How fields actually work, in plain terms:
A field is a place, not a screen. When you arrive at an empty one, the game builds it: rocks laid out along the belt, a couple of guards posted at the tips where the good ore is. That layout is fixed per field, so a belt is the same shape every time you visit.
While you’re in there, everything you do sticks. Kill the guards and they stay dead. Mine a rock down and it stays down.
Pirates drift back on purpose, even while you’re standing there. A lone scout sweeps through every couple of minutes, and guards gradually return to the tips. Clearing a stretch is meant to buy you peace to work it, not permanent quiet. This is by design and it’s slow.
When the last captain leaves, a five minute clock starts. Come back inside those five minutes and you get the field exactly as you left it — dead pirates still dead, rocks still chewed. That window exists so you can dump a full hold and come back for the loot you left behind.
If somebody else is still in the field, the clock never starts. It only begins when the last person out leaves.
After five minutes the field closes, and the next visit builds a fresh one.
Ore pools are separate and shared. The ore in a field is a shared pool that refills slowly over hours, at its own rate. It’s not tied to the five minutes and it isn’t yours alone — another captain mining the same field draws from the same pool.
And the one worth stating plainly: a server restart resets every field. Bases survive a restart exactly as they were; belts do not. That’s the gap we’re looking at fixing.