ARIA grades the danger around her, keeps score of her own forecasts, and keeps a ledger of what her trading does to the ports.

• ARIA keeps what she learned from watching you. Menu and button taps were crowding your real work out of her memory. They no longer count, and learning saved before this release is tidied the first time it loads.
• Threat is graded instead of on or off: how many hostiles, how close, how fast they are closing and how tough they are, against her own guns, hull and battery. One drone drifting past is still not a reason to leave a belt. A pack closing on a hurt hull sends her to the yard sooner.
• She remembers where trouble was for a few minutes and prefers a yard whose lane does not run past it.
• She picks a buyer on the whole hold: what the lot fetches once her own selling has pushed the price down, and what the port can actually pay.
• New standing order, Steward weight. Above 0 she leans toward a port that is short of the cargo and away from one she would flood. At 0 she sells for the best price and nothing else.
• ARIA CORE has two new sections. WHAT SHE SEES: the scene, the threat grade, and anything that changed in the sky — a price step, raiders arriving, hulks appearing. HER WAKE: what she sold and bought where, what it did to prices and to your standing, what her own price moves cost, and station lines her cargo started or her buying stopped.
• ARIA CORE shows "Forecasts kept": how often her jobs came off, against how sure she said she was. The confidence figure is corrected by that record.
• Old results fade with time in the sky rather than counting for ever, and a change in the sky marks the affected kind of work down until she has flown it again.

No Sol reset or save migration is required. Standing orders and learning are kept.

Not in this release: planning more than one job ahead, pilots claiming a seam or hulk so two ARIAs do not pile onto it, and a spoken explanation.

Salvage plate now reaches your hold on a busy or slow device.

• In Sol, plate the rig cut loose could hang a short way off your ship and never come aboard when the game was running slowly or had just hitched. It now stays with you and is reeled in as normal.
• Loose rock near your ship is kept with you the same way.

No save migration is required.

Tested in a headless browser on a software renderer, which is far slower than a phone; not yet on a phone.

A wreck now looks like a wreck, and you work it from close enough to see it.

• The autopilot and ARIA park a few hull lengths off a hulk instead of hundreds of units away, so the wreck fills a good part of the view while it is cut.
• Hulks are scorched, torn and smouldering, and come apart from the stern as the rig takes their sections. The bridge goes last.
• What the rig sheds is drawn as hull plate and crates, at the size of plate off that hull, and is reeled across to you at a speed you can follow. It used to be drawn as rock, bigger than the ship it came off.
• The cutting arc lands on the part of the hull that is about to come off, and is sized to the hull rather than hiding it.
• The lock box and waypoint mark sit on the hulk instead of trailing a little behind it.
• The rig lights as she arrives, not from its full reach.
• A long frame or a tab coming back no longer lets a hulk drift away from a ship holding station on it.
• A small hull cut up in a few seconds no longer ends a salvage loop with an error.

No save migration is required.

Tested in a desktop browser at phone size; not yet on a phone. Flying the rig by hand it still reaches 600 u, and from there a hull is still a dot: close in to see it.

Hulks in Sol are now shared between pilots, and ARIA flies full salvage runs there.

• The wrecks GNN reports are now in your sky when you join, in the same place for every pilot, and a hulk somebody has cut up is gone for everyone.
• ARIA flies full salvage runs in Sol: she picks a hulk as soon as she has the conn, works several, docks, sells and goes again.
• A salvage pilot's ARIA no longer goes mining when there is nothing to cut. She waits for a hulk and says so. If you mine as well as salvage, she still will.
• The rig starts cutting as she arrives at a hulk instead of half a minute later.
• A salvage loop asked to CUT makes its first cut in CUT.
• A hulk she cannot get to is passed over for another instead of ending the run.
• One failed run no longer puts ARIA off a job for the rest of the watch; she tries again a few minutes later.
• ARIA takes deck gravity and the floodlights off the bus while the rig is drawing the battery down, so the rig rests less.
• Selling at the port you are already docked at no longer casts off and docks again first. This applies to your own loops too.
• Cargo pod recoveries no longer come home short because the tractor was stowed on the way out.
• A ship you destroy leaves its hulk for other pilots as well.

No save migration is required.

Tested in a desktop browser against a private copy of Sol; not yet flown on a phone, and not with two pilots working the same hulk. Hulks still have no owner: anyone may cut anything.

