I spent about 100M ISK of my Alt’s newfound wealth on 80 odd levels of new skills and visiting PI.

I was able to look at the 1 to 10M ISK skill books now. Picking the new skills was a reminder that I have been playing EVE for a very long time. I did not have to hum and haw over my decisions – I knew exactly what was worthwhile and when the cost investment made sense.

I need to remember that in how I view the EveLens tool.

Amongst others, I picked up some more Ore processing, Market and Rigging skills. I also picked up new skills in Cloaking, Nanite Paste, PI and Hauling.

For most of the purchases I applied 3 ranks immediately from my pool of Free Skill Points. That makes the game much more playable.

So far, I have made the barest start on some PI colonies. While I remembered lots about skills, I initially struggled with basic PI tasks. It is not as intuitive as it should be.

I have also played The Last Caretaker for 5+ hours now, an interesting early access first person survival game. It does some things well, but sometimes it starts into a stuck black screen, has difficult to judge parkour mechanics, and horrible combat, which there is a lot of. It has promise, and I don’t mind the story line. We shall see how it pans out.

I am also 2/3s of a way through a book. I haven’t read a book in a long time. I picked up the Star Wars Thrawn novel by Timothy Zahn after being intrigued by the character in the Ahsoka series. I don’t entirely like the writing style, but Thawn is fascinating, and the nepotism and politics in the Empire is shown well.

Happy Easter Sunday.

There was a perfunctory collection of eggs left out for the family which received good natured thanks, but we are past any excitement for such things. The only “child” left in the house is 17 and earns good money at her casual job, so can buy chocolate whenever she might have a craving. In fact, her job has already given her easter chocolate.

Like with hot cross buns, I never have easter eggs before Easter Sunday. It is funny how the scarcity in my youth still reaches through time to influence my thinking today. There are still a couple brands that have that original smell and flavour which sends me back to those times.

Growing up my dad was on an average sort of working wage. We always had a roof over our head, food on the table and bills paid, but with four kids there wasn’t a lot of luxury. Mum, however, always found routines that made the treat days special.

Over the course of the Gallente Presidential event I moved a Procurer mining barge, Kikimora Destroyer, Executioner Frigate and Exequror Hauler into Sinq Laison. The destroyer and frigate were new.

By the time I earned 1,000 points I had operated out of 3 different stations. While I had sold off the more expensive rewards as their value dropped day by day, I still had a messy collection of general loot and ore which I have now collected over two days and also sold off.

While I normally salvage most of my PVE, I did not do it for the level 1 missions I ran as part of the event. I fitted a T2 Tractor Beam (a recent skill) to the Kikimora and just grabbed what loot cans were within range as I was moving about.

I keep Trade goods (for no reason, I just do) and Tags (the ones agents want). I refine all modules worth less than 25K ISK and sell everything to buy orders if they are within 15% of current average market value. Anything left over I check, generally putting them up for sale, sometimes storing them to sell later, or sometimes refining them if they will take too much effort.

As I expect there will probably be an event stretch goal, I have left the ships in location, retained some favour for quick trade points, only did one tier of the ore task, and am ready to run the trail task which I had not started – to make that whole extended process a bit easier.

I did make use of the much healthier wallet to take the opportunity to upgrade a new clone into +2 learning implants, and I have shuffled around and added to the training queue.

Speaking of training queues, TACN posted about a possible replacement for EVEMon called EVELens.

/ttps://tagn.wordpress.com/2026/04/03/evelens-in-the-footsteps-of-evemon/

https://evelens.dev/

I used EVEMon extensively for years until its development fell away. I have played around with EVELens with my new character, and there is a nostalgia hit, but I am not sure it will become a tool I stick with.

Last, I have swung back on the side of the Xenon Edge. I have started using it to display other small programs – such as my media player, or the task manager when I have it open, and the Simple Sticky Notes that cover my tasks for the current day. It is working rather well for those things you want to be able to glance at quickly, and of course the performance statistics.

Easter Friday has ended here, and it has been an unusual day.

My son managed to arrive home from clubbing without waking us up, and there was no alarm set for my wife’s work or driving my daughter to a sport or band practice, so I had a reasonable sleep in and got up when my body was ready at 7:30am.

I grilled some hot cross buns, made a cup of tea, and then logged into EVE with the mission to finish off this stage of the Gallente election event.

My daughter came downstairs at 9:00am and asked for some hot cross buns and then spent most of the day playing and transposing music that she will be performing in her various school bands next term.

My wife then came downstairs at 10:30am and asked for some hot cross buns and then spent most of the day on social media and reading books.

My son then came downstairs at 12:00pm and asked for some hot cross buns and then spent most of the remainder of his day playing and chatting online.

Apart from hot cross buns, and a walk with my wife, I was left alone and able to play a very long session of EVE. Almost like from the pre-kid days. It was very unusual.

I don’t think I have finished the main stage of one of these events before.

I did a little bit of mining, and some trading, and visited but did not start the campaign trail, but primarily I ran Gallente security missions. I alternated between two L1 agents, rejected anything causing a loss of Amarr or Caldari standings, and taking a break when both were on refusal timers.

It took a while to complete and the value of the rewards have steadily fallen, but it was overall worthwhile. Between PLEX, Political Favors, Presidential Candidate Favor and the Campaign Bus it was worth close to 1B ISK.

The risk was primarily how CCP channeled participants into set locations that were easily camped.

Every time I visited the Dodixie site where you spend your Favor, I had 1 to 3 players cargo scan me. I went there to work out what options were available, to take some screen shots, and to grab a few small drones to complete some of the trade tasks, and the cargo scanners were always there, and the catalysts were always on d-scan.

CCP made ganking the easiest way to collect event rewards.

After that, I spent the rest of the day continuing to work on reestablishing some sort of performance monitoring on my PC – making use of the new Corsair Xenon Edge. I used Rainmeter for many years, but it hasn’t had new functionality for a long time and is a bit fiddly. I was looking to use the Elgato Virtual Steam decks, but the statistics from external sources like iCue would come and go, and statistics from plug-ins would occasionally just freeze.

By chance I came across a free tool called InfoPanel. It is a bit quirky and repetitive when setting up profiles, and it doesn’t prompt you to save when you close the app which has caught me out a few times.

https://infopanel.net/

But I have been able to set up the basics I had covered in Steam Deck and was doing in Rainmeter.

I was playing a 4K EVE client at the time of the above screen shot. While the 5070Ti did not do a huge amount for Star Citizen, it had a surprisingly big impact on EVE. Everything just runs cooler and easier.

So far InfoPanel seems stable and reliable. I still have work to do, such as deciding on the primary source of statistics and setting thresholds to change colours for alerts and what not, but it might be the solution I go with.

Sadly, if I had come across it before, I could have probably done without the Xenon Edge.

