AI & AUTOPILOT

Asteroid Dominion ships with a deep AI autopilot. It runs your ship hands-off when you tell it to, so you can think about strategy without giving up your seat. The same brain drives every AI ship in the galaxy — the faction patrols, the Bone Collector swarm, the hit-list responders. The behaviors you can hand to your own ship are the behaviors they use against you.

There are four AI functions — Stay, Circle Asteroid, Hunt and Build — and a separate Auto-Fire switch. Each function is one button on the HUD. Exactly one of them can be running at a time, and Auto-Fire is independent of all four, so the gun can be covering you whatever the ship is doing.

Engage a function and the AI console takes over the joystick corner, with a CANCEL ring in the middle of it. That is deliberate: an AI function takes the ship and keeps it. Touching the stick does not quietly steal it back. There are four ways out, and only four — press CANCEL, pick a different function, press the same button again to switch it off, or hit Esc.

One button each, one at a time. Every one of them flies the ship and decides what it does when it gets there — you are not assembling a function out of parts.

Stay S

The ship holds position. The autopilot burns whatever engines it needs to fight gravity, kill drift, and sit still inside a tolerance band around the anchor. The anchor is stamped by the server at the moment you press it, so it is the spot you actually chose rather than wherever the ship had drifted to by the time the request landed.

Use it to park while you read the map, work the leaderboard, or plan a route. Use it in a chokepoint with Auto-Fire on and you are a turret.

Circle Asteroid C

The ship orbits a nearby rock instead of pinning itself to a point. You stay near your work, you keep moving — and a moving ship is a much worse target than a parked one.

This is the mining stance. Circle the rock you are draining and let the orbit do the flying.

Hunt V

The ship closes on a target and fights it. Hunt picks up the hit-list bounty first and falls back to the nearest enemy, and it fires with lead — the autopilot accounts for where the target is going, not where it is, the way a good pilot does.

Hunt is the one function whose whole job is to leave and go kill something, so it is the one function Safety Mode refuses. Under a truce your guns are cold; engaging Hunt would send you chasing someone across the galaxy with nothing to fire when you arrived. The button simply declines rather than dissolving the truce for you.

Build B

The ship runs the whole build program. It searches the field for an asteroid you are allowed to build on, flies there, fires the harpoon on approach, and opens the Asteroid screen when the rope attaches. You pick the structure; it does the rest, then goes looking for the next one.

It will also mine to fund itself when the hold is empty. And when it cannot proceed, it says so — the banner's second line names the reason, whether the hold is full, there is no command point to spend, the approach is blocked, or a structure is already going up. A silent stopped ship is the one thing this program will not do to you.

Auto-Fire is not a fifth function. It is a separate axis: a toggle that keeps your gun answering threats while you fly, or while one of the four functions flies for you. Switch functions and Auto-Fire stays exactly as you left it.

It is also the only autopilot a fresh ship starts with. Spawn in and you are holding the stick with the gun covering you — the ship does not fly itself anywhere until you ask it to.

Underneath whatever you selected, a survival ladder is watching. When a rung fires it takes navigation away from your function until the emergency passes, then hands it straight back. You do not switch this on and you cannot switch it off — it is the floor under all four functions. In order:

• Fight back. Something has a rope on you and is killing you. The ship turns and shoots the thing on the other end of it rather than being towed away quietly.
• Evade. Your shields have hit zero. The ship breaks away from the nearest hazard and starts juking so incoming rounds miss. This buys you the reboot; it does not win the fight.
• Dodge the rock. A big asteroid is on a collision course. A tight, late swerve — the ship gets out of the way and gets back on task.
• Run. Badly hurt with a live threat nearby. The ship disengages instead of trading.
• Refuel. Fuel below a quarter of your tank. The ship goes and gets some — a fuel drop, a rock it can mine, or a friendly Command Center — and does not return to the task until the tank is back over half.
• Defend. Engage what comes close, on a short leash, without chasing it over the horizon.

So a hands-off ship is not a helpless one. It will interrupt itself to stay alive, and the banner tells you which rung took over.

Every AI ship in the galaxy runs on the same engine your autopilot does. The Bone Collector swarm, the Concordium patrols, the Unbound mining fleets — the same decision ladder, the same survival rungs, the same leading fire.

They have more of it than you do, and that is deliberate. An AI pilot needs a personality to be worth flying against — patrols, escorts, haulers, hunters, the free-will tasks that make a named pilot recognizable. You already bring a personality, so your side of it is four functions that do one thing each and do it predictably.

The practical consequence is that AI ships are readable. A ship circling its own sector is patrolling; the moment it pivots at you, it has decided you are a target and you have a few seconds before it is in range. A ship that suddenly stops shooting and starts weaving has lost its shields and is on the evade rung — that one is vulnerable, and pressing the attack is usually right.

Knowing what the AI is about to do is most of the difference between winning fights and surviving them.

• Circle Asteroid + Auto-Fire. The standard mining stance. You orbit your rock, the gun handles anything that wanders in.
• Stay + Auto-Fire. A turret in a chokepoint. Park on the line you want held and let people come to you.
• Build + Auto-Fire. Hands-off expansion. The ship finds rocks, harpoons them and opens the screen; you approve structures and stay armed the whole time.
• Hunt. Bounty work. Engage it when the hit list rotates onto someone you can reach, and let the lead-fire do the aiming.
• Stay, while you are away from the keyboard. The ship holds its spot instead of drifting into something. The survival ladder still covers it.

And the combination nobody expects to need: Auto-Fire alone. No function engaged, you flying by hand, the gun answering for itself. It is the spawn default because it is genuinely the best setting for learning the ship.

• Factions — why the Bone Collector swarm feels overwhelming
• Combat — what Hunt is actually doing under the hood
• Mining & Economy — pair Circle Asteroid with a good route
• Building & Claiming — what the Build program is building for you