OUT TO THE BLACK

Out to the Black ships with a deep AI autopilot system. It runs your ship hands-off when you tell it to, so you can focus on strategy without losing your seat at the controls. The same AI also drives every NPC ship in the galaxy — the faction patrols, the Bone Collector swarm, the Concordium hit-list responders. The behaviors you can program for yourself are the behaviors they use against you.

The system has two layers that combine: a navigation mode (where to fly) and a behavior mode (what to do while flying). You set each independently from the Navigation screen, accessible from the in-game menu. Together they cover almost every gameplay loop — mining circuits, patrol routes, defensive holdouts, even active hunting of the hit-list target.

Manual control overrides everything. Any input on your engine keys cancels the active autopilot for the current moment. The autopilot resumes when you stop providing input. There's never a moment where the AI is fighting you for control of the ship.

Navigation answers the question: "where should the ship be?" Three modes, each useful in a different situation.

Stay

The ship holds its current position. The autopilot fires whatever engines are needed to fight gravity, brake drift, and remain in place. Useful for mining (stay locked onto an asteroid while the laser drains it) and for defensive holding patterns (camp a wormhole entrance and engage anyone who arrives).

Stay is the default mode if you stop providing input for several seconds. The ship doesn't drift indefinitely; it actively maintains position.

Run Away

The ship flees from nearby threats. The autopilot weighs enemy ship positions, asteroid positions, and gravity, and picks a heading that minimizes danger. A pull-toward-home-sector vector is blended in so you tend to retreat toward friendly territory rather than into the unknown.

This is the mode you put your ship in when you've taken serious damage and need to retreat while you handle something else (chat, leveling, looking at the leaderboard). It's not invincibility — a determined chaser can still catch you — but it's a reliable hands-off defensive response.

Go

The ship flies toward whatever the behavior layer has targeted. Brakes inside 350 units of the target and lets the behavior take over. Pair with Mine to auto-fly to an asteroid; pair with Shoot to auto-close-on-target; pair with Build to auto-fly to a buildable rock.

Go is the "do the thing" navigation mode — it commits to action rather than holding position or retreating.

Behavior answers the question: "what should the ship do while it's flying?" Five modes, layered on top of navigation.

Mine

Locks onto the nearest asteroid and fires the mining laser. Auto-aims when in Stay or Go (the ship rotates to face the rock for you); fires passively in manual flight (if you happen to be pointing at a rock during a fight, the laser engages — useful for incidental fuel top-ups).

Combined with Go, Mine becomes a hands-off mining circuit. The ship flies to a rock, mines it, flies to the next one when the first is gone.

Shoot

Targets the hit-list player by default. Falls back to the nearest enemy if no hit-list target is in range. Fires bullets when aimed and in range. The auto-aim is leading-fire — the autopilot accounts for the target's velocity, so it leads moving targets the way a skilled human does.

Combined with Stay, Shoot becomes a turret-on-your-own-ship — sit in a chokepoint and shoot anything that comes through. Combined with Go, it becomes an active hunter that closes on its target.

Patrol

Roams a wide area (about ±2000 units) around your faction's home sector. Engages any intruder within 1600 units of your ship. Resumes the patrol after the engagement ends.

Patrol is the standard Concordium behavior. AI patrol ships in the field use this same logic — that's why you'll often see Concordium NPCs flying in lazy figure-eights around their sector, then suddenly converging on an intruder. You can join them by setting your own ship to Patrol.

Defend

Same engagement logic as Patrol but with a much tighter roam radius (±500 units). Stays close to home, fights intruders that come close, doesn't chase. Good for solo defenders or for guarding a specific base.

Build

Navigates to the nearest tier-2+ unclaimed asteroid. Auto-fires harpoon when in range. Opens the Build Screen when the harpoon attaches. The pilot picks the structure type; the rest is automatic.

Build is how new players ramp up their base footprint efficiently. Hit Build, set Go, and your ship handles the search-and-attach. You only need to pay attention when the Build Screen opens to confirm the structure.

EVADE is a panic behavior that activates automatically when your shields drop to zero, regardless of what navigation or behavior mode you've set. The ship rotates away from the nearest threat and starts a bob-and-weave maneuver designed to make incoming bullets miss.

EVADE buys time. It doesn't win the fight. The right response to seeing EVADE engage is to recognize you're in serious trouble — your shields are gone, you're flickering through the 5-second reboot — and to either disengage hard with manual input or accept that you're about to die.

Any manual flight input cancels EVADE. If you have a plan, override it. If you don't, let the autopilot run; the bob-and-weave is statistically better than random panic flailing.

Every NPC ship in the galaxy uses these same modes. The Bone Collector swarm, the Concordium patrols, the Unbound mining fleets — they're all running real-time decisions through the same Navigation + Behavior + EVADE pipeline that you have access to.

This has practical implications. You can predict what an AI ship will do because you know which mode it's in. A Concordium ship circling its sector is on Patrol. The moment it pivots toward you, it has detected you as an intruder and engaged its Shoot behavior. You have a few seconds before it's in firing range. Use them.

A swarm of Bone Collectors flying loose patterns through their southern sector is on Patrol with a wide roam radius. They engage at 1600 units. Stay outside that radius and they ignore you.

An AI ship that suddenly drops shields and starts bob-weaving is in EVADE. It's vulnerable. Press the attack.

Knowing the AI's decision tree is the difference between a player who wins fights and a player who survives them.

• Stay + Mine. Hands-off mining stance. Lock the position; let the laser do the work.
• Go + Mine. Auto-mining circuit. Ship flies asteroid-to-asteroid extracting on each.
• Stay + Shoot. Turret defense. You become a stationary anti-everything platform.
• Run Away + (nothing). Flee mode. Ship retreats toward home, you handle interruption.
• Go + Build. Auto-base-building. Ship finds asteroids and queues up the Build Screen for you to confirm.
• Patrol + Patrol behavior. The default Concordium loop. Roam, engage intruders, return.
• Defend + Shoot. Solo base defender. Tight area, aggressive response.

• Factions — why the Bone Collector swarm feels overwhelming
• Combat — what the Shoot behavior is actually doing under the hood
• Mining & Economy — pair the Mine behavior with a good route
• Building & Claiming — how Build behavior accelerates base growth