The planet still had survivors.
This fact greatly lifted Hao Ren's spirits and stirred his curiosity. His attention to the matter even temporarily made him forget his miserable situation after plunging headfirst from outer space into the planet's surface. In the Dream Plane, this damned apocalyptic world, planets with Firstborn on them—and planets destroyed by Firstborn—were never in short supply. A drone swarm could go out for a spin and bring back at least ten ruin scans, but very few of those ruins contained survivors, and survivors who still persisted in resisting were unheard of. The few aircraft from earlier had made that clear: not only were the survivors on this planet still fighting, they even dared to take the initiative and strike!
So although Hao Ren hadn't rashly established communications with those aircraft, he had the Data Terminal keep watch on them and intercept as much of their communications as possible. If an opportunity arose, they had to establish contact with these survivors as soon as possible.
Of course, the most important thing at present was to secure their own foothold. Acting cautiously was the primary condition for ensuring the mission's completion. Nolan was still a critically wounded patient sprawled in the impact crater, and aside from the group of companions at home, the only forces Hao Ren could deploy were a group of Autonomous Mechanical Units and the arsenal in his personal storage space. After estimating the combined combat strength of all these resources, he concluded that it wasn't enough to seize sufficient control of the situation when dealing with the local natives. Therefore, he had to take things slowly.
The survivors weren't necessarily friendly. After fighting a mad Firstborn for thousands of years, they might be another group of lunatics.
Still, Nolan's fall had caused such a