← Base Development · For exact material costs, the drone tools in the Calculators will do the math for you.
“Is the drone actually worth building up?” If you’ve just hit HQ15, you’ve probably asked yourself this. It comes up in our alliance chat often enough that I figured I’d write it down once. Short answer: yes. The drone unlocks at HQ15 and it’s the single biggest power source at that point. There was a player on our server pacing right alongside me who let his drone sit for a few weeks, and the power gap that opened up was visible from orbit. Skip it and you fall behind — it’s that simple.
The short version
The drone is a three-axis growth system: level it with parts and battle data, upgrade skills with chips, lift the ceiling with Combat Boost. Sounds involved, but what you actually do is simple — collect parts and battle data every single day without skipping. That’s the whole game.
The three axes
1. Drone level (parts + battle data)
Drone level rises with Drone Parts and Battle Data. Only certain levels (around 5, 10, and similar breakpoints) need extra parts; the rest run on battle data alone. So the daily routine of collecting parts and battle data is drone growth. Mine happens over morning coffee — open chests, run the missions, done.
2. Skill Chips
The currency for upgrading drone skills. The cost per step climbs steeply at higher levels — late steps run 30–40 chips each. They come from chests and drone/radar missions, and while they feel plentiful early, they get scarce fast. Don’t sprinkle them across random skills.
3. Combat Boost — tiers I–VII
At certain drone-level milestones, a Combat Boost tier opens. Higher tiers add Chip Skill Boost (+1 to +5) and extra chip presets. Here’s the reference table, unchanged.
| Tier | Level | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| I | 10 | Unlock the skill-chip system · Chip Preset 1 |
| II | 150 | Chip Skill Boost +1 · Preset 2 |
| III | 300 | Boost +2 · Preset 3 |
| IV | 450 | Boost +3 · Preset 4 (needs a 4th squad) |
| V | 600 | Boost +4 |
| VI | 750 | Boost +5 |
| VII | 900 (max) | Stats increase significantly per level |
In my experience the stretch right before a tier threshold (150, 300…) is the most tedious, but the payoff on crossing is concrete enough that goal-setting is actually easy.
The order I’d recommend
- Fire up the drone the moment you hit HQ15. It’s your biggest power source at that point — don’t put it off.
- Collect parts and battle data daily (chests, drone/radar missions, events). And don’t spend them on arrival — bank them and dump the level-ups on Alliance Duel Day 1 (Mon) so the same materials score points too.
- Set the next Combat Boost tier (II = 150, III = 300…) as your level target.
- Focus skill chips on your main drone skill.
Common mistakes
The biggest one is the neglect I mentioned up top — it’s your biggest early power source, and catching up takes weeks. The second is spending parts and battle data the moment they arrive; you’re going to spend them anyway, so spending them on Duel Day 1 is free points. If you want exact amounts, pre-compute with the drone parts / skill-chip / combat-boost calculators.
Drone parts are the real bottleneck, and they are findable
Most players hit the same wall with the Drone Center: the building unlocks at HQ 15 and then progress stalls, not on resources but on parts. Parts arrive in small quantities from a handful of sources, and the one people most often leave on the table is ghost recon missions.
The problem is visibility. Ghost missions appear on the world map, pay out different reward categories, and expire. Checking manually means scanning the map repeatedly and mostly finding missions that pay something you did not need.
Our PC collector handles this by reading what the game already shows and filtering it: ghost missions can be filtered by reward category — drone parts, skill medals, resources — so you only get told about the ones carrying parts, with a countdown on the remaining time. The same tab covers shining missions. Details are on the collector page.
Why it is worth the attention
Drone progress compounds slowly and quietly, which is exactly why it gets deprioritised. Unlike a building upgrade it produces no visible power jump on completion, so it loses every head-to-head decision against something that does — and then becomes the thing holding you back weeks later.
Treat parts as a background collection task rather than a project. Picking up the ones you would otherwise have missed costs almost nothing per day and is the difference between the Drone Center being finished and being permanently half-built.
Unofficial fan-site content · no partnership or sponsorship with the developer · figures can change with patches.
By: lastwarhub.com
