In-session automation is gone. There was no presence check on it at all — assign a drone to a field once and it paid crystals every second the tab happened to be open, whether you were piloting, standing at the Berth, or off in another window entirely. That's not a small edge case: a single charted field was out-earning an actual pilot working the water by hand seven or eight times over. Rather than tune the number down, it's removed outright. The F key that used to assign a drone is gone, the amber "auto" contact that used to show up on the sonar scope and the Chart is gone, and the Chart's own Assign verb went with it.
Charting a field still matters, and still works exactly the way it always did — collect from the same crystal field enough times by hand and it charts itself, no key to press. What charting feeds is different: it no longer puts anything to work live while you play. Instead, every field you've charted counts toward the rate Fleet Dispatch pays out when you come back from being away. Fleet Dispatch itself hasn't changed at all — arm it before you close the tab, and it still pays for whichever is smallest of the time you were away, the Expedition Hours you banked, or the 24-hour ceiling, at 60% of your live rate, capped by your cargo hold.
Put plainly: while you're actually playing, hunting crystals by hand is how you earn — nothing credits your wallet on its own any more. While you're away, Fleet Dispatch is what pays, on-demand and already throttled. An old save loses nothing it earned; the guided arc's old "assign a drone" step is simply gone from the list, and the manual has been corrected chapter by chapter to match — see The Economy and Getting Started.