Depots & Base

A depot is your drop-off point: fill your storage, bring it here, and launch the shipment to get paid. Without a depot nearby, dust stays dust — you can't cash it in.

The v1.0.3 patch made the drop-off honest. Payment now matches the amount displayed on its screen, and dust or stone delivered by conveyor is paid when it arrives rather than later. If your payout looked short at launch, this is why.

These structures appear by name in DragDrop Games' patch notes, which is the strongest confirmation currently available:

1. Set up your first depot near where you actually sweep.
2. As you clear an area, push the next depot outward so trips stay short.
3. In co-op, give each assigned sector its own depot to avoid cross-traffic.
4. Once robots are running, keep Capsule Catchers within easy reach of the sectors they clean — inserts and pickups are what limit output.

Belts are how you stop carrying things by hand. Since the launch patches: splitters and mergers snap port to port, mergers alternate between their inputs instead of starving one side, and any crewmate can add parts to anyone else's belts.

The full breakdown — including why the merger change matters for production layouts and where the reported dust-to-stone processing chain fits — is on Automation & Belts. Robot supply and Capsule Catcher placement are on J.O.O.N.A.S. Cleaning Robots.

Depots are the backbone of scale. As your earnings and coverage grow, you add more of them, run belts into processing, and eventually put cleaning vehicles and J.O.O.N.A.S. robots to work across the expanded operation (see Cleaning Vehicles & J.O.O.N.A.S.). v1.0.4 cut save times for large bases from up to half a minute to a fraction of a second, so big layouts no longer cost you real time to save.