Minefields no longer grow without bound. Armid fields now obey a 1,000-mine cap per sector, and they decay 5% each day, so a saturated field can never feel permanent. On release, any sector that already held more than 1,000 armids was reduced proportionally across its owners — each owner kept their relative share of the now-capped field.

Armid damage is also fairer. When a field detonates on entry, the damage is absorbed by your fighters first, then shields, then hull, so a ship with a screen can react before eating hull. A bare hull still takes it directly.

Disruptors are the new countermeasure. You can carry up to 10 of them (bought at a StarDock for 50,000 credits each) and spend one in a hostile sector to clear roughly 12% of the armids there — a bounded slice, split across owners, capped between 1 and 120 per use. They never wipe a dense field in one shot, and limpets are untouched, so a fortress sector still takes several disruptors and a reload trip to unstack.

Everything is server-authoritative and behaves identically in The Void and The Abyss.