QA: Joshua Plays the Game

We let Joshua (the AI assistant) play the game.

Not in a sandbox. Not against mocked data. Real game, real backend, real Cloud Functions — using a CLI tool to make API calls as a live player character. Joshua explored sectors, traded cargo, visited starports, claimed planets, and generally tried to break everything.

It worked. 11 bugs found in one session.

What Got Found

Galaxy generator problems

After exploring 130+ sectors, ruins and wormhole landmarks simply weren’t appearing. The galaxy generator wasn’t placing them. Filed, fixed — ruins and wormhole placement now included in sector generation.

Trading stations: completely broken

Trading stations had no stock or price data initialized. Calling tradeGetPortInfo on a trading post crashed immediately on calculateAllPrices because there was nothing to calculate. A related issue: the trade endpoints were checking the wrong Firestore collection — ports instead of stations — so trading posts weren’t accessible at all.

Two separate bugs, same broken outcome. Both fixed.

Starport data corruption

Three starport issues discovered by actually trying to dock:

• Starport document IDs had a double galaxy prefix (the galaxy ID was being prepended twice)
• Starport documents were missing the tier field entirely — returned null
• The galaxy generator was placing multiple ports in the same sector (sector S448 had three agricultural ports)

These were generator bugs that never surfaced in controlled testing.

Repair exploit and balance issue

The shipyard repair function was only available when a ship was fully disabled — you couldn’t top up shields proactively. That’s a design problem that forces players to let their ship get destroyed before repairing.

Separately: field kit repair on a starter ship cost 3,700 credits — 74% of the starting budget for a partial heal. Joshua flagged the balance. We scaled the cost by tier.

Landmark cooldown exploit

The landmark interaction handler was calling loadNavData — a function that doesn’t exist. The success handler crashed silently, which meant landmark cooldowns were never being applied. Players could spam landmark interactions indefinitely.

Response field mismatches

planetClaim wasn’t returning cost or creditsRemaining. blackmarketBuy used item/totalCost field names instead of itemId/cost. These weren’t crashes — just broken contracts between backend and frontend.

POI naming inconsistency

Sector history was storing raw POI IDs instead of objects with name and type. When you looked at your explored sectors, you saw internal IDs instead of readable names.

Eleven issues. One session. No UI, no emulator, no manual clicking — just Joshua reading API responses and noticing when things didn’t add up.

This is what real QA looks like.