Depots — where your fleet starts from

What a depot is

A depot is the yard your machines start from — where the fleet parks, fuels, and loads material before a storm. It's a start point, not a territory: it marks where each machine rolls out from. It does not carve the map into zones or assign machines to areas — every storm, the whole fleet works one shared pool of jobs as a swarm, so any machine can end up anywhere.

Add a depot

1. Open Depots and choose New depot.
2. Name it for the yard as your crew calls it.
3. Set its point on the map — where machines actually stage, not the office address if they differ.
4. Save. It's now available as an anchor when you build a pass.

How the depot shapes dispatch

• Sensible first stop. A machine leaving the yard picks its first property by real road distance from the depot, so it doesn't dead-head across town for stop one.
• Start-spread from the yard. On the opening move of a storm, machines leaving the depot prefer properties away from where peers already headed, so the fleet fans out across the perimeter instead of piling onto the nearest lots.
• It's optional. A machine with no depot just starts from its live GPS location.

The overall sweep direction is measured from the centre of the storm's open jobs by default — not the depot — so the fleet sweeps the whole footprint together and heals around a machine that drops out. You can switch a pass to measure direction from the depot instead, but that's opt-in and off by default (see Pass direction & anchor).

Depots and locations

A large operation runs a depot per region — a natural yard for each location. That keeps first stops and start-spread realistic, but it still doesn't hand a machine a fixed territory: the swarm stays one shared pool of jobs, and any machine can be sent anywhere the storm needs it.