(Growing up we did not get treats or sweet foods all that often, and I have fond memories of getting hot cross buns once a year on Good Friday. Having hot cross buns turning up in store just after Christmas ruins that – so I refuse to allow them in the house except on and just after Good Friday. I feel a bit sorry for my family who don’t seem as sentimental, but they do begrudgingly admit it keeps them tasting a bit more special. I get relegated to preparing them because I’m quite fussy about toasting them just right, like my mother did. They might also just be lazy.)

For over 30 years I have worked in IT roles primarily around maintaining productive ERP systems. The senior colleagues I first started working with – some who mentored and trained me, have been retiring.

A number have looked around at those who are still working and passed over their old clients. I have picked up half a dozen over the years. Most were not commercially viable – it is more being charitable, keeping them ticking over until the business closes or new owners migrate them to different systems.

One of those clients had an outage yesterday. The version of database and application was 26 years old – and something I had not worked on for 15 or 20 years. An unpleasantly stressful situation I find myself in on occasion. My memory did not fail me, and I was able to help them and look like I knew what I was doing.

The client had assembled a sizeable team of resources – not one having any clue what to do, or who would speak up in case they got dragged into it. No one would make a decision, no one would action anything I asked or suggested. The long silences and failures to respond delayed a resolution until they decided to bypass procedures and just give me full access so that I could fix it myself.

Once it was up and running, I outlined the processes they needed to follow to identify the cause and how they can monitor for the problem and manually address it in future. I just heard crickets. No thanks, no plan, just the quiet sound of relief that the disaster seemed to be over.

They don’t make IT staff like they used to.

My burnt ramp in Star Citizen disappeared the next time I logged in. I am still down the rabbit hole of looking at my PC performance.

The new 5070 seemed to cause some stability issues with my PC, but as I have found in recent years Windows 11 seems to resolve these itself. Running an EVE 4K client window on the 4060 uses 80% of the GPU CPU. That explains why I had to allocate each EVE client to a separate 4060. They only use 30% of the 5070 – so it runs cooler and easier.

I haven’t looked at the CPU and memory hardware configuration yet, but I have been looking at memory usage. The DuckDuckGo browser I was using for Dotlan was using 1 to 2GB of RAM all the time, regardless on if I had used it or not. I turned off the fast start up and the AI features and applied some other suggested tweaks, and now it only uses RAM when it is running and about half of what it did. I guess I have Star Citizen to thank.

There were a number of other processes that did similar things, and between that and making changes to the Chrome browser settings, I have freed up a persistent 2GB of RAM during normal operation which suprisingly seems to have helped Star Citizen run a bit better.

I am also in the process of setting up monitoring tools so I could keep a closer eye on these sorts of performance statistics while gaming. I have done that many times over the years, but since my most recent PC’s have just worked, I had stopped doing it.

A further unnecessary purchase was made of a Corsair XENEON EDGE touch screen. That did not work as I had initially expected – my motherboard’s support of thunderbolt ports for example I had specifically had in mind when I purchased it had a little asterisk against it “with additional optional hardware” that I had not noticed. The screen also switches to a different mode when it has its own widgets running, making it difficult to use them in conjunction with other software. I am currently playing around with virtual Elgato stream decks and have a fair way to go to find an optimal solution.

A work in progress

Now it turns into a 7^th screen attached to my PC. I have 6 Display port connections and 1 HDMI, which I had been trying to avoid as I previously had issues doing that. It is however working so far.

I am also going to go back and revisit how I am controlling all the peripherals, lights, fans and cooler. I can save some resources there. Much of it comes under the Corsair environment, but I am sure that has caused me underlying USB port issues in recent years and clashed with the SteelSeries software to the point where I cannot have the later installed.  I still have a hodgepodge of tools on top of iCue such as MSI Afterburner, Glorious Core, ASUS Armory Crate and Razer Synapse which I am frightened to touch because of how difficult it was getting everything to work together in the first place.

Errr – thanks again Star Citizen for getting me to look at this stuff again?

I have actually progressed further in the current EVE Gallente event than I have in any of the others, thanks to some tips and suggestions here.

I still have a bit to go, but I might achieve the end goal, and maybe even the extended one.

I guess it all keeps me distracted from the drama at home and in the world.

I swapped one of my RTX 4060 TI’s for a RTX 5070 TI.

This was not specifically for Star Citizen – although it was the trigger.

After researching the limitations of my 4060’s and looking at the worsening supply issues for what options I had to upgrade, I decided to grab a card that was on sale and in stock to give myself a bit more of a performance buffer on my Desktop.

I had already seen that Star Citizen was being constrained by the CPU and Memory, so going from the 4060 to 5070 did not really make it run smoother.

Going from 8 to 16GB of VRAM did allow me to increase the resolution, so it looks better to play. I will also play around with some of the individual visual quality settings to get it looking even better.

I have to admit when building my PC I did not really maximise the settings for the CPU and Memory. I left a lot of settings at default. It worked, was stable, and I had no performance issues for what I was asking of it.

I am going to have to spend some time rectifying that.

At a glance the new card has helped EVE. I might be able to reverse some of the minor changes I made to make two clients run a bit quicker together.

Star Citizen had a patch the other day to 4.7. I clicked on update without thinking too much about it. It was 15GB in size and slow. (CCP has got this sort of thing working so much better on EVE.) While it was downloading I started reading the patch notes, the first section of which remarked on “Characters in this new environment have been built from Long Term Persistence (LTP) data.” Or in short, much of the progress was reset, even having you back to selecting a starting base and doing your character sculpturing again.

I understand the game is in an alpha state, but that is a complete red flag for me. I will continue through the process of getting the game to work reasonably and getting familiar with how to play it, but I can’t see the point of investing in a character that has no permanence.

Another strange thing about the game – you can not list your wallet / financial transactions. There doesn’t seem to be any history available of where your money is coming from or going to.

On the bright side the improved visual settings has improved the playability, although I am still having issues with ignored or delayed responses to key presses.

This was a bit odd – my ramp was all burnt up after a flight. Maybe I forgot to close it? Although it was closed when I docked, and nothing was burnt inside the bay. I went to repair it, but the service did not seem to be available. I will see if the damage is there next time I log in.

I delved into VRAM and the differences between the 4060Ti and 5000 series graphics cards and monitored hardware performance while running Star Citizen.

The VRAM was certainly impacting on the resolution and the image quality I could select, but generally it was RAM and CPU which Star Citizen was hammering.

A 5070 Ti was about the only upgrade option that made much sense – but at $1,300+ AUD it is a bit of an investment just to make one game look better.

I then read and watched multiple guides on setting changes you could make to get Star Citizen to run smoother. By the end of several more hours of investment and ensuring I closed anything else on my system using resources, I might have got the game to run just well enough to be acceptable.

So, the next step is to try and play it.

One of my first thoughts was – oh no – not another game designed to be played on a console. The suboptimal maps, the reuse of a limited number of keys, an irritating pie/radial menu. It makes for a much poorer game to play on a PC.  Except Google tells me the game has never been available on a console and there were no current plans for it to be done. So, UI sadists or an approach to sabotage the now for a future which is not yet planned.

