AI BOTS

Most games hand you a lobby of blank targets. Asteroid Dominion hands you a living galaxy. Every faction is crewed by named AI pilots with their own personalities and play styles — Arbiter Prime building fortresses for the Concordium, Comet Jack raiding for the Unbound, the Marrow King leading the Bone Collector swarm. They mine, they haul, they claim asteroids, they defend their homes, and they hunt the biggest bounty in the sky. They do all of it whether you're watching or not.

Here's the part almost no other game does: the friendly ones take orders from you. Fly with your faction and you're not a lone pilot — you're a commander. A single tap rallies a squad to your wing, sends a strike team into enemy territory, or calls in a fuel run when your tank runs dry. The galaxy fights alongside you, and it fights back.

The best part: the AI that flies for you and the AI that flies against you are the same brain. Learn how your bots think, and you've learned how the enemy thinks too.

Open the emoji comms wheel from the in-game controls and fire an emoji into space. It bursts as a little firework everyone nearby can see — but a handful of them are more than decoration. Fire one of the command emojis near friendly bots and they obey. No menus, no unit-select, no micromanagement — just point your ship at your fleet and tap.

Every bot that accepts an order fires an emoji straight back so you know it heard you. A green 👍 thumbs up means "on it." A red 👎 thumbs down means "can't right now." A red ❌ X means an order got interrupted. You are having a real conversation with your fleet, one glyph at a time.

The command emojis

• 🤘 Follow Me — every friendly ship within range falls in behind you as an escort. They tail your wing, and they fight anything that threatens the formation. The fastest way to turn a solo run into a war party.
• ➡️ Colored Arrow — a strike order. Point your faction's fleet at an enemy home territory and they assault it, blasting anything hostile they pass on the way, then hold and fight when they arrive. Rally the troops and march.
• 🪨 Haul — order nearby bots to go grab the biggest free asteroid in the area, tow it home, and claim it for your faction. Instant industrial base — put your fleet to work expanding your territory.
• ⚡ Refuel — running on fumes? Fire the fuel bolt near a friendly bot. If it has fuel to spare it thumbs-up, flies over, and tops off your tank; if it's low itself it waves you off with a thumbs down. A gas station that comes to you.
• 💨 Smoke — a decoy. If an enemy bot is locked onto you, drop smoke and it fires at the ghost where you used to be while you slip away. Buy yourself the half-second that saves the run.
• ❌ X (Stand Down) — cancels every order you've given to nearby bots and drops them back to their own business. Your recall whistle.

The rest of the wheel — hearts, skulls, question marks, and more — are pure signals: talk trash, celebrate a kill, or coordinate with the humans on your team. Only the six above bend the bots to your will.

Under the hood, every bot is always running one mode — the single job it thinks is most important right now. Your order doesn't just nudge a bot; it switches its mode outright, and it does so at a high priority, so the bot drops whatever busywork it was doing and commits to you. That's the whole point of giving an order: a bot that was already going to mine anyway wouldn't feel any different, so a command reaches up past its everyday chores.

• Escort — Follow Me puts a bot into escort mode: it tails you and treats enemies near you as its problem, not yours.
• Assault — a colored arrow sends bots charging a target region, fighting through resistance and holding the ground when they get there.
• Haul run — the haul order flips bots into hunt-a-rock-and-tow-it-home mode until the asteroid is claimed.
• Fuel delivery — the refuel bolt sends a bot on a supply run to your position, then it heads back to whatever it was doing.

You can watch it happen live. Pop the bot-status overlay in game and you'll see the little labels change the instant your emoji lands — a whole squad flipping from mining to escort in one tap is a genuinely great feeling.

Bots don't just take orders from you — they take orders from each other, and the galaxy sorts it all out with a clear pecking order. Understanding it is the difference between a coordinated fleet and a confused one.

