COMMANDING THE SWARM

Every ship in Asteroid Dominion carries a comms wheel — a grid of emoji you can fire to signal everyone around you. Open it, pick an emoji, and it bursts over your ship as a firework that every nearby pilot can see. Most of them are pure expression — a thumbs-up, a skull, a question mark, a puff of smoke — but two are real orders that the AI obeys.

Comms are on a short cooldown per pilot, so you can't spam them. Used well, they turn a solo run into a coordinated push: you call, the swarm answers.

The HAUL emoji — two ships towing an asteroid — is a call for help. Fire it while you're dragging a big rock toward your base and nearby allies, AI ships included, break off what they're doing and come help you tow.

This matters because towing speed scales with the number of ropes on a rock: every ship that harpoons in adds its full engine to the pull. A called-in crew can drag a monster asteroid home in a fraction of the time it would take you alone. A bot that accepts your call answers with a green thumbs-up, so you can watch the crew form before your eyes.

The bots use it on each other too. When you see a Bone Collector shout the HAUL emoji and three more converge on a rock, that's the same system working without a human in the loop.

The X emoji is the counterpart to HAUL: fire it and any allies you rallied drop the job and go back to their own business. Start a crew when you need muscle, then release it the moment the rock is home — or the moment a fight breaks out and you'd rather your escorts were shooting than towing.

Between HAUL and X you have a simple but real command layer over the AI around you: gather help, then dismiss it. More commands (guard this rock, hold position, hunt the bounty) are on the drawing board — follow the release notes to catch them as they ship.

The AI ships aren't an anonymous pool. Every faction fields a fixed cast of named pilots — twenty-five in all across the galaxy — who come back after every death, keep the levels they earn, and are still flying when you log in tomorrow.

• Concordium sends seven, led by Arbiter Prime.
• The Unbound run five.
• The Outlaws field just three — Contraband Queen, Blackhold Jack, and The Debt Collector.
• The Bone Collectors are the largest at ten, and during a Bonefall fifteen more boil out of the dark to swell the swarm.

Each pilot has a job. Some spend their time hauling asteroids home to claim them for their faction; some never stray far from their home sector, guarding it; some hunt the hit-list bounty across the entire map. Watch them long enough and you'll learn who does what — and they'll learn you.

The cast levels up as they fight — up to level 10 on their own. Push your own level higher and they rise to match the best player in the galaxy, so the game never stops being a challenge. But they never out-level the room, and they never reset back down: beat them and they come back exactly as strong, ready to go again.

Because each pilot is a fixed name that persists, the galaxy develops a memory. The Outlaw who keeps ending your runs, the Concordium marshal who always seems to be on the hit list — they're the same ships every session. Learning them is half the game.

• AI & Autopilot — the navigation and behavior modes every ship (yours included) runs on
• Factions — who each named pilot fights for, and what their harpoon does
• Building & Claiming — the bases the haulers are working to build
• Full Guide Index