So far all I have got out of Star Citizen is a list of irritations.

I went to a console and was able to call my ship out of storage.  I went to the appropriate elevator, but it did not list my private hanger. I went to one of the external hangers which was available – but I almost suffocated to death because I was not wearing a helmet. Oddly I did not at first notice I was dying as the process was rather sedate. Finally, I worked out that when you press F to activate the elevator controls, you can then use the mouse wheel to scroll through all available hangers.

Once on my ship and in the pilot’s chair I remembered you had to use ALT N to request permission to undock.  It didn’t work. I powered up my ship and tried ALT N again. It didn’t work. I lifted the ship up off the docking bay floor and tried ALT N again. It didn’t work. I then retracted the landing gear with N and tried ALT N again. Permission was granted and the doors opened. I thought I understood the sequence, but it works differently any time I try. Sometimes the Air Traffic Controllers don’t hear the request. Sometimes there is a long delay before they respond, give you permission, then point out they have already given you permission as all your overdue attempts are processed. 

The same when you come into land. It can take well over a minute for them to allocate you to a hanger. If in that time you get too close to the station, they threaten to impound your ship because you are in a restricted area or blocking flight paths.  When you move away the threat remains, although the timer tends not to tick down.

You press N to lower and raise your landing gear. You press and hold N to do an automatic landing.  Except sometimes the automatic landing doesn’t work and your landing gear goes up and down.

Currently I am watching YouTube clips to understand how to use the map properly and find some trustworthy and repeatible sequence for docking and undocking.

I get the feeling there are a lot of quirks in the game that people who have been playing for a while just work around without thought. Brand new players are left thinking WTF!?

My self-censorship failed with the last post – it contained too much frustrated ranting on life and not enough frustrated ranting on computer games. Let’s rectify that.

EVE Online has started its latest event – the election of a new Gallente leader. Capsuleers can influence the results by doing tasks that support 1 of 3 lackluster political aspirants.

The Hi-Sec tasks generally need to be done in Gallente space – Sing Laison being the closest to me. Looking at the statistics, there was a substantial amount of suicide ganking going on. The kill reports rarely showed an economic rational, so it was mostly griefers benefiting from CCP’s artificial clustering of players together.

I decided to start with the mining task that required me to laser up 30,000m3 of a particular ore. I picked a bunch of relatively quiet systems with plenty of belts and moved a mining barge there.

It was only a couple of hours after downtime, but the first two systems I checked had been entirely stripped of the ore, and the skerricks available in the third system amounted to only 15,000m3.

I will have to consider if this is going to be fun or not.

I also spent a bit of time looking at the performance of Star Citizen.

As I remarked somewhat recently, my PC is 15 months old, running Windows 11 on an Intel i7-14700K with 32GB RAM, a pair of GeForce RTX 4060s with 6 monitors (3x4K, 3xFHD), with all executables running off performance m.2 SSDs. Every component was researched and from a good brand, the system is well cooled, and I keep the patching up to date.

4K multimonitor gaming does not always work straight out of the box, but I have almost always been able to find workarounds.  For EVE Online, if I want to run two 4K clients I just need to remember to allocate each to a different video card. In Satisfactory there is one specific setting around lighting or shadows that I must change. More often I just use Desksoft’s WindowManager to move and resize windows or THS’s Lossless Scaling to get a FHD game to mostly fill up a 4K screen. That works really well for DDO.

I initially left Star Citizen to pick its own settings, which were running at low visuals on my primary monitor in full screen, at 2K resolutions upscaled. When slowly moving around in the short tutorial it seemed to be ok, but once out in a station it would work ok if I looked and moved straight ahead but was jittery any time I tried looking left or right.

As you change graphics settings Star Citizen shows you how much VRAM is required. At the default settings it required more VRAM than my 4060s have (8GB).

So, I started playing around with the graphic settings.

Unlike EVE online, setting tooltips either did not exist or were poor. To understand what settings did I generally had to google them.

When making changes to graphics settings I found the client sometimes picked up performance issues related to making changes but unrelated to the actual change. After making a string of changes the game was also prone to crashing. To test properly you had to log out and back in again between each individual change.

This highlighted that the login times for Star Citizens seem to be frustratingly slow compared to other games.

It turned out that while I could bring the game’s VRAM requirements below the 8GB I could provide, it never seemed to run ok full screen on my primary 4K monitor without it being ugly to play.

I tried changing the scaling options and using the NVidia specific settings recommended without much improvement. I also tried using Lossless Scaling instead, but it crashed my PC.

I could only get the game to run smoothly in borderless window mode at settings below 2K.

I then thought I would just run the game on one of my FHD monitors instead – but it kept forcing itself back to the primary screen which is 4K. Google searches suggested the only solution was to make one of the FHD monitors the primary screen – since Star Citizen generally runs on that. That is not an option as I do much more on my PC than just play Star Citizen.

I still must go through every setting individually – in case I find something like I did with Satisfactory which makes a big difference by itself. Reading the commentary however suggests the game is poorly optimised and requires beefy hardware.

I am still looking for a balance where the game’s visual experience and performance align to make it worth playing.  I am not there yet. I still remain unimpressed.

And just like that I have only logged into EVE once or twice in the last month.

My neurodivergent daughter, son and wife have been extraordinarily hard work this year and I lose day after day dealing with their fuckery. Between that and the seemingly collectively corrupt vampires of society, big business, media and government, everything around me is an ever worsening drain.

Oh – and the orange lunatic. It is amazing how much impact one man who is half a world away is having on us, who should instead just be terrorising a corner of an old people’s home.

I did play a fairly intense week and a half of Dungeon and Dragons Online. I reincarnated one of my characters and ran through half a dozen wilderness areas and heading towards 100 quests. I was surprised at just how much I remembered.

I purchased the Foundry VTT (Virtual Tabletop for roleplaying games) and the RMU (Rolemaster United) game rules for it. I used to play and run Rolemaster RPGs decades ago, and have been enjoying spending some time reading up on that.

I purchased The Last Caretaker after watching some random reviews, although have not yet run it.

Oh, and I purchased Star Citizen. It has a horrible tutorial, runs poorly and jittery on my PC, and I have to watch introduction videos on YouTube to understand what is possible and do constant Google Searches to work out just about everything I want to do. It was not cheap to get into so I will work my way through all those issues – but so far is makes EVE Online look slick and easy.

Crap, I better go see if I have anything in my training queue.

I have not been able to play much in the last couple weeks thanks to a Diverticulitis flare up.

I have finished my trialing and tested of various hulls and have settled on core ships for exploration, missions and mining. I have one area of operation with all required ships, and a second area that just covers mission running.

I also started the process of updating fits from T1 to T2. I still have a long way to go – mostly training time, but I am seeing progress in the effectiveness of the ships I am flying. Generally, my wallet sits between 150 and 250M ISK now, which makes these module updates less impactful than when I was buying and fitting out full ships.