Salvage is open. It had its verb and nothing that flew it: no mission op, no ARIA plan, a tutorial branch that still described the dwell timer, and a bench that had never been run with the rig in the loop.

SALVAGE, the mission op. The pick is credits per second over leg + cut, and it passes over a hulk that will age out first, one under a hostile port's guns, one behind a world, one in a belt unless it is worth 2.5× as much, and one with a raider or a nest still over it. A low battery rests the rig (28% → 65%) instead of standing the mission down.

Jobs on hulks. "Recover a wreck" spawns a real, pinned, whole hulk sized to the order, on the port's approaches rather than in a belt shoal, on the open side of a tethered port and riding that port's world. "Salvage N plate" takes hull steel off any hulk. A flight recorder is handed in at any honest port for 350 cr + 240 per hull tier and trains Law.

ARIA flies it. The terminal player plans wreck and plate orders as SALVAGE → DOCK → DELIVER, sells or keeps what else came aboard, and flies free salvage between orders. At the conn she plans a salvage run when the pilot's habits or career say so. AUTO is STRIP while it is quiet and CUT under threat, and for an order: CUT, unless the wreck has no plate to spare.

What the bench found. The first run with all of the above was 0.15× Mining. None of it was pay:

• A hulk outside a world's sphere of influence lies in the star's frame; a ship inside it brakes against the world. Near the edge the autopilot braked for ever against a target leaving at 39 u/s — eight minutes for a 21 km leg, on a flat battery.
• A hull waiting on the core's jump reserve (65% of the battery) with the shed line at 45% shed nothing, never made the reserve under fire, and sat there until the leg was given up — then flew it again. Waiting 10 s on the reserve now sheds comforts and the tractor; 25 s stows the guns until she can jump.
• The newest hulks are where the killing is. See the pick, above.
• The rig worked at 0.4 plate/s STRIP, 1.0 CUT against a cutter's 3 to 6 ore/s. It is now 1.0 and 2.5; the 2.5:1, the 85% CUT yield and the draw are unchanged, so a plate costs less charge than it did.
• Orders were a third the size of a mining order for the same flying. Plate and wreck orders are sized to half the hold, and pay 3.6× and 3.2× the plate's base value.

The open loops from 0.3.88.

• Late break-off on a flat battery. The break-off line is the repair line plus 0.20 when the battery is under 25%, in both ARIAs. At the conn, a break-off is followed by the yard even when the hull is over the repair line.
• Drone culls did not count belt drones. A rogue drone with no nest and no owner is reported to the desk as a rogue.
• The dogleg was ARIA's only. Any plan with more than one step flies round a world across its lane. A single "go there" still stops and says why.

Also.

• A hulk somebody is flying to or cutting is not the one the cap of 48 throws away, and does not age out from under the beam.
• The rig is put back as the pilot had it when a mission leaves the SALVAGE step.
• The tutorial's salvage branch is RIG: lock a hulk, STRIP or CUT, reel, sell — with MARK HULK when the nearest is out of sight and the Salvage board when the sky has none.

| career | median cr/min | range | done / dropped | |---|---|---|---| | mining | 3,513 | 2,088 – 4,655 | 5 / 0 | | salvage | 3,061 | 2,461 – 3,573 | 5 / 0 |

Ratio 0.87×, band 2,459 – 4,567. Mining's own median moved between 3,237 and 4,109 across four runs of the same mining code — the runs are not seeded below the exploration coin — so against the highest of those Salvage is 0.75×: inside, with less room. At 0.3.85 the pair was 611 against 933.

ARIA at the conn, headless, 30 sky-minutes, 20,000 cr: miner +30,703, salvor +81,553.

All 107 node suites pass on that tree.

Not verified. Not flown on a phone. Not flown with two players.

Still open.

• Hulks are session state: not saved, not shared between players. A wreck order does not survive a reload.
• No ownership, claims or prize law. Anyone may cut anything.
• Salvager drones do not work hulk sections.
• Hand loops are not at parity: with no orders, ARIA's SALVAGE LOOP out-earns her MINE LOOP about 2.7× at the conn. The gate measures board work.
• Parity is measured on the B hull. The A hull's orders are smaller.
• The autopilot's approach law (4.5% of range per second) is why a 9 km leg takes 80 s. It is every career's, so it was left alone.

