v0.1.0: Combat, Markets, and a Difficulty Dial

This is the first versioned release of Cultures of the Belt. We've been shipping continuously since launch, but this is the first time we're drawing a line in the ore dust and saying: here's what the game is, as of today.

Combat

Defender robots now engage and repel hostile faction ships when they enter your operation's territory. This isn't a full combat system — it's the foundation. Defenders intercept. Factions respond to losses. The belt has teeth now.

We also fixed the save/load behavior for faction dispositions and combat spawn timers, which previously reset on reload and caused factions to forget they were at war with you.

The Resource Market

You can now sell resources directly to faction traders. Set a sell order, and your haulers will carry the load. Faction offers now reflect actual scarcity in their operations — if they have too much of something, they don't want more. No more same-resource trades.

ARIA for Everyone

ARIA — the Commander AI who narrates your operation — previously required you to bring your own API key. That's a friction point for new players, especially playtesters. v0.1.0 ships a built-in token proxy so playtesters can experience ARIA without any configuration. Just load the game with a proxy key in the URL and she's live.

ARIA also received two behavioral upgrades this cycle: she now narrates research completions and construction milestones in her morning reports, and her research direction advice is now gated behind the Signal Analysis tech unlock — which means it shows up when it's actually useful, not from minute one.

Difficulty and Seeds

The title screen now has a difficulty picker. Not just "easy/medium/hard" — actual gameplay parameters you can tune before starting. The pause menu lets you adjust mid-run.

Every new run also starts from a random seed, displayed on screen. You can enter a custom seed to replay or share a specific belt layout. This is essential for playtesting — if a playtest session produces something interesting, we can reproduce it exactly.

Minimap and UI Overhaul

The minimap is three times larger, color-codes robots by type (miners, haulers, scouts, defenders each get distinct colors), and now displays named locations. A drag-to-resize handle lets you set it to whatever size works for your screen.

The overall UI was also reorganized: left sidebar, tabbed tech tree panel, minimap anchored to the top right. Less clutter. More space for the actual asteroid belt.