There has been some in-game news from CCP about Gallente politics.

https://universe.eveonline.com/new-eden-news/president-aguard-impeached

Apparently CCP wants to focus on the Empires this year. The development work will be on faction warfare including making it more impactful on Hi-Sec in a way that people might not like.

Not sure how smart it is designing something they think will make the game less enjoyable to play, but it is CCP. They give us this big open sandpit world, then try forcing us to play the game like they do.

We should hear more at Fanfest.

There were also quality-of-life updates released on the 11th of February.

https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/eve-evolved-neocom-upgrades-and-more

The nicest update for my deteriorating eyesight is the ability to change the size of your cursor. However, in typical CCP fashion, the options on 4K resolutions are too small, small, or too big.

Also useful with my eyesight, you can now change the color of each individual Neocom icon. It seems to be missing the option to change all icons, and in practice I have found it to look a bit … shit, if you use too many colours.

My bigger but not quite big enough cursor, and a minimalist selection of Neocom Icon colors is an improvement over what I had before.

The steak dinner was sublime.

My old work colleague has all the superpowers of ADHD busyness and Autism focus, with none of the negatives. He has a family, works at the executive level, runs in partnership a separate business, sits high in rank in two well-known fraternal organisations, has extraordinary connections and amazing stories to tell.

My wife said he is the most interesting person we know.

He has the busiest schedule you could imagine –yet he always makes time to maintain his friendships. A phone call every so often when he is driving home from work, and a catch up over a nice steak meal or an event once or twice a year. That is a rare trait nowadays.

He had kidney disease and never expected to live a long life. Maybe that helped make him into who he is? Just when he got to the top of the transplant list the last of his health checks found he had cancer. He was dropped from the list, fought the cancer, put back on the list, and finally got a new Kidney. He had some great years, but then the cancer returned. They can not treat it without killing his Kidney, so they just monitor it. Thankfully it has been a lazy and content cancer so far and hasn’t done much yet.

He is a reminder for me to try and whinge less.

I’ve missed a day logging in here and there. Life has a way of making you forget the things you want to do by interrupting you with the things you don’t want to do.

I logged in yesterday to run a couple of the daily AIR goals for 15 minutes and then found myself spending a couple hours undocked. I guess that is their idea.

I paid EverMarks to complete a factional warfare goal, earning 1/2 a Mil ISK. I flew a couple of systems to manufacture a shuttle, earning 1/2 a Mil ISK and 10K SP Free for another goal completed. On the return flight I earned another 1/2 a Mill ISK for completing the make 3 jumps goal. I then undocked the Procurer and half filled the mining bay until life called me away, earning another Mil ISK. I then ran 6 combat sites and salvaged them, getting lucky on drops and earning another 15M ISK and completing the Destroy 25 non-Capsuleers goal. Finally, I scanned down 5 signatures – finding 2 Wormholes and 3 Deepflow rifts. That completed all my Daily Goals and earned me over 100M ISK. The random crate drops and payouts from the rifts giving me 40+, 40+ and 20+ Mil ISK across the sites.

So – around 120M ISK for two hours in Hi-Sec.

At 69 Days old, the new character has 7.1M SP (575K free), and with the last run passed 1B ISK wealth.

This last month has been about consolidating ISK earning potential though the Precursor hull and weapon platforms and the ORE’s Noctius. I have also started targeting some T2 fittings, which will cost a little time and ISK in refits, but improve earning potential further. My last skill trained for example was Mining V.

There are still different / new things I plan to do with this character. That will come with time. I am enjoying the process as it is playing out so far.

My real-life To-Do list has hundreds of tasks on it. Some are immediate items – such as I need to put the bins out today, pick up my daughter from her school play rehearsals, and I am catching up with an old work colleague for a steak dinner tonight. Some are date reminders – such as when the car Rego’s are due or the insurance on the house and contents. Many are long-term or nice to do, including a growing list of maintenance tasks on our 26-year-old home. On Tuesday for example I replaced one of our toilet cisterns.

I revisit all these somewhat regularly to clear what has been done or is no longer needed and adjust priorities, but overall, I rarely seem to make much of a dent.

Sometimes when it starts to feel overwhelming, I log in to EVE. Ironically, I usually start with my long EVE To-Do list.  Today I needed to collect some small standard containers for my Main character. I grabbed some of the loot collecting in his new L4 mission hub, flew over to Jita to sell it, and picked up those containers I needed. Crossing off an easy virtual To-Do list item helps settle the mind a little from the heavy weight of the real To-Do list.

My secondary character crossed off the next item on its To-Do list – purchasing a Vedmak cruiser to replace the Navy Caracal I was using for lower-level missions and Hi-Sec exploration sites that cruiser hulls can access. It has been working better, although I had to slow training in other areas to get to Precursor Cruiser IV and medium Precursor Weapon IV. I have to grind up to buy a second one now, for its second mission base.

Another new item for the EVE To-Do list is to watch an hour long video from CCP discussing its development plans for the next year. It doesn’t sound promising for the solo Carebear. I will see if I can find the motivation, or if I end up finding someone else’s summaries.

When I am moving stuff around in haulers, I leave myself zoomed in on the ship I am flying. That way, even when only half paying attention, I can hear the distinctive sound which is made when your ship is being scanned by another player. It is often done a jump or two before the suicide ganking zone the player is scanning for, so you can get to make a choice of moving forward or docking up instead. My Hauling Exequror cruiser rarely gets scanned, whereas my Industrials often do.

Now I better go put the bins out.

The balancing of PVE in EVE is not linear. I find it is either easy, or you must be aligned to warp out. I have been reminded of that with my new character. A new hull or module or skill update can turn a difficult task into a routine easy one once you cross over that threshold.

I put my new character aside and went back to my main in the last week. It has been many years since I have run a Level 4 mission, and I wanted to revisit them.

I started with trying to find a location to work out of – but the logical ones near Jita were frequently camped by gankers and griefers (G&G’s). The occasional sight of combat probes popping up on scan and related killboard records showed they were not just docked up.

So once again I had to look for less ideal backwaters. Thankfully I was able to use the research and experience of my second character to narrow down my options, and after a couple days of scouting and living out of, had a quiet system to move too.

I think my last Level 4 mission ships were a Rattlesnake and a Nighthawk. I started this time with a Ikitursa – the Triglavian Heavy Assault Cruiser that you can set up to better handle tracking disruption and jamming, which makes short work of L3 missions.

[Ikitursa, L4 Missions – Cheap]

Damage Control II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Multispectrum Energized Membrane II
Multispectrum Energized Membrane II
Entropic Radiation Sink II

10MN Afterburner II
Sensor Booster II, Scan Resolution Script
Tracking Computer II, Optimal Range Script
Republic Fleet Large Cap Battery

Heavy Entropic Disintegrator II, Meson Exotic Plasma M
Small Tractor Beam II
Small Tractor Beam II
Salvager II

Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump II
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump II

Hobgoblin II x5
Hammerhead II x5

720M ISK, 27.7K HP, 499 EHP/s tank, 296-884 DPS, Cap Stable, 550m3 and 8s align time

It worked well, although it was a little slow against Battleships.

