Logistics Weekend

This weekend was a mish-mash of activity.  I hunted for Ghost sites, but didn’t see any.  I think I have jumped through well over 100 lowec and nullsec systems without seeing a single Ghost site.   I ran a few profession sites, but it was in lowsec and the loot was mediocre.  Mostly, I was looking for combat sites since I had some uninterrupted play time, but they were never around when I needed them.  I did get to run one good drug site and picked up a Neurotoxin Control skillbook.  So that was nice.

I ended up back in my home system for PI so I emptied the customs offices of all their commodities and dropped them at my home station.  I have nearly a full Epithal load so I got in my Tengu and scouted for wormholes.  I found 3 in my system.  The first went to a C1 system with only another lowsec exit.  The second was a C3 with a C2 connection.  I hopped into the C2 and it had a highsec exit.  I probed it down and it opened into Lonetrek only a few jumps from Jita.  I bookmarked everything and returned home to grab the Epithal.  I filled the commodities hold with about 230m isk of PI and the standard hold with about 600m isk of loot.  Nothing like flying a T1 industrial with nearly 1 billion isk!

My trips through C3 and C2 were uneventful.  I docked up in the Lonetrek system put everything into the station and started to create the Red Frog contract to ship it to Jita.  Hmm, something is wrong.  What is this?  I am in Jotenen – a high-sec island.  Red Frog won’t pick-up from here.  I weigh my options and decide I will try again some other time.  I load up my Epithal and wormhole jump back to lowsec.  No loot cash-out for me today.

Back at my lowsec station, I finish up some invention jobs and get some nice Tech 2 rig blueprints.  I start to manufacture them only to find out that ALL of the manufacturing slots in this station are filled for the next 5 days.  I feel like I have been invaded.  I don’t know who has moved in, but they are clearly more of the industrialist than I am.  Looking around the system I see that another station has 20 plus open manufacturing slots.  Since I don’t feel like waiting 5 days to run my manufacturing, the Epithal gets refitted with cargohold expanders and I move all my stuff to the station next door.  It takes 4 trips, but the system is empty so the risk is low.  I get my manufacturing jobs started and set up another round of invention jobs.  Except this station doesn’t have any invention slots.  I really should check these things first!

Outside of moving things back and forth, I got to play with the new mobile depot.  It works pretty much as noted in the patch notes.  You deploy it and 60 seconds later you can refit your ship in space.  I tested it on my Tengu and was able to swap subsystems easily.  You have to drag and drop though.  I tried to right-click on a module in inventory and there was no option to “fit to ship”.  I also noticed that you can overload your ship.  I fit a cargohold expander, loaded the ship to full and then unfit the cargohold expander.  I couldn’t add anything else (like the mobile depot), but it let me fly away out of range of the depot while I was overloaded.  I didn’t try warping.  I would also like to try using “saved fittings” if all the equipment is in the mobile depot.  I know it doesn’t work if everything is in small container in my ship, but does it work otherwise?  I don’t know.  Trying to keep everything organized for refitting can be a little complicated.

I am looking forward to using these mobile depots on some longer roams.  Storage will always be an issue – especially for ammo, but I have a plan!

Rubicon: The Real Exploration Expansion?

RUBICON

ODYSSEY

Which one looks like the explorer to you?  :)

In Odyssey we got a faster/smoother scanning update and a mini-game that replaced the rats at data/relic sites and some other forgettable changes.  I am not complaining, but there was nothing that was really exciting here.  Kind of like – well, a minivan.

In Rubicon, we get new Ghost Sites that will add quite a bit of flavor to exploration.  We get 2 new Sisters of Eve exploration ships that have the potential to completely transform exploration.  I am holding off writing about them until the details get finalized.  Siphons are not directly tied to exploration, but they might add some interesting options as they mature.  The space depot deployable could be HUGE for exploration – if (and it is a big IF) it allows T3’s to swap subsystems.  If it doesn’t, it will still be very big for the aforementioned SOE ships.  We get auto-loot tractor beams that could have a major effect on ninja salvaging/looting and a minor effect on combat site running.

Time to fire up the Jeep!

Know when to walk away, Know when to FUN

You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

– The Gambler

A big part of making isk through exploration is knowing what to SKIP.  A lot of the sites just don’t have much return for the amount of time invested.  Rogue drone site in high sec?  Skip it.  Cosmic anomalies?  Skip it.  Unrated complexes?  Only if there is nothing better.  Data sites?  Scan for the good stuff, cherry pick, and move on.  Ditto for Relic sites.

