allow xenos to close in to the front without being shot at.

• It is discouraged to build corridors 1 tile wide because xenos will body-block each other. Try to always leave a 2 tile wide corridor. Protip: The Tank and APC are 3 tiles wide.

• Spread the eggs out around the hive to allow easier infecting. Remember that eggs can only be planted near the Queen when she is in her Ovipositor form. Ideally, avoid leaving unplanted eggs laying around so marines don't steal them.

Combat Tactics

• When the assault begins, try to tag along at a distance. While you are not a front line combatant you may be needed to plant weeds and build defenses to assist the frontlines. Don't be that Drone hiding in the egg room while your sisters scream for nests to be set up and for weeds to be planted in contested areas.

• When the Hive is defending or attacking, Drones should be in the backline placing weeds and defenses for the frontline. Listen carefully to the Hivemind so you can fulfill requests from fellow xenomorphs.

• The Drone is one of the most mobile castes which have access to facehuggers, making it highly desirable to work together with most offensive castes to net the Hive one or two more infected Marines.

• If the Queen dies, you are first in line to replace her. Make sure to stay safe, even excessively so. The last thing the Hive needs after losing its Queen is Drones throwing themselves to the Marines and dying.

Facehuggers

You can pick up Facehuggers by clicking a mature egg with an empty hand to open it, then clicking on the facehugger with any intent active to pick it up. Next, click on a host when you're next to it and the facehugger in your selected hand should attach. You have two hands and can use two facehuggers if you click quickly. If you need to return a facehugger back inside of the egg, drop it on top of the egg and after 30 seconds it should crawl back inside or click on the empty egg with the hugger in hand.

Drone Evolution and Upgrades

Drone Upgrades focus on making their all-around decent statistics even more decent, along with boosting his plasma reserve and plasma regeneration. Don't forget your pheromones will also get better along the way. Drones are unique in that they are the only caste in the game that can Evolve without a full Evolve timer, into a Queen.

Drones can Evolve into four possible castes:

• The Queen. If the old Queen died, you will have to wait until the Hivemind restores from the frenzy. You may then rise up as the new Queen of the Hive. A sister will have to, however, as a Hive cannot survive long without a Queen. You can check if other Drones want dibs, but if you hear nothing, take one for the team. It's not needed to have full Evolve progress to evolve to a Queen.

• The Burrower trades in the Drones monstrous plasma pool, pheromones, and hive building ability for the ability to make resin hole 'landmines' and build tunnels to help their sisters get around the map more quickly.

• The Hivelord is an even more effective Hive builder, with sturdier resin structures and an insane plasma reserve and regeneration. It also gains a strong movement speed ability allowing it to get to the frontline or away at a safe speed.

• The Carrier allows the drone to specialize in the infection and capture of hosts. It grants the xenomorph the abilities to store facehuggers and eggs safely around the battlefield for later use They can create hugger holes that act as infectious 'landmines' that will infect individuals that step on them.