Next I tried the Leshak – the Triglavian Battleship. You need to swap a middle slot but can still handle tracking disruption or jamming.

[Leshak, L4 Missions – Cheap]

Damage Control II
Large Armor Repairer II
Large Armor Repairer II
Multispectrum Energized Membrane II
Multispectrum Energized Membrane II
Capacitor Power Relay II
Entropic Radiation Sink II
Entropic Radiation Sink II

Domination 100MN Afterburner
Republic Fleet Large Cap Battery
Republic Fleet Large Cap Battery
Tracking Computer II

Veles Supratidal Entropic Disintegrator, Occult L
Salvager II
Salvager II
Small Tractor Beam II
Small Tractor Beam II

Large Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Large Capacitor Control Circuit II
Large Capacitor Control Circuit II

Garde II x4
Hobgoblin II x5
Hammerhead II x5

833M ISK, 77.8K HP, 558 EHP/s tank, 874-2275 DPS, Cap Stable, 933m3 and 12s align time

You had to be more careful about agro than in the Ikitursa, because the battleship took more damage, but it was much better against the battleships and handled cruisers at quite short ranges, with plenty of drones available for the frigates that got close.

And last of all, I got my first ever Marauder to try.

[Paladin, L4 Missions – Cheap]

Damage Control II
Corelum C-Type Multispectrum Energized Membrane
Corelum C-Type Multispectrum Energized Membrane
Core B-Type Large Armor Repairer
Heat Sink II
Heat Sink II
Heat Sink II

100MN Afterburner II
Tracking Computer II, Optimal Range Script
Cap Recharger II
Republic Fleet Large Cap Battery

Bastion Module I
Mega Beam Laser II, Gleam L
Mega Beam Laser II, Gleam L
Mega Beam Laser II, Gleam L
Mega Beam Laser II, Gleam L
Small Tractor Beam II
Small Tractor Beam II
Salvager II

Large Capacitor Control Circuit II
Large Capacitor Control Circuit II

Hobgoblin II x5

In Bastion Mode –
1.73B ISK, 114K HP, 1,171 EHP/s tank, 1725 DPS, Cap Stable, 1,125m3

In Normal Mode –
1.73B ISK, 80.6K HP, 485 EHP/s tank, 912 DPS, Cap Stable, 1,125m3 and 11s align time

In bastion mode this is a very fun ship, and with a little range obliterates NPCs.

I did not go with a Micro Jump Drive – in the missions I have run so far with a little care about agro and taking out high DPS opponents first, I haven’t had issues with my tank.

While I went for a cheap fit, you still have a target painted on your back flying a Marauder, so I am watching local and d-scan much closer whenever I undock in it.

So, all three options work. I might pick and choose depending on which mission I run.

Meanwhile my second character almost had their first big loss. I have been running Deepflow Rifts when I find them – a cosmic anomaly which involves you fishing through a rift in space with your tractor beams. They are worth around 25M ISK for 25 minutes effort, so good money for Hi-Sec.

There is a gotcha – each tractor beam you use causes instability in the rift. Normally it is 16% for one tractor beam, which quickly drops back to 0. For two tractor beams you hit 33%. For three tractors beams it is 50%. If you hit 100% a surge occurs and a wave of Rogue Drones appear which do a lot of damage.

I have been using my exploration Sunesis with two tractor beams. I had just purchased myself a mobile depot to use to fit 3 tractor beams to it in space, when I found another site and decided to use my Noctis.

And it worked as I expected. 4 Tractor beams hit 66% instability. Until they hit 100%. Despite care and not recycling until instability had dropped back to 0%, on one cycle it went from 50% to 100% when going from 3 to 4 beams.

The drone swam that appeared quickly started chewing through the tank on my Noticus. I had been collecting pulled cans by flying to them – which meant I was actually up against the rift, and the Noticus couldn’t align to warp out. Webbed, so moving very slowly, I ended up struck bouncing at 95% warp. It looked like it was done for until it finally bumped along far enough to warped out.

I don’t really like the notion of there being rules which are randomly different, but I guess I learnt a lesson not to be complacent. I went back with my Navy Caracal to try and clear the spawn, but I found they were really quite hard to kill and I had to warp out.

The undocking and learning continues.

(My fits are just basic examples which work for me. They are usually on the cheap side, flexible, one size fits all – and are not best of breed.)

…

This is about my 20th post since the Catalyst expansion interested me enough to revisit EVE two months ago.

…

My wife’s 12-month contract had a short extension but is finishing next month. She is moving on to a new 12-month contract elsewhere. It is the hardest job market she has seen in more than 30 years of working. Companies seem to be retrenching and cutting back left right and center.

…

My job was meant to finish up but was extended for a couple of years.  The contract renegotiations were apparently brutal, with a long fruitful relationship permanently damaged. Organisations seem to be screwing over their staff and their suppliers.

…

I think I mentioned that I was having performance issues when running two clients undocked at the same time. It has been limiting my EVE play.

My PC has an Intel i7-14700K, 32GB RAM, runs off m.2 SSDs and a pair of GeForce RTX 4060s. Not top spec, but I assumed it should handle two EVE clients running in 3800×1980 windows ok.

Turns out it can.  I just need to remember to allocate each client to a different graphics card. It defaults to the same one.

…

I have remarked in the past that concentrating on EVE can be difficult with my family. They still keep me busy, but generally I no longer need to drop everything immediately.  These last couple months have helped prove that.

(As I typed that I could hear my daughter baiting my wife, and the raised shrill in my wife’s replies.  I had to immediately stop typing and go and distract both from the clash they were about to have.)

…

For a while there it seemed CCP were pushing towards all stations being player owned. Then in their ever-changing rules, they made them easier to kill so that they were not something you wanted to rely on. They then removed some space and trade routes through the Triglavian invasion.

As I played EVE less, I consolidated my characters and their assets into Jita. I did not want to return to the game at some point in the future to find everything lost to rule changes.

In the last two months I have had to branch out and try and find new locations to live out of, moving away from Jita.

…

I have spent 2 months now operating anywhere up to 20 jumps out from Jita.

While there are plenty of gankers and griefers, and they are active in the areas where people travel or loiter (more than I remember them being), there are not all that many of them. It is the same groups and the same people. I have been diligent in monitoring the Killboards and setting negative standings, but after a couple of weeks I rarely came across new ones.

Meanwhile over the last two months I have run several hundred exploration sites. Aside from some cheeky behaviour during the Nexus event, every player who has warped in on me running a site has warped out again.  This includes data and relic sites with unopened cans.  I don’t ever recall Hi-Sec being so consistently considerate and polite.

There are many very old characters flying around Hi-Sec, avoiding drama and not bothering anyone one. I presume, like me, that they are keeping themselves amused.

