Stellaris Ancient Drones: What Happens With Each Choice (Full Guide)

If your colony’s moon has been hiding a “gaggle of wayward drones” that mistake your people for their long-dead masters, you’ve triggered the Ancient Drones colony event chain. It’s a low-stakes, mostly-hands-off chain, but it does have a couple of real decision points worth knowing before they come up.

What Triggers Ancient Drones

Ancient Drones has a small chance to trigger 2-3 years after founding a colony, can only happen once per game, and can’t occur for empires with the Wilderness origin. It starts after finishing the “Left Behind” special project on a moon showing strange readings.

Ancient Drones: Discovery

The initial event is mostly flavor — the drones wake briefly, get excited thinking you’re affiliated with their old masters, then lapse back into inactivity. Your only real option here is to keep an eye on the situation; nothing to actively decide yet.

Ancient Drones: Awakening

If your colony has at least one Blocker, the drones eventually wake and start terraforming a small area, which ends up removing a Blocker from your colony — a small, free, passive benefit with no real downside.

Ancient Drones: Reaching For Past Skies

If your colony has no Blockers left, the drones instead build a “space elevator” structure that will eventually need to be razed to continue expanding — a mixed blessing. Choosing to let them continue grants a solid chunk of Engineering Research (90-10000, scaling with game progress) but also adds a temporary Inconvenient Space Elevator modifier for 10 years, cutting Minerals from Jobs by 20% during that window.

Is It Worth Engaging With?

Ancient Drones isn’t really a choice-driven chain in the way Subterranean Civilization is — most of what happens is determined by your colony’s existing Blocker state rather than a decision you make. There’s no real “wrong” answer here: the Blocker-removal outcome is pure upside, and the space elevator outcome is a worthwhile trade (real research now for a temporary, moderate minerals penalty). Just don’t panic if your mineral output dips on that colony for a decade — it’s expected, and it goes away on its own.