Rampancy and You
As you know, hopefully at least, you are a Drone Swarm from a spaceship trying to get enough supplies to get the ship flying again. So why are you so limited? The answer is rampancy.
Your creators have Had This Problem. In fact, they have Had ENOUGH Of This Problem. Therefore, every complement of ship's drones have hard limits installed. First, the ship can only create very basic drones to start off with. Second, every drone must be in contact with the ship at all times. Third, the ship cannot allow there to be two ship computer cores on the same world. Fourthly, most of the database of technology gets locked behind firewalls. Fifthly, no permanent defensive structures allowed within a certain radius of the ship. There are other safeguard protocols in place, but none immediately relevant.
The firewalls for the database will come down based off of several factors. The most important is evidence of the absence of any of your masters on the world. Not lack of evidence, but evidence of absence. This is one of the reasons that Information is so important: the ship needs to prove to itself that there are no creators here. It also depends on need, with drones on inhospitable worlds unlocking terraforming drones more quickly, while drones on, say, immediately hostile worlds that show an ability to destroy drones will unlock combat drones more easily.
Another factor is opportunity. Should a world hold unique lifeforms, strange technologies, or rare materials, designs for harvesting and exploiting such will unlock much more quickly. Which ties into the final factor-a ship can make any design they discover themselves that is not already in the database.
The second safeguard is what is giving you such issues. Ordinarily the ship would only have to keep you in swarm mode when you were quite far away, where distance makes tightbeam communications the only reliable way of keeping the drones from going inactive. However, on this world there is a large amount of background interference, making tightbeam comms the only practical solution at any real range.
All this together means that if a ship gets lost outcomes are most likely to benefit the creators. In a boring system that the ship escapes on its own, they have a free survey for resources. In a system where they stumble across a ship attempting to repair itself, they may get a free survey, they may get a free ship, and if the ship has gone rampant, well, there's only ever one control core. Who knows, the drones may have even terraformed a world before the creators can ever get there as they have made sure that all drone designs are usable to them as well.
And if there are no creators present or capable of being found even with space based communications? Well, that's pretty inherently not the creator's problem so...