Reported: ARIA warps to a station and docks, undocks at once, warps to the belt, locks back onto the station, warps home and docks, for ever. No mining loop, no board work, no hiring, no charter. Reproduced headless in both ARIAs — at the conn and in the terminal player — and traced to the ARIA Core patch that had been laid over 0.3.87, plus two faults 0.3.87 already had. This release carries ARIA Core and the earlier mining-loop hotfix with them fixed, so it applies to a clean 0.3.87 or over either of those zips.

The loop. Core's "avoid hostiles" order broke work off whenever a hostile contact was inside 6,000 u. The belt spawns rogue drones 4,200 u from any hull near it, so in a belt the test was always true: drop the job, run for a yard, dock, the 30 s hold already spent on the flight home, undock, fly back, drop it again. The order is now a line on the hull — contacts close AND the hull under the captain's repair line AND a yard she can reach and pay — and with a whole hull she keeps working with the guns on CASTLE, as she did before Core.

Board work. In the terminal player every "threat" drop left its contract on the books; five idle contracts lock the desk. A job broken off for the yard is now PAUSED: the contract is kept, she patches, and picks it up again if the clock allows. A contract she holds and is not flying is flown before anything new is taken. A resumed job no longer sells the ore it had already cut.

Hiring, charter, treasury, combat, drones. Core shipped those authorities withheld. Every authority now starts granted; the Core panel is where a captain takes one away. A mind saved by the Core patch drops its authority block once, since it could not tell a captain's choice from the withheld defaults.

The reserve. Core's 15,000 cr reserve was applied to everything, repairs included: a pilot with less than that could never patch a hull, buy a load or pay a hiring bonus. It now guards investments only (refits, a charter, settling crew). Repairs are never held back, cargo and hiring keep 800 cr aboard, a treasury transfer is not a purchase, and a load over the purchase ceiling is trimmed to it rather than refused after the flight to the shelf.

Two faults 0.3.87 already had.

• The signature lock breaks when the nose swings 60° off the target and takes the jump target with it. The jump key reads that target, so a leg could ask for a jump for ever — "warp unavailable, no target" — while it drifted.
• A world across the corridor ended the step ("jupiter in lane") and with it the mission. An ARIA mission now flies the dogleg itself.

Also.

• The terminal player tends the bus: comfort loads go off as the battery runs down with nothing spare, and with a flat battery she waits for charge. Before, a stood-down mission was replaced every think tick by a fresh contract that was stood down a second later, until the hull was gone.
• Wreck and pod recoveries switch the SALVAGE system on over the site and clear the hold first when it cannot take the load.
• The Core panel rebuilt its readout every frame; it now redraws on change.
• MINE's recharge pause no longer cuts in while the core is spooling.

Measured (headless, mining, 40 sky-minutes, 20,000 cr purse, three seeds):

| seed | 0.3.87 | 0.3.87 + Core | 0.3.88 | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | +36,112 · 5 done, 1 dropped | +34,220 · 5/5 · no hires, no charter | +79,138 · 10/0 | | 2 | +26,169 · 3/1 | +24,982 · 6/4 · none | +161,454 · 11/0 | | 3 | +88,531 · 8/0 | +72,309 · 8/6 · none | +79,370 · 10/0 |

Every 0.3.88 run registered a company and hired; no Core run did.

At the conn, 30 sky-minutes from the 3,100 cr start, two seeds: 0.3.87 +25,847 and +27,798; Core +5,400 and +5,400 (11–12 dockings, nothing mined); 0.3.88 +20,216 and +34,148, flying mine → dock → sell → repair → refit.

Salvage career in the terminal player, 25 sky-minutes: 0.3.87 +10,545 with 42 autopilot stand-downs and the hull lost; 0.3.88 +49,132 with none.

In headless Chromium at 412×915: the HUD's ARIA button takes the conn, she flies four mine → dock → sell loops with one break-off at 54% hull and a refit, NAV › ARIA CORE draws with every authority ticked, and unticking one withholds it and saves it.

Open. A break-off at the default 55% line can be late for a hull with a flat battery climbing out of a belt under fire: one conn run reached 18% hull before the yard and the salvage hull reached 2%. Raising the repair line in ARIA CORE moves it. Drone-cull contracts do not count the belt's own drones. ARIA does not fly the salvage rig.