How to Get Beam Drone in Risk of Rain Returns

Risk of Rain Returns inherits all of the best aspects of the classic roguelike series, and makes for a seriously fun time with more than plenty of secrets to uncover and items for your survivor to wield. Among those items are Drones, which can provide some very crucial benefits in the heat of battle, be it firepower or health regeneration. The most powerful offensive drone is the Beam Drone, and they’re not always easy to come by. If you’re wondering where to find these, here is our handy guide for how to get Beam Drone in Risk of Rain Returns.

What is the Beam Drone & How to Get Them in Risk of Rain Returns

The Beam Drone in Risk of Rain Returns is technically a special kind of drone, which you can only get by combining 3 x Laser Drones that you’ve bought and activated during the game. The Laser Drones themselves are the rarest and priciest of the regular drones you’ll find in randomized spots.

They traditionally spawn from the second zone onwards to the final zone, though if on Monsoon difficulty we’ve been told that you may be able to find them as early as the first zone. We’ll re-confirm this with our own test runs.

Once you do find your first Laser Drone, like any other drone you’ll notice a bright green arrow pointing down at it, along with a price tag that’s typically higher than the other types of drones (e.g. – Gunner, Healing). However, they’re definitely worth it on their own, as they fire lasers at mobs of enemies that do a good chunk of damage on top of your own firepower.

The goal here, however, is to get three of them together, and you need to make sure they’re all active at the same time. If one goes down in battle, pay to repair it if possible or find another. The next objective is to locate a Drone Combination Station, which is a big blue contraption with yellow robotic arms (as seen above).

You may have passed these before with initial confusion, but these are used to combine smaller drones into bigger, more powerful ones. This is where you want to hand over your three Laser Drones, so that it can be turned into a Beam Drone. This essentially gives you what one would call a floating death ray. When it comes to handling mobs of powerful enemies on higher difficulties, this death ray machine will be your best friend, especially if you’re going solo.

You also need to do this as Engineer in order to get the Amplifier achievement, which also unlocks the Laser Turret ability for that survivor. As if they weren’t cool and powerful enough already.

Alternatively, if you’d rather not go through the process of acquiring three laser drones and finding a combination station (it can be very tricky when against the clock and on your own), you can possibly find an existing Beam Drone on the final zone (Contact Light) of the game. It’ll be somewhere around the Bridge area, and depending on the difficulty you’re playing on, it’ll cost you a few thousand gold to repair, give or take. It also only has a 25% chance to spawn, so you may need to attempt the zone more than once.

That concludes our guide to how to get Beam Drone in Risk of Rain Returns. We hope you found this helpful, and let us know what you think of the Beam Drone. Is it best with Engineer, in your opinion, or another survivor class?

Be sure to check out all of our other guides for Risk of Rain Returns, including our official review of the game.