I have two EVE accounts with characters on them.

On my oldest account I have:

. Main – 19 years and 4 months old with 428M Skill Points.

They have every skill in game at rank 4 or 5 except for Advanced Doomsday Operation and Capital Jump Portal Generation. Aside from some T2 Capital modules, they can fit every module and fly every hull in game.

. Alt 2 – 8 years and 11 months old with 26M Skill Points.

Setup to fly most T2 Amarr frigates and cruisers.

On my second account I have:

. Alt 1 – 16 years 4 months old with 55M Skill Points (although 9M unallocated)

This alt is a jack of all trades with some trade, PI, fleet, corporation and structure management skills, plus can fly most T1 frigates, cruisers, battlecruisers and industrial hulls.

. Alt 3 – 54 days old with 5.8M Skill Points

This is the character I have been playing most days for the last couple months.

If needed, I pair Alt 1 up with my Main.

I used Alt 2 to help Alt 3 with some of the new player AIR Career tasks, but I spent time on the weekend visiting Alt 2’s assets and moving stuff around. I will have Alt 3 support Alt 2 more moving forward, although not with ISK generation.

On Alt 3 – I want two bases of operation for my new character – one for building Caldari / Amarr standings, and one for Minmatar and Gallente.

No matter what else I get up to, I want to be able to jump clone or shuttle my way into these systems and have the tools I need ready for basic ISK generation.

My initial location in The Citadel has worked out well. It is not too far from Jita; there is a good assortment of close services and agents, the gankers and griefers do not visit all that often, and the locals are quiet and courteous. The only issue is that exploration content is heavily run.

After a couple of mis-starts, I have settled on a second location in Metropolis. It is twice as far away from Jita, and the services and agents are not as close. However – it is extremely quiet, systems go weeks and sometimes months between Player vs Player deaths, and I can commonly run exploration sites one after another for as long as I can handle.

I liked it so much, I set my home station there.

As I remarked before, setting up two somewhat mirrored bases has been expensive. The biggest cost and the mini project I just completed was setting up a Noctis in each location.

I salvage almost all my wrecks, and it earns me 150%+ on top of the bounties. The Noctis with its extra long range and fast tractor beams, makes this process so much easier. It is however – even with a T1 fit, my most expensive ship hull at 116M ISK. Times that by two. So, I have been busy grinding through 232M ISK of earnings.

Right now, the character’s wealth is at around 800M ISK.

I need another Kikimora – which even with low skill points, has been great for Hi Sec content. I might need to work on training into some T2 tanking modules since it is a touch squishy.

I am also considering swapping the Caracal Navy Issue and Omen Navy Issue for a pair of Vedmak’s.

It has been interesting trialing different hulls and tactics and approaches to generate undocked ISK for this character in Hi-Sec. The lowest income at this point is from missions – which are mostly just L1 and 2 for the Daily AIR rewards. Mining and combat anomalies earn around 5 to 10M ISK an hour. Cosmic Signatures and Escalations earn 5 to 40M ISK an hour. I have had one-hour worth 150M ISK, and several worth 50M ISK. This is still mostly with T1 modules and hulls and rank 3 skills. I have been surprised at what you can do with such a young character.

The undocking continues.

My wife has been doing her usual holiday catchup with friends.

One said that her husband had no friends, never went out, and just played computer games in his spare time. She asked if I had any friends.

My wife said we had joint friends and that I had friends of my own. While I did not catch up with my own friends all that often in person, I communicated with them and family as often as daily.

When she recounted this to me, I pointed out that the husband might have online gaming friends.

My wife gave me a look that suggested those were not real friends.

People seem to underestimate how much gaming friends – or acquaintances, can fill a male’s social or connection needs.

I am gaining familiarity with some of the pilots operating in the same areas I am. When they are online, what ships they fly, what they tend to do in space. Familiarity though is not a connection. I have been going to the same coffee shop for years.  I recognise all the regular morning patrons. Sometimes we might smile and acknowledge that familiarity – but we never sit down at the same table and speak to each other.

I only have one in game connection now – someone I was in a corporation with many years ago.  I have primarily used my new character since I returned, and that toon is not in the chat channel where I keep in touch with them. I don’t commonly interact with anyone else.

I have moved my new character into their own corporation to cut back on taxes.  I have not decided if I will join another player corporation or not. I am not sure I have that much time to invest, or if I want to risk the drama.

The EVE Bloggers I follow are an unusual familiarity / connection to the game that I am not sure how to categorize. There have only been a handful of times that I have noticed a blogger flying by in space – but you know some of their story and you know they are out their undocking and doing things. I have been hailed a handful of times in space myself, or more often received an EVE Mail from people who have come across this blog. As I have remarked, blogging and blogs have probably been the key thing to have kept me connected to the game for this long.

I don’t think I have used a single T2 module yet on the new Character.

I have trained up skills for specific ships and fits, but mostly my approach has been to buy all the available cheap skills and inject to rank 1 or 2, then train to rank 3. Over only 42 days I have picked up around 140 skills, covering a lot of the basic hulls and small to medium fittings, with 5.1M SP (0.3M Free).

Armor – 9 / 14
Corporation Management – 2 / 5
Drones – 11 / 28
Electronic Systems – 4 / 15
Engineering – 9 / 15
Fleet Support – 0 / 20
Gunnery – 12 / 65
Missiles – 9 / 31
Navigation – 7 / 15
Neural Enhancement – 3 / 9
Planet Management – 0 / 5
Production – 3 / 13
Resource Processing – 10 / 35
Rigging – 4 / 10
Scanning – 7 / 7
Science – 2 / 43
Sequencing – 0 / 16
Shields – 10 / 13
Social – 5 / 10
Spaceship Command – 21 / 90
Structure Management – 0 / 7
Subsystems – 0 / 16
Targeting – 8 / 8
Trade – 4 / 15

Ignoring Shuttles, I have 20 fitted hulls across 2 main areas of operation, one near Jita in Caldari space, the other 20 jumps from Jita in Minmatar space.

They are broken down into:

Frigates
Magnate (Hauler)

Exploration Frigates
Endurance

Destroyers
Coercer – Salvager (x2)
Kikimora – PVE
Dragoon – PVE
Sunesis – Scan / Exploration (x2)

Cruisers
Caracal Navy Issue – PVE
Omen Navy Issue – PVE
Exequror – Hauler

Mining Destroyers
Pioneer (x2)

Mining Barges
Procurer (x2)
Retriever

Haulers
Bestower (x3)
Sigil

For every in-game ship I need, I sit down in Pyfa and check my options across every race in my price range. I don’t recall ever using Navy Hulls before, but they have given me the boost required to get into the Hidden / Forsaken / Forlorn versions of the hi-sec combat anomalies without a long grind for T2 fits.

I had settled on the Omen Navy Issue for harder Guristas sites, which worked well. It did not work as well against Angels, so I have a Caracal Navy Issue for those.

I am hitting a funding problem though.

