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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
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, at least until a Hivelord shows up to take up the torch. Then, you can move on to forward hives, defensive locations, or just weeding everything in sight. As long as you're using up your Plasma, it's hard to do any harm. Your sisters should suppress the Survivors with incredible ease, so you should have clearance to roam the colony before the Marines land to plant weeds and melt dangerous gear.
Since you will be spending a lot of time behind the lines, you might take up the Sentinel's job of guarding hosts. You're not ill-suited for it, but you might not have as easy a time, especially if the hosts managed to sneak in their weapons. At least you can make nests on the fly if they are lacking, unlike said Sentinels.
Don't overestimate 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. Three Drones should be the absolute minimum in all but the most skeletal Hives. Only at five and above should the brakes be hit.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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: |
|---|
Strain Abilities
Healer
| Abilities: | Description: |
|---|---|
 Transfer Health |
Transfer Health to another Xenomorph at the cost of your own health.
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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.
- Secure nests: Build nests for dangerous hosts (Humans) in small cell patterns of a few nests with multiple entrances. This allows Sentinel castes to guard a lot of hosts at once safely, and gives any caste a much better chance to neutralise an armed host that just got out of their nest without damage. Dangerous hosts should be away from the center of the Hive, and away from any young chestbursters.
- The area surrounding these nests should be constructed to provide maximum safety. A checkerboard pattern is regularly used. See Drone Tactics. Place a single door, and put four nests adjacent to it. (Above, Below, Left, & Right). Then surround those nests with doors. This allows Sentinel castes to guard all four nests by standing in that initial door. There are other effective methods, including building nests next to solid walls or walling off small rooms full of nests with only one exit.
- Spread the eggs out around the hive to allow easier infecting, and bring them to the frontline (through Hivelord's tunnel).
Combat Tactics
- When the assault begins, tag along at a distance unless you are needed to guard hosts. You are not a front line combatant, but you may be needed to plant weeds and build defenses. Don't be that Drone hiding in the command trench while your sisters scream for nests to be set up and for weeds to be planted in newly contested areas.
- When the Hive is defending/attacking, Drones should be in the back line, placing weeds and nests as the main forces advance or hold their ground. Listen carefully to the Hivemind so you can fulfill requests from other castes.
- The Drone is one of the most mobile castes which has 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, then click the facehugger. With any intent active, click on a host when you're next to it. The hugger 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 his 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 '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 specialise in the infection and capture of hosts. It grants the xenomorph the abilities to store face huggers and eggs safely around the battlefield for later use They can create hugger holes that act as infectious 'landmines' that will infect individual that steps on them.