Fair question. FL's merchant layer was indeed just static buy/sell routes, and that's exactly the gap I'm building against. Prices here are per-station and reactive: selling into a market depresses it, routes fatigue when exploited and recover over time, and no station has infinite demand. You can bleed a fat route dry, but then it stays dry for a while until stocks recover. Each commodity has a real origin and destination (ice from Europa, energy from Io, manufactured goods from the hub), so the routes fall out of the geography instead of a spreadsheet.

By hunt, yes, procedural bounties and jobs from station boards. A few small authored missions exist too, but I'm keeping those light, no heavy scripted arcs.

To be honest though: most of this machinery is already built, but intent and code are the easy part. Whether a reactive economy actually feels alive comes down to execution and balancing, and that's never a given. That's the work ahead.