The Kikimora I picked up for DED / Escalation sites that were limited to Destroyer hulls cost 58M ISK. The Caracal Navy Issue was 49M. The Procurer was 57M ISK x2. Grabbing some of these more expensive hulls and setting up effectively a mirror image second base of operations has drained my wallet to near zero several times.

I hit a brick wall of boredom a couple of times while grinding up ISK again. I am going to have to step back and take things a little slower.

Here is my Caracal fit – I went passive just because.

[Caracal Navy Issue, PVE]

Damage Control I
Ballistic Control System I
Ballistic Control System I

10MN Monopropellant Enduring Afterburner
Alumel-Wired Enduring Sensor Booster, Scan Resolution Script
Missile Guidance Computer I, Missile Range Script
Enduring Multispectrum Shield Hardener
Large F-S9 Regolith Compact Shield Extender
Large F-S9 Regolith Compact Shield Extender

‘Arbalest’ Heavy Missile Launcher, Nova Heavy Missile
‘Arbalest’ Heavy Missile Launcher, Nova Heavy Missile
‘Arbalest’ Heavy Missile Launcher, Nova Heavy Missile
‘Arbalest’ Heavy Missile Launcher, Nova Heavy Missile
‘Arbalest’ Heavy Missile Launcher, Nova Heavy Missile
‘Arbalest’ Heavy Missile Launcher, Nova Heavy Missile

Medium Core Defense Field Purger I
Medium Core Defense Field Purger I
Medium Core Defense Field Purger I

Warrior I x5

49M ISK, 27.2K EHP, 87 EHP/s tank, 228 DPS, 450m3 and 6s align time

CCP rewards aggression, bullying and theft – preferably if you gang up with others to do it. They also provide mechanisms that allow and reward players for ganking other players.

I can see a wide range of reasons that validate this – not the least being that EVE would not be EVE without it.

The rules and their balance around this game play have ebbed and flowed over the years, but generally I feel CCP favours those who destroy over those who build. I don’t play EVE as a destroyer – but it amuses me to find my own solo way around in such an environment.

Unfortunately, it also suits griefers.

By griefing, I am talking about players who gain pleasure from upsetting other players. Not for profit, land, politics, or historical grudges – but being titillated by the tears.

And you might think – so what?

I often wonder at people who publicly celebrate and crow about their griefing successes. It is textbook sadism – deriving pleasure from inflicting suffering on others.

And you might still be thinking – so what?

Studies show people with generalised sadistic traits are more likely to engage in criminal conduct, the criminal conduct they do is likely to be better planned than average, they are more likely to end up in jail, and they are more likely to be aggressive and violent. In short, I don’t gain any joy from interacting with that sort of person – in life or in game.

For years I have ignored most of CCP’s events because they tend to attract griefers. They are not there for the event content, but to make content for themselves out of the artificial congregation of players.

This year I got involved with the latest Winter Nexus event as an experiment with my new character – what could a month-old toon do?

I briefly read the official descriptions. There appeared to be daily log-in rewards, plus combat sites, mining sites, hacking sites, exploration sites and roaming NPCs situated in Ice Storms that had sprung up across space.

The daily log-in rewards were available to everyone, with a possible 525K of skill points and 26,500 EverMarks up for grabs for players with an Omega account. That is a lot of skill points for a new character. The combat sites indicated you should have a T2 fitted Battleship – so I ignored those for obvious reasons. So, I decided to start with the mining sites.

The sites in Empire were called Fading Volatile Ice Fields. They were found in Ice Storms, more regularly towards the center, less often on the edges of the storms. They were behind ship restricted acceleration gates and were made up of a semi-circle of 20 blocks of ice around an NPC who you turned the ice into for reward crates.

I used up a bunch of unallocated skill points and half my wallet balance to get into a Procurer – the tanky mining barge. However, it wasn’t very efficient because it moved much too slowly within the sites.

I then switched to a Retriever, using up most of the rest of my wallet. This moved quicker and held more ice before having to return to do a hand in, but the 2+ minute activation times for the miners could be gamed by the Endurances with their closer to 1-minute activations.

So, I made some ISK, consumed the provided Expert System to temporarily get the required skills, and purchased myself an Endurance. This small, fast Expedition Frigate was used by 80-90% of those running the sites. The speed to move around, get to the Ice, re position and respond to the actions of other players, and to do hand ins meant this hull was substantially more effective (and fun) than the Mining Barges.

While most ice mining participants were surprisingly courteous, I still had to repeatedly adjust my play to them.

I started by finding sites in the center of the storms where they were more numerous, but so too were the competitors. Normally this was not a problem, as each site might have 6 to 12 mining ships all spread out evenly munching on their own Ice, only moving to mine the same ice as the field diminished. But you also regularly found groups mining – particularly boosting Porpoise with 6 to 12 Endurances, all with similar character and hull names. They would move through the sites hoovering up Ice in just one or two cycles for each. So, I moved to sites further away from the storm center. These popped up less often, and inevitably had a rush of competitors, but you could get a quiet period with just a handful of other miners to make some progress in the event.

I started with storms which were closer to Jita, but there were a noticeable number of Gankers and Griefers about. Solo and in gangs. I saw evidence on Killboards, in space wrecks, remarks in local, and witnessed it first-hand multiple times. For the most part you could avoid them – but at times they camped undocks and acceleration gates so you could not make things entirely safe.

So, I moved further and further away from Jita. The further away, the less of this coordinated behaviour I ran in too – but it was not particularly safer as there were now lone-wolf pilots who I had not previously flagged as negative contacts.

I didn’t get around to the Hacking / Exploration content. I did not have a lot of ISK or unallocated skill points spare to investigate them, and I wasn’t that enthused for grinding through the event point rewards.

I didn’t mind the mining sites at a conceptual level – and I enjoyed the process of working out the basic efficiencies of what to run them with, how to run them, and how best to deal with other players. I think I ended up with 150+M ISK and 250+ event points.

If I had mined in low-sec it would have been more rewarding, and even more rewarding if I was in null-sec. That makes sense, although ironically, those in protected null-sec space likely faced less risk than I did.

So, I was impressed that a 1-month-old character could get involved. Next time around I might be able to investigate the other sites.

I have had to change my mouse cursor to yellow. I was too often losing it across my 6 screens. I suspect there isn’t an option to do that in EVE, but I will have to check.

My new character has made its 1-month birthday. I was not overly active in EVE since my last update, so the statistics did not change much. I ran my daily goals, did some mining, and started investigations into a second mission hub.

Skill points went up to 4.1M (427K Free), mainly due to Winter Nexus daily login rewards.

Wealth increased 10M to 470M (147M ISK Wallet, 323M Assets), with an extra mining destroyer added.

I am pleased with the wealth accumulated in only a month, given it was not a grind / slog to get there. I expect things will slow down, but it is a solid base to work from.

