Yeah, I'm flying a super basic drone with none of the built-in crash avoidance / navigation / etc. stuff for now. I'll upgrade to something fancier later, but for now I'm totally satisfied with something I can crash repeatedly and when it breaks, throw it away (or salvage parts from it to build another drone).

I'll look into the simulator thing. I didn't even realize that drone simulators were a "thing" so I had not gone looking for anything like that.