“Collect barrels of pollution with drones” showed up as a real launch-week Steam Community question. The confusing part is that players often have several drone types by the time the quest appears, while the wording only says “drones.”
Current full-release video gives the practical answer: use the Vacuum Drone on a sludge-heavy job and let the drone collect pollution into its own capacity. The footage specifically reaches the quest, then heads into a suitable region and lets the drones do the collection work.
The short answer
Deploy the Vacuum Drone, let it vacuum sludge, and give it enough time/battery to fill and return its collected pollution. Do not do all the sludge yourself while the drone is idle — the quest is checking drone-collected pollution, not just whether a drone is present on the map.
A reliable way to make progress
- Pick a map with plenty of normal sludge still available.
- Deploy the Vacuum Drone early.
- Avoid instantly cleaning every dense sludge patch yourself.
- Let the drone fill its capacity and return / unload.
- Improve drone battery or capacity if it keeps quitting before collecting meaningful amounts.
- Repeat until the quest completes.
The video route uses Quiet Shores Resort at this stage, but the mechanic is more important than the name: the quest needs the drone to do the collecting.
Which upgrades help most?
If the Vacuum Drone is running out of power, buy battery. If it fills too quickly and spends the run shuttling back, capacity is the more direct fix. If it is simply too slow, performance/suction upgrades matter.
Patch #1 reduced the Draxine and money cost of Drone Capacity and Speed upgrades by roughly 30%, so those upgrades are cheaper than they were in some launch recordings.
What this guide does not claim
We have not verified a hidden quest multiplier, a special map-only trigger or a requirement to use all three drone types. The current evidence supports a much simpler explanation: the Vacuum Drone needs to collect the pollution barrels itself.