OKAY SO.
in my little hypothetical the ancients aren’t as obsessed with discovering how to ascend as they are in the actual game, so they make the iterators smaller and less intense (which also makes them easier and faster to build so there’s more of them than in the base game) and can move around freely (they don’t have all the power they have in the base game though, they’re a lot more compact), this also prevents the heavy output of water vapor causing the intense rain the regular rain world has to be nonexistent.
they didn’t always have the wings actually, so during the no wings time they would use ‘nanny drones’ (who don’t have complex thought) to follow them around kind of like overseers that would get them out of trouble and keep them from going too far and stuff, then one day one ancient has the brilliant idea to give them wings so they could move around faster and get to hard to reach places without squidcada, they also get the idea to add charging ports so that if they go too far they’ll loupes power and be forced to come back to base and recharge (the iterators can also get power from the environment in case of emergency or they take longer to get back to base but the environmental energy is a lot less powerful than the base energy & causes a lethargic feeling for the iterators [they get sleepy, basically])
that’s my silly little au idea