This is the efficient way to play.  But I don’t always feel like playing efficiently.  Sometimes I do the hacking minigame just for the fun of it.  Sometimes I hack all the cans even when cargo scanning told me that it isn’t worth my time.  Sometimes I run a combat site just because I haven’t done it in a long time.   Sometimes I even go back and loot and salvage it.  Sometimes I clone jump into a long unused Assault Frigate clone and run high sec sites just for the fun of being in a maxed-out combat frigate.   And of course PVP is usually not an isk efficient activity.  But this is a game.  And while making lots of isk can certainly be fun, grinding for isk is not (at least not for me).

Fun is different things to different people.  And I think that is why the second half of this post by Eve Hermit made me smile.   I could hear the FUN in his unplanned, fully boosted mining session.

Sometimes you do an activity whether it is mining or missioning or scanning or whatever – just for the joy of the game.

Ghosts in the Rubicon Machine

TMDC has a short article by CSM member Ali Aras about a new type of site being introduced in Rubicon.  There is also a forum thread kicked off by CCP Affinity that describes the sites.  So far they sound pretty interesting.  Here are the details from the thread:

Ghost Sites:

• Ghost sites are a new, rare type of cosmic anomaly (not signature).
• They will appear on your system scanner and will be a new style of exploration site featuring fast paced hacking and combat.
• Ghost Sites will be in ALL areas of space – including WH
• It’s tailored to be run solo if you want to but to allow for disruption gameplay. It may be beneficial to take a team with you, but there will be nothing in the site that forces you to take a group or be at a disadvantage.
• The first player to enter sets off the trigger and the site timer trigger will be random. Sometimes you will have 5 minutes in the site… sometimes 20 and lots of variations in between.
•  The sites do not have scattering – they are lootable containers after they are hacked
• There will be multiple containers in each site – 4 of them!
• The cans will be scannable
• Either a hacking module or an analyzing module will work
• Potentially, (CCP Affinity seemed to like the idea) looting the cans will give you a yellow Crimewatch flag
• The NPCs do not spawn until the timer expires
• The timer will be random so you never know when the NPCs will arrive so you will take a chance with each container
• When the NPCs appear [there may be some delay – see below], the cans will explode (and potentially do damage to nearby player ships)
• The NPCs are still being tweaked but they should be pretty tough and yes, there will be a slight delay
• Thematically the NPCs are there to stop you getting access to the loot and would rather blow up the containers than have you receive anything. When the timer expires, the NPCs will appear and a minute or two later the cans will explode – if you wish to take your chances and tank the NPCs to give yourself an extra few minutes to continue hacking then that is a choice you will have to make knowing that if they damage you too much, the exploding can may kill you.

 

Loot:

• Sites in each area of space will drop slightly different items, including blueprints for the first ever implant set to be manufactured by players. The blueprints and one of the required materials will be sourced from the Ghost Sites.
• The set will follow the standard pirate high-grade sets.
• All materials needed for production will not be available in WH space – no single area of space will have everything they need without moving stuff
• The new set of player manufactured pirate implants, called ‘Ascendancy’ implants will vastly improve your warp speed
• All implants will provide a +3 in their respective Character Attribute.
• We chose high-grades over low-grades due to the rarity level we wanted them to be at
• The ingredients will be a mix of PI materials, some trit and items dropped from the ghost sites
• The implants can be manufactured in all stations that have manufacturing lines and in Equipment Assembly Arrays
• The current total bonus to warp speed is 53.6% with all 6 slots (Alpha-Omega)
• The current stats might not be the final numbers as we want to look at over-all speeds and make sure it’s not breaking something unexpected. (Everything is still WIP obviously)
• The blueprint for the best implant will only be in the loot tables in WH space** but can be manufactured anywhere you can manufacture modules
• There will be no blueprints for the implants available in high sec at all. The high sec sites will only have access to the material needed to build the implants. If you want a blueprint – you need to go out of your comfort zone and go to low, null or WH space.

 So all in all, this looks pretty interesting.  The fact that these are high-value sites that show up on the on-board scanner means you really have to be on your toes when you are in low-sec or below.  Anyone in local could be warping to you!  Sounds like a great conflict driver and it definitely skews towards combat ships.  I only hope that the loot is indeed valuable enough to drive people there.  Warp speed improvement isn’t very high on my list of things to spend money on, but maybe it is for freighter pilots. 

** This drew the entirely predictable and yet still funny response from Goonswarm. 

Not all those who wander are lost

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

These are the musings of a solo pilot wandering through New Eden.  I have been playing for almost 2 years now and have benefitted so much from previous Eve bloggers that I decided to  join in.  We will see how it goes.

This will mostly be a blog about the Exploration career path in Eve.  It is a fun and lucrative path for the solo player.

The famous chart:

Career choices in Eve Online

The exploration career path includes exploration combat sites, data sites, relic sites, and the associated Tech 2 invention and production that go with them.  It also includes solo pvp, ninja salvaging, ninja looting, and the creative uses of wormholes.

One final note, the header image is “Wanderer above the Sea Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich.