A Mordunium ore site popped up in one of the local systems. I had never heard of the ore before – it refines to Pyerite. The site also contained Hedbergite, Omber, Scordite and Pyroxeres.
I enjoy the randomness of ore sites more than normal belt mining, both as they are visually a little different and as you sometimes get to mine asteroids not normally available locally.
I have up to this point been fairly generalist in my skill training. I have got to rank III in most skills I have needed. The exceptions were targeting skills, hull upgrades (IV) for the armor compensation skills, drone V to access 5 drones and some of the support skills like drone interfacing, and mining IV for the mining destroyer.
One of the local corporations came out with industrial command ships and mining barges. I stayed on the opposite side of the belt, but they inevitably made their way to me and quickly hooved up whatever I was working on. Unlike exploration and combat sites, I don’t view that as untoward or rude.
My Pioneer was chugging along with a yield of around 10m3 a second, but some of my silent companions would have been mining at closer to 30m3, and presumably with mining wastage on top of that. (I haven’t worked out precisely how mining residue (better if it was named wastage) works. I will have to check the mining ledger once I start using equipment that causes it.
The Pioneer has been a fun little low SP ship.
[Pioneer, M 02]
Mining Laser Upgrade I Mining Laser Upgrade I
1MN Monopropellant Enduring Afterburner ML-3 Compact Mining Survey Chipset Medium Shield Extender I
Small EM Shield Reinforcer I Small EM Shield Reinforcer I Small Thermal Shield Reinforcer I
Hobgoblin I x4 Mining Drone I x4
But sharing the belt with others got me thinking – what do I need in skills to fly a mining barge, which one would I pick and how would I fit it, what processing skills would I need to improve my earnings, and how much ISK would all this cost. That kept me busy during two sessions of mining in the Mordunium site, and another session later in an Omber site.
Thanks to a large amount of free SP I have covered all the skills, now I need to sort out buying one. That will leave me ISK poor.
Because mining – particularly at this point, is a low earner, I ran some combat sites to generate more ISK for this project. I ended up getting my first escalation – to a 4/10 DED Guristas Scout Outpost.
My little toon is far more capable than I thought it would be – but there seems to be a threshold where you go from relaxed and coping to “oh fuck”. The DED site was well past that threshold. My Omen could only handle the DPS of two of the cruisers at a time. In fact, clearing the first room required a lot of manual piloting while sitting on 80% armor damage and picking off targets that strayed off by themselves. I did not even try the second room.
I made two notable investments in the last few days. The first was an Omen cruiser for missions and combat sites.
[Omen, Omen PVE]
Damage Control I Medium I-a Enduring Armor Repairer Compact Multispectrum Energized Membrane Compact Multispectrum Energized Membrane Extruded Compact Heat Sink Extruded Compact Heat Sink
10MN Monopropellant Enduring Afterburner Alumel-Wired Enduring Sensor Booster Large Compact Pb-Acid Cap Battery
Focused Anode Medium Particle Stream I, Standard M Focused Anode Medium Particle Stream I, Standard M Focused Anode Medium Particle Stream I, Standard M Focused Anode Medium Particle Stream I, Standard M Focused Anode Medium Particle Stream I, Standard M
Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Hobgoblin I x5
18M ISK, 10.5K EHP, 82 EHP/s tank, 186 DPS, 400m3 and 7s align time
I have never used an Omen cruiser before. The biggest impact has been on the speed of doing low level content – and that relates to increasing the longest range (at current skill levels) from 23.5km to 48.6km.
This flexibility and speed has opened up the in space Anomaly PVE content. There is so much competition for these sites that it is rare to find one empty and for it to stay empty while you run it. So, you need to get in quick and clear it quickly. The Omen has allowed that.
I still need to test the Tier 1 Level 4 Forlorn sites, and the Tier 4 Den sites.
The second investment was a Sunesis destroyer exploration ship.
[Sunesis, Exploration]
Damage Control I Small I-a Enduring Armor Repairer Upgraded Multispectrum Coating I 200mm Rolled Tungsten Compact Plates
5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive Relic Analyzer I Data Analyzer I Scan Rangefinding Array I
Core Probe Launcher I, Core Scanner Probe I Small Tractor Beam I Small Tractor Beam I Salvager I
Small Emission Scope Sharpener I Small Memetic Algorithm Bank I [Empty Rig slot]
Hobgoblin I x4
29M ISK, 6.3K EHP, 29 EHP/s tank (not cap stable), 77 DPS, 600m3 and 4s align time
There are a lot of new or changed exploration content since last I looked, not all of it available to solo players. The Homefront sites for example – which are for 5+ pilots and which I thought were never being run since they never disappear. But I have since noticed a group of 3 pilots in the local area who run them together.
The primary reason I went for the Sunesis over an exploration Frigate are the new to me Deepflow rift sites. These require tactor beams. They also seem to stick around for a while, but I think I earnt about 18M ISK from the one site I did run.
One thing about how busy space is.
I am a courteous explorer. If I warp into a site and someone is already running it, I will warp out. If a pilot shows me the same courtesy, I quietly add them as a contact and give them a +5 standing and an associated label. In future I treat them with extra respect and if I know they are working through a system I might just move on to the next one straight away.
If a pilot warps into a site and starts running it while I am / makes a rush for any named loot, I quietly add them as a contact and given them a -5 standing and an associated label. And then at every opportunity I do the same in return, making a point of going out of my way to find and run their sites.
I will say – despite never before seeing so many people competing for sites at all hours of the day, that the politeness levels are also higher on average than I have seen before. I wonder if it relates to a majority of pilots flying ships named in Chinese characters. In a similar vein, I have never seen so little chatter in local.
My wife refuses to charge her iPad. She comes into my study, puts it down on my desk and says it needs charging, then walks out.
This has been getting more frequent and she has been complaining. Her iPad should last around 10 hours of normal use, so I presumed she was on it at least that much a day. It certainly seemed like it. She assumed her iPad was faulty.
Today her complaining reached a certain threshold in my brain so I was triggered to do something. I pointed out there were usage and battery statistics I could check. I was rewarded by a sudden look of discomfort.
It turned out we were both wrong. She used her iPad 4 to 6 hours a day. Half as much as I had assumed, but twice as much as what she thought. The battery was being used up fast by Safari – because it had 75 tabs open. I know it was 75 as I counted aloud as I closed each one. So hopefully that was the cause and solution to her battery running flat so quickly.
My wife then said I was not allowed to tell anyone.
My new alt is now 17 days old. The stats –
2.5M Skill points with 650K Free 30M Wallet 120M ISK income 90M ISK expenses
I have mostly been working through the AIR Career Program since the last update. I have broken several of my rules in the process.
First – I have mindlessly rushed a bunch of the tasks, instead of taking it slowly and methodically. Some I think I can be excused for, such as having to run 20 Distribution missions. But I need to ensure I focus on the journey with this character, not a destination.
Second – I have wasted ISK unnecessarily at times, with a 19-year-old character mentality instead of a 17-day-old one. Two of the Career tasks are to mine and refine Kernite. There is no belt Kernite in the area I am in – you must wait for anomalies to pop up. The mining task was covered because the mining mission ore Lyavite is counted as mining Kernite. For the refining task I could have gone hunting for Kernite in space, but instead I purchased it locally off the market. I lost about 1M ISK in that second process – fine for my main character, but I should have been more thoughtful with the new Alt.
Third – I have dragged in one of my Alts to help when I said I wouldn’t. There are a lot of Career tasks that require you to do PVP. My Alt has been logging in, accepting duel requests, and gets damaged or drained or disrupted as required. This has also highlighted that I can’t run two EVE clients at near 4K and maxed out settings on my PC without a bit of stuttering. I need to go look at dialing back some graphic settings.
Interestingly I have almost solely been using this new Alt over the last couple weeks, and not my main.
The little pocket I have established myself in has been great, relatively quiet and with all the industrial and agent resources I have needed. But I am surprised at how hard some of the exploration tasks are to complete. There is a constant flow of old pilots in Tactical Destroyers and Orthrus looping through the constellation running low level exploration content. The basic Hideaway, Burrow and Refuge sites last bare minutes, while the harder sites my Alt cannot handle are left alone. Occasionally someone in a Marauder will come through and clear out the harder content. I may have to move further out from trade hubs to be able to access low level exploration content more reliably.
The game client says my character is 11 days old, has 1.5M SP, and is worth 113M ISK.
I have spent a couple days consolidating – collecting loot and salvage, revisiting initial ship fittings, skill training, and low hanging goals.
One of those things was installing a set of +1 learning implants and finding some basic skill hardwirings. It is still odd / refreshing to have to consider the price of things. I could have gone with +3 implants but then used up much of my liquid ISK.
The AIR Daily tasks are surprising rewarding – 500,000 ISK and 500 EverMarks each. The stretch monthly goals can include an 8,000,000 ISK reward and a block of Skill Points. One of them that comes up is to Manufacture an item. I went and purchased 2 shuttle blueprints.
One I started to do Material Research on – to make them cheaper to build in future. The second I put in a nearby manufacturing facility with a bunch of Tritanium I had collected. Now it takes me a minute or two of effort to manufacture an item and earn 500,000 ISK when it is a daily goal. Shuttles are also easy to sell and always useful.
The boost to standings from the Sister of EVE Arc made a difference to what agents I could start with. The level 1 and 2 mining missions are easy. The level 1 combat missions are almost always easy – but some of the level 2 require thought. An 8K frigate rat can take a few hits to take down and require consideration of turret tracking and so on.
At this point I need to see how exploration goes, find specific career goals to chase down, and see what the character can do in the Winter Nexus.
While there are highs and successes and proud moments, my neurodivergent wife, son and daughter maintain their steady flow of fuckery, with a healthy dose of shittery thrown in for good measure. There is no finish line with this – it will go on forever. For my own sanity I have made a point to find time this year to play computer games more often.
I decided to now try the Sisters of EVE introductory Epic Arc called The Blood Stained Stars. I’ve run it before once or twice, but so long ago I couldn’t remember the details aside from a fight near the end where the NPC has a very strong tank.
I picked a Dragoon to run this Arc with. I have never flown it before, and I did not notice it being used by other people running the Arc with me. There was a strategy to this choice which paid out at the end.
[Dragoon, SOE Epic Arc]
Damage Control I Small I-a Enduring Armor Repairer Extruded Compact Heat Sink Compact Multispectrum Energized Membrane
1MN Monopropellant Enduring Afterburner Eutectic Compact Cap Recharger Small Compact Pb-Acid Cap Battery
Small Focused Anode Pulse Particle Stream I, Imperial Navy Multifrequency S Small Focused Anode Pulse Particle Stream I, Imperial Navy Multifrequency S Small Focused Anode Pulse Particle Stream I, Imperial Navy Multifrequency S Salvager I Salvager I
Small Auxiliary Nano Pump I Small Processor Overclocking Unit I Small Capacitor Control Circuit I
Hobgoblin I x5
2.45 – 3.68M ISK, 5.5K EHP, 35EHP/s tank, 104 – 157 DPS, 300m3 and 6s align time
I did read comments where it was suggested the Arc could be run in a few hours. I took my time to read the storyline, looted and salvaged all my wrecks, and looked at the scenery. It took me 3 sessions of a couple of hours each with one hiccup.
Early in the chain I warped to an agent in space to hand in a mission. The agent said they were busy talking to another Capsuleer – although I was the only one on grid. Then the mission completion window popped up. My hand-in item was still in my cargo hold, but the agent would not speak with me. I flew back to the overall agent for the chain, and they would not speak with me either. I gave it some time to correct itself, which it did not, so I had to log a support ticket. Two friendly GM’s quickly reset that part of the chain for me and I continued with no further problems.
There is a lot of couriering and moving around and you get to see a fair sampling of Hi-Sec, but you do get a bit of combat. Here I wasn’t sure what was going on – because my less than a week-old character with less than 1M SP handled situations I would not have thought it should have. I didn’t know how much of this was influenced by my knowledge of fitting and flying, and how much were gimped and overly weakened opponents.
There were only a few points through the main chain which required much care. A couple times where you could agro a lot of DPS if you didn’t do some mediocre kiting, and one NPC which drained your cap. This was one of the reasons I took a boat with drones. Missiles would also have done the trick.
There was only one battle which had me scrambling – the final fight against Dagan.
I went into this fight with around 105 DPS according to the Pyfa fitting tool. While I could tank the damage from Dagan without much problem, I would only get to scratch his armor during short gaps in his own active tanking. So, I then went to my backup plan.
I retreated and went and fitted faction crystals to my guns and selected drones with the best damage type. I would have also gone to shorter range more damaging pulse turrets, but there were none in the area. I returned but while it was an improvement, it was still going to take a very long time to win.
So, I went to the backup to my backup plan. I had already amassed around 250K SP of free skill points from the various daily and AIR career rewards. So, I trained Drone IV to V, and the supporting drone skills which I had already pre-purchased to at least rank III. I also increased Amarr Destroyer to rank III and trained a few other low hanging Gun skills and in a few minutes got my DPS up to 150. The battle was then shortly over.
The main reward, which new players won’t really understand the benefit of, was a somewhat free boost to the standings with one selected faction. I also picked up around 15M ISK in salvage and loot, and maybe around 15M ISK in bounties and mission rewards. By the end of the run my client said I have 1.3M Skill points, a wealth of 82M ISK, and a Caldari State Faction standing of 1.93. There were also a couple storyline missions that popped up.
That is a surprisingly good starting point for a new player.
Look but don’t touch.
Dagan – done in by hoarded free Skill Points.
There were two little moments that stood out. One of the GM’s gave me some helpful tips which possibly alluded to maybe the problem was me not handing the missions in correctly. I wanted to say I have been playing the game for 19 years and know a bug when I see it, and that I had already read lots of posts about it happening while trying to help myself, but then I realised I didn’t care if the GM thought I might have been a moron. The second was the final fight took longer than I had anticipated, and I ended up only getting to bed at 2am. Been a long time since a computer game kept me up so late.
There are gaps in my playing as I switch characters and real life intervenes, but the block of logged in sessions I am going to call Day 4 came to pass.
I am suffering from jump fatigue from my moving operation, but I make a start on reviewing and setting up ships.
I need to identify the most effective options for hauling, mining, exploration and PVE, and work out what sort of containers I will use in station to store assets.
I am surprised at how often the enduring, compact, and restrained versions of modules are both better and cheaper than the standard T1 module.
I set up a Bestower industrial to be able to haul 2 station containers around at a time. Tank is not really a factor as it won’t be carrying anything of worth, and I won’t be able to fend off griefers anyway. It is tokenism.
10MN Monopropellant Enduring Afterburner Medium Shield Extender I Medium Shield Extender I
[Empty High slot] [Empty High slot]
Medium Cargohold Optimization I Medium Cargohold Optimization I Medium Cargohold Optimization I
3.68M ISK, 5.4K EHP, 22.1K m3 and 15s align time
I will also use it for short range movement of Ore and Minerals.
While playing around with ship fits for a character with limited funds and less than 1M Skill points is intriguing, I also want to ensure I earn a couple daily rewards and do something in space, so I decided to tackle the new mini–Epic Arc from Ore – called Fractured Legacy.
I grab a Venture, do a little research, and head over to the starting system. You need basic hacking skills and a module, a propulsion module, and to be able to train the Mining Destroyer skill you are rewarded with. I had 100K Free SP already so I could do that without having to wait.
It was a straightforward, visually interesting, and easy arc even for a 4-day old character. The rewards were great at this point – a free Pioneer Mining Destroyer and skill book and an additional 7.5M ISK.
Parked at the AIR Station waiting to go.
Getting a chance to look at phased asteroids.
Flying the new Pioneer.
At this point my character’s wealth was sitting at 45M ISK. That took a lot less effort than the first time around I played.
It might just be how my mind works, but I have never found the EVE in-game map to be particularly useful in giving me a simple overview of where I am in the game world.
It is apparently mathematically correct, but I often have to rotate the map after each jump to help with my situational awareness.
So I – like many people – instead used the 2D maps on DOTLAN.
With the catalyst expansion CCP has finally implemented something similar in game.
It allows you to zoom in and out, and select and favourite a whole heap of in game statistics.
The information can be used for both good and evil, and you have the ability to save a favourites list.
There are issues with it. The links between regions is frequently messy and hard to follow / understand. The map realigns to the edge of the region every time you dock. It realigns to your current location when you undock, or you can click on the “focus on current location” to realign it manually each time, but it irritates. Also if you have your map open / floating, it does not re-open between client sessions.
Where I love it though is being able to add it to the mass of windows I have open in my client (work in progress on the new toon) to keep track of where I am and what is going on around me.
And it is lucky it is now available, because after years of use, DOTLAN’s level of onscreen and pop up ads has got to the point where it is irritating to use and can occasionally cause browser freezes and slow downs.
This only scratches the surface – but I have used the in game map more in the last couple weeks than I have in the previous 19 years.
With some ISK in the bank and a collection of shiny new ship hulls, it was time to escape the career school system and find a new home.
I pulled up the trusty dotlan evemaps website, and taking in the main trading stations, the hi-sec routes between them, and the ganking choke points such as Uedama and Gheth, I went looking for suitable pockets to live out of based on statistics like the number of jumps, player and NPC kills, what agents were available and so on.
What I was looking for recently for my main character was not the same as what I was looking for this new character, but the previous research sped up this search.
The new location picked was 50 jumps from the old.
I purchased a Bowhead for my main recently, to move cheap hulls around in bulk. This was a perfect opportunity to use it, but unfortunately my rule for this new character was no help from the old.
It made no logical sense to fly my cheap hulls one by one to the new location, so I needed to sell most of my newfound loot, fly over, and re-buy what I needed at my destination. Then it dawned on me. I couldn’t afford to do that.
I scrambled to learn some skills to increase the number of trades I could post, but all the taxes and fees on them were at the highest levels they could be. I would also be without the ISK for these ships and modules until they sold. When sold, I was probably looking at a minimum 10% loss.
In the end I moved 3 ship hulls and sold the rest, making around 300 jumps in one day.
Setting up in the new location I made a point of polishing all my fits – and then hit another block. I couldn’t afford optimum fits. For example, a had to settle on a salvaging frigate instead of a salvaging destroyer, as tractor beams are too costly. I can do without for the moment.
There were all these compromises and restrictions around my wealth and skill points. It gave me flashbacks to the EVE of old. I didn’t mind that.
Meanwhile on my main character I had spent 10B ISK in the previous month, and several million unallocated skill points. I purchased the before-mentioned Bowhead, and a Freighter, and any skill I was missing which I immediately jumped to rank 4 in. Anything I was experimenting with I just purchased, often multiple options to try them all.
For as much as I can justify $0.96 a day for two EVE accounts as being cheap entertainment, it was still $340+ worth of transactions in one go to pay for them to each have a year subscription. That was a risk.
One reason I wanted my second account activated was to create / run a new character from scratch. Initially it is to refresh my knowledge of the game by running the new character tutorials and career agents. Later I might try something like Faction Warfare, or joining a corporation, or just being less risk averse in how I play them.
I have some rules. The character can have full use of the Omega training for the year and any daily rewards. It also cannot receive any support from or join with my current characters.
The other character on that account is my main Alt. I think they have around 50M Skill points, with a further 8M unallocated. I have a couple of MCT (Multiple Character Training Certificates) on that account and will keep an eye out for when they go on sale. I should be able to run this new Alt and maintain a useful support Alt on that one account.
My thoughts from the first 48 hours.
. I created an Amarian character because I prefer lasers.
. The character design process appears unchanged. It works ok.
. I missed creating my portrait during the process – but I was able to go back and do that via the character customisation services in station. I think you could miss creating your portrait and not realise it was a thing.
. While creating the portrait, I realised I wasn’t entirely happy with the character’s lips. I cannot change it however without purchasing a Character Resculpt Certificate. That costs 140 Plex or 700M ISK. That is steep and irritating, especially for a new player. I mistakenly had the vague belief you had a period of grace with this resculpting, so I was not as careful as I should have been. (I suspect that was only from when it was first released!)
. Because I know how to play EVE, there is no way for me to truly comprehend how effective the new character introduction process is.
. The initial AIR tutorial was fine. It does a nice enough job highlighting in blue what buttons to press, gives you a basic overview, and has some nice visuals to zoom in and out of. It is also the first of 3 ship and 1 pod death it sort of pushes down your throat. “See, dying isn’t so bad. Here, die again. Not so bad as I said.”
. It gives you varying degrees of warning about when you will lose a ship, and you can fit and insure appropriately to minimise the impact. New players however might not pick up the warnings and lose ships they have become attached too or taken a while to setup.
. Once you do the initial mini tutorial (which you can skip) you are pointed towards the Career agents. Mine were all in a system a couple jumps away. I ran them all in just over a day. It would take longer if you had not played EVE before. I didn’t mind them. There were a couple where I could see a new player could become lost, but in the more complex areas they pointed you towards help videos, and a quick google search would resolve any other roadblocks.
. I was only in the career agent system for a couple of days. It was busy, but I did not notice anyone griefing new players. There was a fair bit of market gouging – but I happily paid double or triple for T1 modules in station to save me 20+ jumps. At times there were mining fleets with Orca boosts clearing out belts. Maybe they felt safer in the system? There were always mining sites behind restricted gates, so new players were always able to gather required resources even if the belts were empty.
. There wasn’t all that much interaction in the system. The occasional person offered up services such as “cheap” skill books or free ship hulls for newbies, but I never saw them answered. Just before I moved on, I noticed one new pilot asking if anyone would dual them.
. The “Track” option on missions worked well. It did, however, randomly turn off, which could confuse new players. I am tending to use mission tracking on my main now. It saves having to look up destinations and stations to dock at.
. Aura was ever helpful, as was the mission tracking, and the agent pop ups, and the in-mission character pop ups. Sometimes though they confused things. Several times they did things like insist I install a civilian version of a module even though I already had the T1 version. You could get around this by manually selecting destinations and what not, but there were a few times when I wondered if a mission would break. (They didn’t.)
. I just threw a base skill plan at my character and haven’t worked on their skill plan yet. This was an area they might have done a little better introducing. The same with implants, although you do get a couple basic ones given to you so that might trigger self investigations.
. Being in space and doing things had you interacting with the AIR Daily Goals. These replaced the daily log in bonuses and are surprisingly lucrative, especially for a new player. With a few minutes’ effort you could commonly earn 1M ISK+. You could also use EverMarks to pay for some of the goals you would not normally complete. Make a mild effort for a couple of weeks within a month, and there are reasonable ISK and SP payouts.
. Using the AIR Career Agents also got you interacting with the AIR Career Program. These provide a whole heap of mostly little rewards for completing actions. Many just occur as you go through the agents, some you will need to plan and make an effort to complete. If you are not sure what to do when you first start out in the game, it isn’t a bad source of goals and reward.
. The opportunities interface is a bit cluttered, and the agency interface shows its age. They should probably be merged and neatened up, but they do make it somewhat easier to find things to do in game.
. After a couple days I ended up with 475K SP of trained skills and 125K SP of unallocated SP. The base skills provided covered almost all my needs to be able to do the career agent missions. In fact, I was surprised to be able to use salvagers, so I felt like I had a very good starting point.
. There is probably an order to do the career missions so that you always have the right ship and equipment at the right time, but I grabbed hulls and modules off the market at inflated prices whenever it was convenient. At the end of the process I had 12M ISK, 11M in Hulls, 1.5M in Modules, 3.5M in Loot, 8,500 EverMarks, and a small amount of LP for a couple mining missions I ran. So maybe around 30M of wealth for my first two days in game. It is a good base to work from.
So next I need to relocate – to any area with appropriate missions to run, belts to mine, somewhat near a trade hub, and with access to low sec.
An EVE Subscription month is 30 days, and a year is 360 days.
If you pay for your EVE Subscription by the month, it is about $30 AUD.
I have historically purchased yearly EVE Subscriptions for my main account.
Based on today’s exchange rates, a year Subscription costs around $220 AUD. That equates to $18.30 a month, or $0.60 a day. A good discount over monthly.
It does not take much to get $0.60 of entertainment value in a day out of EVE. Even if I don’t log in, I will inevitably read The Ancient Gaming Noob’s daily post or see something on social media and at least think about it.
Reflecting on it in a different way, my almost daily café coffee and cinnamon donut is $5.20.
To make this self-justification equation better, I generally buy my subscription during sales. This year there was a discount during the Black Friday Sales of 25%, plus some PLEX, plus some SKINR Supplies.
After being relatively busy with EVE over the last month, I made use of this sale and added another 12 months of Omega time to my main.
360 days for $170 AUD, or 30 days for $14.15, or 1 day for $0.47.
There was also 1,000 PLEX. That would cost $69 AUD at full price and is currently worth about 4.8B ISK. So that makes the equation even nicer.
The SKINR supplies were neither here nor there – worth about $80M ISK and dropping when I looked. They might return more ISK if I look to sell in 6 to 12 months.
Overall, the deal was nice enough for me to resubscribe my second account.
I don’t tend to use PLEX – maybe the occasional well priced SKIN – but I guess it is good to have some in the bank.
(* Some of the monetary calculations are a few percentage points out. Some are based on what I paid on my credit card, some are based on Google’s exchange calculations, and there has also been some minor rounding.)
I am still logging in daily and working through the various changes introduced with the catalyst expansion (and before). I will get around to writing down my thoughts on it all later.
I just wanted to mention something that has genuinely surprised me.
I am still paying close attention to the pilots who come and go from the area I am playing out of, flagging the Gankers and their scouts, and those who are courteous explorers and those who are not.
My main EVE Toon is now over 19 years old, and if I remember correctly has been subscribed for almost the entire time. He will have clicked over 422M Skill points by the time I submit this post. I would think such an old toon in Hi-Sec would be at least a little unusual. I am wrong.
Half the pilots I check are over a decade old. In fact – let me check the age of pilots in system right now:
<1 Year – 7
5 Years – 1
8 Years – 2
9 Years – 1
12 Years – 2
16 Years – 6
17 Years – 2
19 Years – 1
So, 22 pilots are in system, 11 of them are over 10 years old. And this is what I see across the constellation when I am running sites or doing mining missions. Not many players between 1 and 9 years old, and a disproportionately larger number older pilots than I would have expected to have seen in Hi-Sec.
I wonder if this is normal or it has been caused by pilots coming out of the woodwork due to the catalyst mining changes. I might have to visit more regions.
I have spent more time playing EVE in the last week than I have in the last two years.
I decided I would do some preparation for the Catalyst expansion, to check out the mining updates in so far as they impact solo players.
I brought up dotlan evemaps and zkillboard and over several days of scouting identified a cluster of systems I could work from doing belt and mission mining.
I then set up alliance contacts flagging the common groups ganking miners through the area. The names were different, but the regular references to James 315 were plastered through the character, corporation and alliance bios.
Looking through the types of kills, there was no such thing as a safe fitting. Every type of hull, yield or tank fit were victims. I suspect I might have missed some nerfing on some of the hulls. Interestingly there were often less pilots doing the ganking, but their destroyers were now more often T2 fit.
My impression was that while the mining losses did not seem to stand out as excessive, they were more random and spread out. I saw gankers moving through systems more frequently than I was expecting at all times of day. I feel I will have to be even more alert than I used to be.
While doing this research I did a Datacore run. After the loss of the Niarja system to the Triglavians, this loop almost doubled in size to now over 130 jumps. I did this in a Malediction shuttle, so I left most of the 5,000 odd datacores for later collection. After selling I should clear more than 300M ISK.
What else did I do.
I looked at SKINR. I glanced at it when it was initially released but it seemed a mess. It was far more intuitive this time around. I am not sure if they improved the process or I was just looking at it differently. I was able to save some completed designs without having to resort to Google. While I liked the idea, the cost is quite prohibitive. It would limit its use, especially for newer players. I have created one skin for myself which I have not activated just yet.
I spent a lot of time deciding on and setting up a frigate to mine in. I have fittings more than 10 years old, which still worked as reasonable starting points. There were some slot changes and some of the faction gear I had previously used had become prohibitively more expensive. I settled on an Endurance for L1 and L2 mining missions.
I have since started but not concluded deciding on a mining barge. The biggest change here is the idea of Residue Probability and the changes to mining crystals. I had never heard about it before. It is basically the concept of mining wastage. The faster you mine / the bigger yield you take, the more wastage occurs. So, you can earn more with a higher yield, but a third or more of the asteroid is wasted, so you must move more, and a belt will run out of resources quicker.
In an environment where there are more resources than you need, then maximising your yield by throwing away resources you were not likely to use anyway is nice. In high sec, especially with the return of mining anomalies, you might instead throw away resources not normally available in high sec and be poorer overall. Unless of course while mining slowly, someone else comes in and hoovers up the site, stealing more of a share than if they had mined with no wastage like you did.
I am up to 200 hours in No Man Sky – but hit a wall and have put it aside for the moment.
I heard rumour that mining was getting looked at in EVE. I had not logged in for some time, so I updated the launcher and the game client and found myself back in Jita. The last time I checked my skill queue had 150+ days in it, but it was now down to less than a week.
I logged in sporadically to chase down some skillbooks, threw more skills at the queue which I will never make use of, and waited for the announcements.
So, with the Catalyst expansion coming in November mining will become “increasingly dynamic, rewarding, and fiercely contested.”
I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or throw expletives at CCP. There are few miners who are interested in “fierce” competition in their mining.
The fierce bit are new sites in Low and Null Sec that initially need to be scanned down. They contain normal asteroids and 4 new phased asteroids. These asteroids give a new ore called prismaticite. The phased asteroids need to be anchored in our dimension using devices powered by mining command ships. A combination of 1 rorqual, 2 orcas or 3 porpoises. Without this anchoring, yields are held at 10%.
The 1st and 2nd phased asteroids are available in the first 20 hours of being scanned down. After 20 hours the sites become visible on the star map, and the 3rd and 4th larger phased asteroids can be anchored. And therein sees CCP giddy with excitement thinking about the rush of miners trying to extract their ore before the PVP players turn up.
To make this even less appealing, you won’t know what mineral is refined from prismaticite or how much – it will be random each time you do it. Alternatively, you can use reactions. The suggestion is that overall, it will be more valuable.
Yeah, nah.
This mechanism is for the highly organised null sec industrialists who will mine these efficiently and in protected space with little risk in comparison to the reward.
If that is what CCP was wanting – then success.
So, what is there which might be usable by the solo player? Plenty it seems.
Mining cycles will be 4 times shorter, along with yield, capacitor, crystal damage and so on. So, you will have the same yield over time, but more immediate feedback. I have tables and timers set up to allow me to finish my last mining cycle efficiently, so this change means I can dispense with that and just let the cycles finish.
There will be mining criticals – offering bonus yields, with skills and modules to improve your odds.
There will be improvements to the Mining interface, with cleaner real-time colour coded data available overlayed in space.
All corvettes and bonused mining ships will get a built-in mining surveyor. You can improve this data by retaining the existing scanner or relying on suitable mining command bursts.
Anomaly mining sites will return to Hi-Sec with Omber and Kernite, with the chance of mining escalations. It also appears that cosmic signatures will include hidden mining sites. I stopped mining when they removed these, trying to force people to mine in Low Sec.
L1 and L2 Mining missions are getting new visuals and 50% higher ISK and LP rewards.
They are adding Mutaplasmids for mining modules.
They are adding new ships – apparently a mining destroyer (Pioneer) with T1, Faction and T2 versions, and a Faction Venture, and a Sisters of EVE jack of all trade’s expedition command battlecruiser (Odysseus) which while not specifically a mining ship can be set up to mine.
So, in the end it will be worth revisiting mining as a solo player – and once the silly prices are over – checking out the new mining ship options.
We have a current winner in my hunt for a new computer game.
I have spent over 100 hours in No Man’s Sky (to be shortened to NMS from now on).
You can play it in short bursts or long sessions, put it down whenever you need, there is a wide range of things to try, and it is not that buggy.
It can be very grindy. Sometimes it is balanced and works, sometimes it does not.
Tutorials are covered by copious story line missions and events that give you the basics. Some of these work well, some do not. All seem to hand out a lot of free stuff. I found the introduction to underwater mechanics to be particularly tedious, as is the introduction to the various service technicians in your home base.
There is a lot of stuff which is not all that clear – so you do tend to have to read wikis and watch YouTube videos to get the most out of it.
Your main tools in the game – your exosuit, multi-tool, starship, corvette, exocraft and freighter all have a technical class, technical and storage slots (except the multi-tool), a starting slot count, layout and maximum, and an appearance.
You get given these, find them, repair them, pirate them, trade in or purchase them, upgrade them and apply various modules to them. You are mostly stuck with the appearance and initial supercharged slot layout, but there are cosmetic changes available, and you can build your own starship and corvette majorly influencing their appearance.
There is however a big element of luck to building up your toolkit – the grind is repeatedly checking your opportunities in case you find a better mix of statistics and appearance than what you already have.
Early on I diligently maximised all the possible slots on my starship, exosuit, multi-tool and base storage. Over time with careful organisation, I almost always have whatever I need at hand without needing to go gather a certain resource. That has made the game a bit more enjoyable.
I don’t always love the appearance of my early maximised tools, but they do what I need them too do and regrinding a new tool from scratch hasn’t appealed yet. I like the new corvette concept. I particularly like being able to stand up in it while within a planet’s atmosphere and scan for resources without needing to land. You can even gather some resources, such as the new corvette parts, by shooting them with your corvette. Most salvage drops with corvette parts can be farmed that way, making it a quick and easy process.
I also like the freighter mechanic, but it has been more grindy than I would like. You get your first freighter for free. Some people save their game before the encounter is triggered, run it, check the random freighter drop, then restore from save and repeat over and over until they get a setup they like.
I don’t like save gaming – so my first free freighter was pretty average. The very next freighter I had an option to buy was perfect, S class, the appearance I wanted, with a great slot layout – and I did not have the money to purchase it. I stayed away from freighters until I saved up more than 300 million units, and soon after got an S class freighter with minimal slots and an appearance I didn’t like. While I traded up, I have been waiting for a better option ever since. That has been more than 100 hours, and I still haven’t had anything better pop up.
I will have to see how much time I can get out of the game.
The Dev Blog is full of the worst of CCP Speak, but it is worth trying to decipher.
Utility goods are “Items like PLEX, Skill Books, MCT, Skill Extractors, and Expert Systems, introduced by CCP and tradable, when not soulbound.”
The interesting bit – “They carry little to no player-added value, yet often generate profit through arbitrage and speculative investment. This is not part of the value chain – it extracts margin without contributing. These goods should be as accessible as their utility demands, which means eliminating unnecessary trading friction.”
There are plenty of things in our real life that need the same approach.
They have started this philosophy with MCT (Multiple Character Training) being bound to account. (I hadn’t noticed.) One of the next steps is that all PLEX sales, outside of private stations, will move into a single market accessible from all space (but abyssal). Logically this makes PLEX sales much more competitive.
We will see how all that pans out. The consequence of any mistakes could be huge.
I wonder if non-player created Skins will fully go down the same path to being all “soulbound”?
I am already up to 28 hours of play in No Man’s Sky. There is a lot I don’t like about this game. It is designed for consoles, and those interfaces and game decisions make for a poorer PC game. I also find there is quite a lot of complexity thrown at you from early game, and a mix of tutorial and storyline impacts that come down to luck. I like a game where I can work things out for myself with time – but I have had to google search for guidance at points because there isn’t enough provided by the game to make decisions on. I guess the game wants you to replay to work out the impact of your choices, but I am not all that keen on repeated playthroughs.
There are enough goals I want to achieve that I should stay interested in the game for a while. At the moment I am maximising my exosuit’s capacity and working through repairing a damaged S class Frigate.
The games I have played recently – No Man’s Sky, X4 Foundations, Astrometica, Satisfactory, Elite Dangerous, Starfield etc, all have a lot in common. No Man’s Sky and X4 Foundations particularly so.
I use 6 monitors on my home desktop – 3 x 4K and 3 x FHD. I have remarked a couple of times over the years that I had a strange issue with my 4K screens randomly going blank for a second every 20 seconds. I spent an inordinate amount of time, effort and money trying to resolve this irritation with no luck. When it started, I would have to turn the screen off and on 1-3 times before it stopped. If it was the primary screen, I would have to reboot windows 1-3 times. Some days it would drive me crazy.
In the end with everything else being replaced, the problem came down to the Dell 27” 4K monitors I was using (S2721QS). Google suggests this is a known issue with some Dell monitors – possibly related to Display Port and the Input Autodetect (even when turned off). There were a handful of suggested fixes, but they did not work for everyone, and did not work for me.
One of the fixes was to use HDMI instead. I found with 6 monitors Windows would sometimes re-allocate screen numbers to different screens on boot up if you used some or all HDMI cables. That included when you apparently hard coded screen numbers. That messed up your layout each time it happened.
The other day I replaced the Dell monitors with Lenovo 27” N27P 4K monitors. I don’t like them as much as the Dell’s, but they were cheap – and I have not had a single issue with the screens going blank since.
I am still playing around with X4 Foundations, but it doesn’t fit the “quick to pick up or put down” bill, so I have still been looking for a go to distraction game. Minecraft has fitted that bill at times, and I have played that on and off for years, but I glanced through my Steam library to see what I have played and tried to play over the last couple years.
. Satisfactory (800 hours) – I really like this game, the progression is well balanced, and you can play it relatively simply or go in-depth. I don’t mind occasionally restarting from scratch when there has been a major update. Currently I tend only to return after an interesting patch.
. Starfield (190 hours) – A bit buggy but good for both short and long-playing sessions. My eyes have currently glazed over at its reincarnation grind.
. Factorio (80 hours) – another game I liked, but my play time was limited by not liking the idea of restarting from scratch.
. Baldur’s Gate (30 hours) – I like this but find the camera a bit annoying and the click on everything approach boring. There are also some storyline impacts from random character skill check rolls which have irritated me.
. Pathfinder – Wrath of the Righteous (30 hours) – I find it a bit easier to navigate around than Baldur’s Gate, but there have been a couple storyline misses and some missions I don’t enjoy and result in me putting the game aside.
. X4 Foundations (22 hours) – big learning curve and depth. Has promise – if I can find enough time to work through it all.
. Dredge (20 hours) – an amusing little game, but there are a couple gotchas where if you mess up the order you do things or fail to understand the significance of something, you can’t complete all aspects of the game. I messed up and haven’t felt inclined to start from scratch again.
. Hardscape Shipbreaker (20 hours) – This kind of scratches an itch I did not know I had. It is the storyline which sort of detracts from it.
. Sudden Strike 4 (14 hours) – I love these sorts of games but find this one a bit buggy and I don’t like many of the mission styles or balancing.
. Blitzkrieg 3 (8 hours) – I played hundreds of hours of the earlier versions of Blitzkrieg. I like this – but as with Sudden Strike it is a bit buggy (more so) and some of the mission styles annoy me (less so).
In the last week I have tried a few more games.
Astrometica (15 hours) – like Starfield / Empyrion / No Man’s Sky. Early access and missing lots and the progression is not quite right. Waiting for the next patch in a few days.
Empyrion – Galactic Survival (2 hours) – Got a X4 foundations vibe, but more walking than spaceships. Looks as complicated as X4.
No Man’s Sky – pretty game like the above. I haven’t finished the tutorial yet. Undecided.
It is apparent that I prefer sandbox games. I don’t mind a game storyline, but not when it is too linear or forces me to engage in a mission or quest that I don’t enjoy.
The hunt continues. (I have a dozen other games I have purchased on sale but not got around to installing yet.)
This is the map of the Heretic’s End region in x4 Foundations, where my player owned station sits. It is the green star. You can see a Free Port to the south west, at least 3 jump gates to different regions, and the location of the ship I am flying to the north east. The reddish hexes are areas I can see / observe, from a satellite near the free port, from the station and the orbiting ship I have there, and from around the ship I am flying.
I was following a mission objective when I found an entrance and exit from Heretics End. I scanned the third gate (which unfortunately leads to a hostile region) and the free port.
These are what Jump Gates in X4 look like. You must fly through them to activate it but can come in from either direction. They don’t have an annoying animation after jumping like EVE, and you exit at the same speed you go in.
In Heretic’s end I must manually fly between the gates and stations.
In more populated areas they have these sorts of Space Highways you can “drive” along at substantially faster speeds than your ship can normally travel. This image is looking down on a highway – with one road going in one direction, and the other road in the opposite direction.
This is what it looks like on the highway:
The highways can pass through jump gates – sometimes in quick succession, so it tends to be best to use them when you have a waypoint to exit at. I ended up multiple systems away from the starting point by mistake the first time I used a highway.
You must manually exit the highway – if you are following a waypoint (I think they are guide points or something) the navigation system will give you a countdown for when you must do that.
Something I forgot to mention about X4 Foundations yesterday which I find rather cool is that it is possible to have a pilot fly your ship while you are on / moving around it. The image below is the view from my character on the bridge of the Hyperion Exploration Ship as a crew member pilots it.
You can take over from the pilot whenever you want. The only issue I have found so far is that when I am not on a ship the pilots seem to be able to follow waypoints and trade orders ok, but when I am on the ship they have more of a tendency to get hung up and stuck in asteroid fields and the like. Performance anxiety in front of their boss maybe?
The Hyperion also has one small sized docking bay and allows you to store one additional small sized ship in a hanger, which is also rather cool.
One gotcha I have found with being able to allocate captains to different ships is that it can be easy to mistakenly give orders to the wrong ships, particularly with trading. I have landed, left the ship to look for crew or to buy personal trade items, then returned to find the docking bay empty. The captain has taken off while I was away on a trade mission I had inadvertently allocated to it. You must order it or another free ship back and wait. It is kind of cool seeing it flying in and land.
There are all sorts of orders and options with ships and how they interact. I haven’t looked too closely at them yet. I did have an issue today where I ran into a medium sized hostile that I could not defeat in my small sized fighter. I flew to the Hyperion to repair my fighter and see if it could destroy the hostile. It could tank the damage, and it fired lots and lots of lasers, but it wasn’t causing much damage. So, I returned control to its captain and undocked my fighter, and between the two of us was able to kill the hostile.
Conversely you don’t want to leave your ships floating in space waiting for orders for too long, as it appears they can be destroyed by random hostiles.
It took almost two months before I (mostly) stopped being impacted by the surgery wound. It still gets a bit uncomfortable after a long day of sitting, but it no longer requires “maintenance” or comes up in conversation. I have some very expensive issues with my teeth and skin to start on now. Getting old is literally a pain the arse.
I have gone past 15 hours of playing X4 Foundations. I guess that means Elite Dangerous will have to wait. It is a familiar sort of game to play, but the mechanics are not always obvious. Despite my best intentions, I keep having to Google answers to my questions. The answers are usually simple – but I often can not see how I would have got there just within the game.
The in-game map and in ship radar displays tend to be cluttered and subpar. The trading overlay is particularly bad. It has got more workable the longer I use it – particularly after finding the setting to keep your ship speed when displaying the map instead of slowing down to a stop. Setting waypoints tends to be good.
It has Star Gates, and Accelerator Gates, and glowing superhighways that you run along as if in a car. Or, you can head off into unexplored areas where you tend to find even more Gates.
Your ships have a standard speed, a time limited boost speed, and a travel speed. They differ between the sort of hull you are flying and its engine and thrusters. The small unmodified vessel I am using currently travels at 200+ / 1800+ / 4500+ in each of those modes, so there is quite a difference. I have not had the money to play around with this too much yet.
So far, the game has handed out 3 small hulls, aa exploration carrier and a small space station for free. It seems generous, but you sort of need them to access the necessary mechanics of the game. A word of warning – I did not realise I had been gifted ships a couple of times – it is not always obvious. You can hire staff and assign them to your ships and stations and have them do all sorts of tasks, including flying all over the place trading.
I have done half the tutorials, picking up new ones as I require, but these initial storyline missions are also tutorial like. They have been useful, but the cut scenes tend to be somewhat long, not helped by a so-so storyline, and the tasks are often a bit too repetitive.
So far, I haven’t found an easy way to earn a lot of money, although I guess I have not been really looking hard. My ships do not have enough cargo space to make trading particularly worthwhile. I don’t have a mining vessel yet, so I haven’t tried that sort of resource gathering. Randomly hunting hostile pilots might get you a thanks, but the loot drops are hit and miss and sometimes illegal to carry anyway. The best money earned so far in my early game has been running missions, but these pop up only sporadically and are inconsistent.
About four weeks ago I went duck hunting. This involved three hours of driving, six hours of wandering around a swamp in waders (see above) and three more hours of driving home.
The following day it seemed like I developed a boil on my tailbone, which progressively got worse. I have had a couple of boils on the inside of my thigh, and doctors had very little interest in doing anything about it until they were given a few weeks to clear themselves. This got rather unpleasant, so I went to a GP after a week.
For most of that week I could not do any gaming as it was uncomfortable to sit for very long.
The GP said it was in fact an abscess which would need to be operated on. He immediately sent me off to a nearby Hospital Emergency department, where I spent one night waiting on a bed after two ED doctors and an ED surgeon agreed, and then I was operated on, stayed another night and was released.
What no one mentioned was that they leave the surgery wound open, to allow it to heal from the inside out. That healing process can take 3 or 4 weeks if the wound was deep like mine. So, for two weeks I had daily visits at home from a nurse to repack and redress the wound, and I have now just finished a further week visiting the local GP clinic every second day for the same wound care. I am not sure how much longer it is meant to take. Any time I ask I am told the wound is healing very well and that it will take about a week more. That was at the end of week 1, the end of week 2, and now again at the end of week 3.
A consequence of having an open wound right on your tailbone is that you can’t stay sitting for all that long.
So that was the new unexpected way I found not to be able to play computer games.
I am ok. It turned out while the abscess was deep, it had not spread like the doctors had feared and assumed from its presentation. It could have been a lot worse. It is also not especially painful – more awkward. I am however looking forward to a time when I can shower when I want, sit down without having to think about it, and be able to lose myself for hours in a computer game.
X4 Foundations is a bit like the less attractive child of EVE Online and Starfield.
I really wanted to get into the game without resorting to guides or YouTube videos, but I failed at one of the very first steps – landing my space craft.
You start by getting close enough to a place you can dock (around 5 or 6km so far) and requesting permission through a right click menu. If granted you get little green animated lines indicating where you should fly. This bit is relatively straight forward, although you can run into things.
The little green lines become an image of your ship on the correct landing pad. You fly until you are hovering sort of somewhere over it. Initially it was a bit disconcerting because you can’t look below you, and aligning your ship to look downwards tends to make a mess of the process. Luckily I realised that this does not require you to be particularly precise.
Later I looked up the various internal and external views and changing camera angles, but it wasn’t really required for most of my landings. That was more helpful reversing out from under overhangs and the like.
The bit I got stuck on was the landing guidelines once you were above the landing pad. After a couple goes in the tutorial I still hadn’t worked it out. The guidelines are red – but turn Green when you are pointing in the right direction, have moved forwards or backwards correctly, and moved left and right correctly. Or at least, that is what I thought.
A 90 second YouTube video resolved my confusion – with the guideline for your left and right movements not actually turning Green, but just needing to be aligned properly. Once I realised that I was able to lower myself until the automatic landing kicked in.
A nice touch is that the allocated landing bay can change between visits, and it seems for different ship sizes.
I note there are software upgrades which automate the landings – but they cost substantially more than your starter money.
The joystick and throttle make the process of flying to the landing bay easier, but I use the keyboard for the more precise alignment of the guidelines.
I am not sure how long it will take until the novelty of landing wears off, but my first hurdle was, well, hurdled.
Evehermit 