A good way to get items quickly is to send drones 2-3 squares away from you to empty slots that surround you. Once you do that move in any direction by about 5 squares and then do the same thing again.
Recycling glasses, watches and lightbulbs are good items to recycle for glass if you have a lot of them. Magnifiers and test tubes don’t seem to be too difficult to find and they tend to give you quite a lot of glass, especially Magnifiers. So whenever you find Magnifiers or at least a few test tubes and you need glass then go recycle them, but I do agree with you though. There needs to be more a lot more glass and probably a few more plastic items to find. Too many metal items, but more is better than less.
You have missed my point AND you haven't understood how it works.
First of all it doesn't make ANY difference how far away from your position you send a drone to an empty field, in fact you can send 23 (that's my current max) drones simultaneously to THE SAME field, just 1 away from your position, it will complete 23 missions within 1 minute and it will find the EXACT same stuff you find if you send your drones to all different fields.
You don't even have to select the field every time, you select the field once and then you click "send a drone" 23 times in a row, takes less than 20 seconds (if your computer is fast enough to update the display that fast).
Even if you misclick and launch the same "real" mission twice in a row, the first of the two drones will pick the item from the field and the 2nd drone arriving just half a second later will see this as an empty field where it finds things to recycle, only in this case the empty field costs you just as much energy as the item.
But then my main point was that you ALWAYS find so much more metal than anything else, that you end up with a huge supply of metal and no way to use it, because you're missing the glass to upgrade the drones.
