// TRANSMISSION 004 · MAY 30, 2026

First Contact

// MARQUEE

▶ DOCKMASTER wants a word.

Three NPCs are on station in ORION: DOCKMASTER, PIP, and BULLSEYE — the welcoming committee. They'll teach you to move, maneuver, and fire. Pass their three lessons and DOCKMASTER will unlock the rest of the galaxies for you. Fail to show up and you don't see ANDROMEDA or CYGNUS until you do.

These aren't scripts. They're Ironlogic — AI drone ships built from plain-English briefs that a CLI compiler turns into JSON action graphs the game runs. Every behavior, every line, every personality quirk: written like a memo, compiled like a program, executed like an NPC. This is the v0 of the programmable-drone-ship system we've been teasing since the marketing site went up. The infrastructure to let pilots author their own drones ships behind this. The foundation is on the air.

REF · #49 · #50 · #51 · #52 · #53 · #54

// NEW

ORION is the start; the rest you earn. New pilots see only ORION unlocked on the galaxy carousel. ANDROMEDA and CYGNUS sit behind a soft hover hint — "DOCKMASTER wants a word before you go." — until the welcoming committee's three lessons are done. Graduate, and the carousel animates the new galaxies in. No relog needed.
· #55
Objectives are a real thing now. The game has a first-class concept of an objective — an in-fiction goal with completion criteria and per-pilot state. The welcoming committee's three lessons (move, maneuver, fire) are the first ones. Every future training arc, contract, or content drop slots in cleanly behind this primitive.
· #56

// PILOT'S NOTE

This is the one we’ve been pointing at since the marketing site went up. Ironlogic — the system that lets you build AI drone ships by chatting with them in plain English — is shipping in its v0 form, and the first NPCs built with it are on station in ORION. Go meet them.

The infrastructure under the hood took six tickets: an NPC entity primitive (#49), a per-NPC memory store (#50), a JSON action-graph schema with a Zod validator (#51), an executor that runs the graph against the live game (#52), a CLI compiler that turns English briefs into the JSON the executor consumes (#53), and the actual welcoming-committee briefs being compiled and committed (#54). Two more tickets ship player-facing features that wouldn’t make sense without the rest: galaxy unlock gating (#55) and the objectives primitive (#56).

This is v0. Every behavior here is currently authored by us — three NPCs, three lessons, one graduation. The next milestone is letting pilots author their own. That’s where “programmable AI drone ships you build by chatting” becomes real for everyone, not just the dev team. Watch this space.

— Ray