What changed

The Auto-Pilot panel now opens with a Route Scanner at the top. It scans every port directly connected to your current sector and ranks profitable commodity pairs — buy ore at 95 here, sell it at 110 one warp away. Each route card shows estimated profit, how many loops you can run before local supply dries up, and a commodity-level breakdown.

Click Use on any route and it pre-fills the Auto-Pilot form with the best port pair and commodity combo. Run a Dry Run to verify the numbers, then hit Engage.

You can still configure routes manually below the scanner if you want full control. The scanner respects directional port rules (no same-port flipping) and checks trade in both directions — buy at current, sell at neighbor, and buy at neighbor, sell back here.

Why it changed

Trade in the directional port economy requires finding complementary port pairs. Before the scanner, you had to guess which neighbor to trade with or manually compare Market screens. The scanner eliminates the guesswork — it answers “which route should I run from here?” in one API call.

What’s next

The scanner is single-hop for now (your current sector → one neighbor). Multi-hop route scanning (A → B → C chains) and galaxy-wide “best route finder” are on the roadmap, but they need caching to stay fast. For now, scout your local neighborhood and let the scanner point you at the credits.