Replicator, Drone (3.5e Monster)

= Replicator Drone =

''Strange mechanic whirring and the clatter of a thousand metal feet preceeds a wave of these mechanical insects. Almost demonic in the voracity with which they propagate and replicate, they do not distinguish good from evil and have no qualms about mining people as well as materials.''

Drones are the replicators' main bulk utility unit. They are comprised of 168 monads working together, compacted into a shape of a quadrupedal insect-like form roughly 18 inches in length. They weigh approximately 6 pounds (or half that much when the base material is mithral). Although drones can harvest and sculpt materials necessary for replication, they are uncapable of refining raw ore and are therefore severely limited in replication speed. Being small constructs, replicators can eat their way through stone and metal and often bide their time within walls or structures where people cannot get to them until they are too many.

Combat
Drones use either their powerful limbs or their cutting tools as weapons when met with resistance. Although menacing in their own right, drones usually attack when provoked, and ignore any creature until it attacks them or directly blocks their attempts at fulfilling their prime directive of replication, at which point they will swarm the attacker with all of their nearby numbers.

These are small, concentrated beams of energy that they use for harvesting raw material and attack. A drone's cutter beam ignores all material hardness and does 1d6 base damage when used for the latter purpose. It is considered a melee weapon because its range does not far exceed the drone's touch.

Fast Healing (Ex): When replicators get damaged, they attempt to absorb remnant monads from destroyed replicators into their subsystems, as well as shift the monads of their own body back into alignment, with limited effect. A drone regains 1 hit point at the start of every turn.

 (Ex): A replicator drone can harvest raw materials in the form of metals and mineral sediments of sufficient purity necessary for the construction of additional monads. To harvest, replicators use their cutters. Replicators cannot attack and lose their Dexterity to AC when they are harvesting. Harvesting sufficient material for one monad requires a number of rounds equal to the material's hardness - 10 (minimum 1 round).

 (Ex): All replicators are able of interacting remotely with binary communication over any distance, although not across planes. Furthermore, this interlink functions roughly like a telepathy spell.

 (Ex): The strange magical energies that power individual monads have an arcane dampening effect that blocks the effects of most arcane and divine magics, with the following exceptions. Both chill metal and heat metal have the same effects upon a replicator as a slow spell, and a shatter spell deals normal damage to them.

 (Ex): A replicator drone can then use base materials to synthesize new monads, being able to build one every 2 minutes or one whole new replicator drone in 6 hours. As such, one drone can become 16 in the time frame of a single day, given enough quality material is available. When harvesting, drones prefer to use material that is already refined, such as weapons or constructs, or other technological forms of arcana. The replicators themselves can interface with such technologies and assimilate them for personal use, vastly increasing the limits of what the technology could ordinarily do. When harvesting, replicators multiply to a critical number, after which they migrate to different areas in order to further multiply.

Skills: Replicator drones have a +8 racial bonus on Jump checks.