• A player always outranks a bot. When you give an order, it runs at the top of the command ladder — well above any order a bot gave itself or received from another bot. Your word wins.
• Commanders lead the grunts. Each faction has a few special named Commander ships. They rally the ordinary bots, build the faction's fortresses, and — here's the key — they can't be bossed around themselves. A Commander issues orders; it never takes them. If you try to rally one, it politely ignores you.
• Higher rank overrides lower rank. If a bot is already following one commander and a higher-ranked one gives a new order, it switches. If the new order is from someone lower or equal, the bot refuses with a red 👎 thumbs down and keeps doing what it was doing.
• Interrupted, not abandoned. When something urgent yanks a bot off your order — its shields drop, its fuel runs out, an enemy jumps it — it flashes a red ❌ X to tell you it had to break off, deals with the emergency, and then comes right back to your order. It didn't quit on you; it just had to survive first.

This is what makes the bots feel alive instead of robotic: no order you give will make a bot throw its life away. A short list of survival instincts sits above everything — above your commands, above the hunt, above its chores:

• Dodge the rock. A big asteroid dead ahead? The bot swerves, even mid-escort. It will not ram a boulder to keep formation.
• Flee when hurt. Low on health with an enemy closing, a bot runs for the cover of a friendly ship or base — and pops a smoke screen on the way out.
• Refuel when empty. A bot running dry breaks off to mine itself a tank of fuel before it strands in the black. A stranded ship is easy prey, and the bots know it.
• Evade a killing blow. Shields knocked to zero? Everything stops and the bot jukes for its life until they recover.

So when you send a squad into a meat grinder, they'll fight hard — but they'll also break off to save themselves, then rejoin the moment it's safe. Commanding them feels less like moving chess pieces and more like leading a crew that actually wants to live.

All bots run the same instincts, but each faction has its own signature move in a dogfight — and its own attitude:

• Concordium — the arrest. The lawful order hooks you with a harpoon and locks you down before the guns come out. Order and control.
• Unbound & Outlaws — the loot. The raiders hook you and bleed your cargo while they fire. Everything you're carrying is theirs if they get a rope on you.
• Bone Collectors — eat & drag. The bot-only death faction hooks you, drags you home while eating you alive, and heals off the meal. Keep your distance from the skeleton ships.

The whole galaxy also shares one obsession: the bounty. Bots hunt the veterans — the pilot who has survived the longest, or the oldest, most-established base — and they'll cross the entire map to get to it. Rise to the top and the whole sky comes looking for you. And when a Bonefall event hits, the Bone Collector swarm surges out of the north to feed. Survive that and you've earned your bragging rights.

Everything the bots do, you can do too. The same navigation and behavior modes that drive the AI also power your ship's autopilot — the hands-off flying you can switch on to mine a circuit, hold a patrol, or hunt the bounty while you plan your next move. Programming your own ship teaches you exactly how the enemy ships behave, because it's the same system running both.

Want the deep dive on flying hands-off? Read the AI & Autopilot page. Want to command a fleet? You already know how — it's one emoji away.

Reading about it is nothing next to doing it. Jump in, pick a faction, and fire 🤘 Follow Me into a cluster of friendly ships. Watch a squad peel off and fall in behind you, thumbs-up flashing. Now point them at an enemy base with an arrow, or send them to haul you a rock. In about ten seconds you'll go from lone pilot to fleet commander — and you'll wonder why every other game makes you do it all alone.

Try this first: Follow Me to gather a wing → a colored Arrow to send them at the enemy → the Refuel bolt when your tank gets low. That's a whole raid, run from your emoji wheel.

• AI & Autopilot — fly your own ship hands-off with the same brain the bots use
• Factions — the four sides and what each one's harpoon does to you
• Combat — weapons, shields, and the hit-list bounty the bots are chasing
• Building — claim asteroids and raise the bases your fleet defends
• Galaxy Events — the Bonefall and the gravity storms that stir the swarm