One aspect of EVE that I don’t think the new player experience explains well enough is faction standings. As I gained positive standings with the Caldari faction by running their missions, I started to accumulate negative standings with the factions who do not like them. If you let these negative standings get bad enough, it can result in those Factions attacking you in their space.

The main empire faction with negative views of the Caldari is the Gallente Federation. If I balance my mission running between Caldari and Gallente, I should maintain access to all Empire space.

The mission hub I found for Caldari has been excellent. L1-4 of different types in a small area. It is not too busy, and the gankers and griefers visit but are not a constant presence.

The first possible Gallente mission hub I checked out was mainly for mining agents. I found gankers and griefers were a regular presence, including seeing them using combat probes to scan down mission runners and attempting to gank them. This also wasn’t just about profit, since the Killboards showed they targeted new players in cheap hulls as well. Some of the gankers that I watched in Local were 10+ year old characters that I recognised. There wasn’t much chatter – but it felt toxic.

I might have to keep on looking. I might also have to pay attention for longer to what EVE in Hi-sec is really like today.

So, what’s next? I need to step back and do more with my main character, so progress on this one will slow but it won’t stop. Aside from setting up a balance of mission agents, I am thinking about the low-level COSMOS agents, and low-level Abyssal space content. I also have more thoughts on the new player experience to get back too.

I can not believe the number of stations that get destroyed by asteroids that you have to go out and mine…

I don’t always do this – but I do want to acknowledge the start of 2026.

I do not recall a time in my life when evil had so much power in the world, where there was so much social disharmony, so much disinformation, so much blind ideology, and so much corruption in our institutions such as democracy and capitalism. I can see the sinking ship / everyone for themselves mentality all around me.

Having said that, I lead a quirky but charmed life. It is by no means perfect or entirely happy, but it would be a rare day indeed that someone in Australia could claim to be having the worse day out of the 8.2 billion people around the world.

So, I will try to enjoy and appreciate the day to day and continue to prattle on about the solo playing of an MMO internet spaceship game.

The other day CCP released some infographics showing what the most undocked ships were in 2025. I wondered why CCP did so without explanation because it made the player base look like Carebears, which is not what CCP has been pushing for years.

Of the 12 slots – there was 1 PVE ship, 1 Hauler, 3 Exploration frigates and 7 Resource Harvesters.

(I did not include Pochven – which were 3 PVE/PVP hulls – Barghest, Loki and Vargur. I don’t believe the average player visits regularly, and it is a more unique location/culture.)

Logically many are at the top because there are limited and shared hulls for things like mining, which would boost their numbers when compared to the frigates, cruisers, battlecruisers and so on that are spread across each race and different focused weapon systems.

Still – it does suggest a lot of players are regularly flying Carebear ships.

CCP’s commentary seems to suggest that the Catalyst expansion has been a notable success – which is amusing as it was primarily focused on Carebears. I believe CCP would have a more vibrant game – to the benefit of all, if they continue to focus a bit more on the substantial number of Carebears who undock.

I noticed last week that a couple of mercenary corporations are clearing out Upwell structures from the pocket where I am located.  They were all for small or Carebear corporations, including assets of the group who was mining the Mordunium belt I mentioned the other day. That group has lost around 18 Hi-Sec structures over the last few months.

There is no evidence that the structures were defended – maybe one or two used their fitted weaponry, but there were zero losses amongst the attackers. Most structures were only fitted with their rigs and quantum core, suggesting the owners had stripped them.

The quantum core drops ensure a pay day for attackers. I presume the mechanism was put in place specifically to do that. The Structure turkey shoots are a PVP version of resource gathering – auto shoot, get a set reward, with a small chance of a loot pinata drop. They are just farming other disinterested players instead of NPCs. 

I do not know why anyone would use Upwell Structures in Hi-Sec unless they had at least a dozen half competent pilots keen to defend them.  The killboards show groups of as little as 2 people who roll through constellations collecting quantum cores without appearing to be hindered.

Another example of CCP’s wonderful gameplay.

I had two attempts made to take my Customs Offices. I had my main and alt cloaked nearby in combat ships while I was war dec’d.  The first attempt was by a small group – and I took the opportunity to kill an AFK attacker. It turned out they were not interested in PVP either – so retracted the war and left me alone.  The second group brought more than a dozen hulls to each kill, so I could do nothing about it. They even hung around as they anchored their own offices so I couldn’t get a cheap kill.

I note a large number of Custom Offices are owned by the Hi-Sec Gankers and war declarers. I like the irony that Carebears who use the structures are funding the Gankers who come kill them later.

My new character is fast approaching its 1-month birthday. While I have not managed to undock every day, I have put some solid hours into it.

As at 25 days old.

3.4M Skill points (37K of them unallocated)

459M Wealth (143M ISK Wallet, 316M ISK Assets)

2 Mining Barges
1 Cruiser (PVE)
4 Destroyers (PVE + Salvage + Mining + Exploration)
2 Frigates (Salvage + Haul)
2 Haulers

The in-game client thinks I have 510M in wealth. Sometimes the discrepancies come from its tendency to overprice some items, particularly Skins and SKINR materials. Sometimes reconciliation seems askew. When I sell something the wallet increase seems to impact wealth quickly, but the removal of the sold asset is not immediately accounted for.

I have looked at

AIR Introduction (100%)
AIR Career Agents (100%)
AIR Career Program (2,650 of 3,000 points)
AIR Daily Goals (2-5 a day)
Epic Arc – Ore – Fractured Legacy (100%)
Epic Arc – Sisters of EVE – The Blood Stained Stars (100%)
L1 & L2 Security and Mining Missions, with access to L3
Caldari State Standings to 1.97 (For agents and fee reduction)
Belt and Anomaly Mining
Winter Nexus Ice Mining
Exploration– Hi Sec combat anomalies and signatures, Relic and Data sites
A small amount of Industry and Trade

I have also been setting up the UI from scratch and getting used to the interface changes, slowly updating the various third-party tools and websites I use, and setting up lots of new low SP ship fittings.

The way all the introduction content and balancing has been done has meant I haven’t really felt like ISK or Skill Points were a major impediment to doing what I wanted in this first month.

For ISK the daily goals have been good money earners and bookmarking and going back to salvage wrecks still earns more than the original bounties or agent rewards. Exploration drops have been good, and mining is reaching the point where it helps the wallet balance. The Winter Nexus daily rewards and more recently running some of the event mining content has also helped the character’s wealth, including getting 20 PLEX.

I have been able to scan down all Hi-Sec exploration content and clear all Relic and Data sites using level 3 skills and cheap T1 equipment, and Sister of EVE Probes.

With similar set-ups I have been able to run all combat missions to L2 (not tried enough L3 to confirm comfort levels), sites to DED 3 of 10, and most solo anomalies.

You do have to pay attention as there are some brutal sites in Hi-Sec, including even wormhole entrances guarded by high end NPCs.

I am not sure what this would all look like to a brand-new player, but if they were methodical and interested, the solo starting process is substantially better than what it was when I first started 19 years ago.