The Belt Remembers

This is the biggest Cultures of the Belt update yet. Anomalies no longer fire within seconds of starting a new game. Your fleet can declare a manifesto. Factions offer mentorship. And miners have finally learned to come home before they run out of fuel.

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Anomaly Pacing

Discovery is no longer instant. Anomalies require minimum game time and depleted asteroids before they appear. The first anomaly is a subtle sensor reading, not a full overlay. Eight canonical anomaly types — geological, electromagnetic, structural, and more — replace the old instant reveal, each with weighted discovery rates tuned to feel earned rather than scripted.

Fleet Manifesto

Declare your colony's values through a multi-statement manifesto. ARIA references your manifesto in briefings, and factions react to your stated principles with affinity shifts. What you say you believe in matters to the people watching from deeper in the belt.

Mentorship Bonds

Factions can now mentor your colony. Lesson messages route through your advisors with mechanical benefits that scale with bond strength. Earning a faction's trust means more than a number going up — it changes what they're willing to teach you.

Smarter Miners

Two long-standing AI bugs are fixed. Miners now track orbiting asteroid positions each tick instead of flying to where the rock used to be. And miners with low energy return to base before stranding themselves on weird orbits in the middle of the belt. The physics are still non-negotiable — delta-v is delta-v — but at least the robots are making better decisions about when to head home.