Sweepy's Dock

Sweepy's Dock is the charging and storage station for Sweepy, providing the small cleaning robot with a home base, battery recharging, and a place to deposit collected debris. A dock and a Sweepy are effectively paired: if the dock is destroyed while a Sweepy still exists, the Sweepy is lost as well. The dock is built with 25 kg of refined metal and, once completed, comes with a fully charged Sweepy.

Sweepy operates within 30 tiles of its dock in either direction, making Sweepy's Dock best suited to compact, clutter-prone work areas rather than broad base-wide cleanup. Sweepy can gather nearly any loose material it encounters, including solid debris, bottled liquids, and gases, and it also wipes liquid spills off the floor. This makes the dock especially useful in places where Duplicants should not or cannot work safely, such as hazardous radioactive biomes inhabited by Beetas. Since Beetas ignore the robot, Sweepy can clear up the nuclear waste they leave behind without exposing Duplicants to the area.

The dock only consumes power while charging Sweepy. If automation disables the building or it loses power, the dock can still receive debris and create new Sweepies, but it cannot recharge them. When Sweepy returns, its collected debris is stored in the dock and can be removed by Duplicants for transport elsewhere. An Auto-Sweeper can empty solids from the dock, but not liquids; liquid contents must be removed manually.

Sweepy returns to its dock under several conditions: when its carried load exceeds 500 kg, when its battery falls below 4.5 kJ, and every night, regardless of its current charge or inventory. During the night, the dock will continue to spend power as Sweepy repeatedly heads home to charge, so disabling the dock with automation or cutting power at night can reduce waste when round-the-clock cleaning is not required.

Sweepy is most effective in places where debris is constantly created or liquids are frequently spilled, such as below long ladders, near mess halls, or around Jet Suit Docks where Duplicants often make a mess. It can pass through 1-tile-high gaps, but it cannot open closed doors, jump gaps, or climb ladders, so its pathing can be controlled by the surrounding layout. It is also not considered Industrial Machinery, which means it can be built in rooms that forbid such buildings, including the Great Hall.

A few practical details are worth keeping in mind:

• Sweepy can collect up to 10 kg of debris from a tile per visit, so heavily littered tiles may need multiple passes.
• It will not pick up critter eggs.
• It does not have a decor bonus, but can still be used as a display object.
• It will not travel more than about 30 tiles from the dock, and if it cannot reach home it becomes “afraid” and waits in place for a Duplicant to recover it.
• If a Sweepy is standing on a horizontal Mechanized Airlock or Manual Airlock when it opens, the robot can fall away from the dock and become separated, requiring manual retrieval.
• Sweepy may briefly stop moving when it encounters another Sweepy, which reduces efficiency if several are assigned to the same area.

Overall, Sweepy's Dock is a specialized cleanup tool: it is weaker than an Auto-Sweeper for raw solid collection, but it excels in dangerous, flooded, or awkward spaces where a compact autonomous cleaner is safer and more flexible.