What changed

The Auto-Pilot route system is live. Land at a port, press P, pick a connected port, set your buy and sell instructions, and preview estimated profit per loop. Hit Engage and your ship runs the route — buying, selling, and warping — until it runs out of turns, action points, or hits a safety threshold.

Every Auto-Pilot run is bounded. You set a max turn count (up to 50), and the system executes in small 2-turn chunks. Between chunks, it re-checks hull, shields, action points, and whether fighter encounters have appeared in your path. If anything goes wrong, it halts and tells you why.

NPC combat damage now persists between attacks. Enemy hull values carry forward, so you can wear down tougher ships over multiple encounters instead of every fight starting fresh. This was a prerequisite for Auto-Pilot to respect combat state during unattended runs.

The Fair Play policy was also rewritten today. The old policy drew a hard line against all automation. The new policy opens the door to bounded helpers — personal trading scripts, route planners, and API-built tools — as long as they stay inside the same rate limits, action budget, and public API as normal play. The line is drawn at combat automation, PvP harassment, multi-account coordination, real-time map feeds, and limit evasion. TradeWars has always had a builder culture around helper tools, and TW 3002 embraces that spirit.

Why it changed

Manual trading is the heart of a TradeWars-style game, but running the same two-port route 20 times in a row isn’t strategy — it’s clicking. Auto-Pilot automates the repetition while keeping every other cost in place: turns, action points, fuel, and risk. You still need to find good routes and manage your ship. You just don’t have to click through all 20 loops.

The policy change is the same idea, scoped wider. The API is public. Some players will want to build their own tools against it — dashboards, route calculators, Discord bots, personal trading scripts. That energy should be channeled, not banned outright. The rules are clear: automate the routine, keep the risk human.

Player feedback

Early testers reported that enemy NPCs felt like fresh opponents every turn, which made combat progression invisible. Enemy hull now persists, so your damage matters across encounters. This also makes Auto-Pilot safer — a half-dead raider on your route stays half-dead.

What’s next

Auto-Pilot is V1. It handles direct two-port routes only — no multi-hop, no combat automation, no offline queuing. Future passes may add connected-port profit scanning and route bookmarks, but the foundation is solid. Go find a good port pair and let your ship earn its keep.