Monthly Archives: January 2022

Curious, Enigmatic, Mysterious!

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So, for a couple of days now I noticed a new type of signatures popping up, so called “Warp Matrix Convergences.” They look really weird and beautiful and I can’t get enough of them!

I asked a friend (Remy, I don’t think I ever told you of her?) about what ship she can recommend for these kinds of sites and she was all like, “a Probe, hands down.” She has a lot of experience with these things so I totally defered to her judgment and got myself one of those. This is what it looks like:

A Probe in a Warp Matrix Convergence
A Probe in a Warp Matrix Convergence

Everything about this is just so incredibly beautiful! Where do these sites come from? Who is responsible for them popping up just now? How long will they stay? Will I ever have to live without these stunning visuals again? 😭

For now I am intent on making the best of it. The sites I can find in the backwater of New Eden where I currently am give me a lot of Strange Matter Components and some blueprints, apparently for some kind of filament. After a whole afternoon of visiting these sites all over I went to a manufacturing station and got one of the blueprints manufactured. The result is indeed a filament!

I unloaded my Probe (because who knew what would expect me on the other side?), warped a bit away from the station and activated the filament.

Holy moly. This “warp matrix” thingy is even more beautiful than the convergence sites! See for yourself:

Curious Warp Matrix

Absolutely stunning! This pocket of space is apparently being attacked by some kind of rift in space (see above) and there is a lot of debris floating around; some of which again contains those Strange Matter Components and even more blueprints! I see a busy day ahead of me tomorrow! 😃

Mining & Industry Changes

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So, New Eden recently underwent a couple of changes when it comes to one of my favourite pastimes: mining! In more specific (and relevant to me) terms, the drones of an Orca have lost some of their mining bonus but the Orca has gained the Large Industrial Core which technically is a Siege Module which boosts many of the Orca’s defining traits but in turn make it immobile for quite some time and additionally uses fuel. All in all this again reinforces the Orca’s primary purpose; many people are seeing the Orca as a mining ship but it’s actually not, it’s a mining support ship! You’re supposed to have a hord of real mining ships around, like Mining Barges and Exhumers!

This past weekend I have for the first time tried to use one of the new Industrial Cores and I have to say, they do take some getting used to. First of all, you need to be really slow when you activate it. Optimally, you are at a complete standstill because once you activate the Core, your ship will coast at its current velocity until you either deactivate the Core (only possible after a complete cycle which takes two and a half minutes) or you bump something or something bumps you. Have you ever spooled up a Micro Jump Drive and somebody got too close, sending you 100 km in a random direction and you could neither steer nor brake? Exactly that can now happen with the Orca.

And then it doesn’t have an immediate effect on currently running boosts but its changes will only take effect on the next boost. That your boost range switches from 90 km back to 45 km only because you planning to unload is something that needs to be communicated to your mining fleet as long as they don’t really know how this Core thing works.

Other than that, this new module is really fine! With one Covetor, three Procurers, one Retriever, and one Venture it takes about 30 minutes to fill up an Orca — which in turn uses about 20% of the Heavy Water in the new fuel bay… one more thing to pay attention to!

Another thing that has changed as a part of this patch are the mining crystals. While before you needed a specialized crystal for each and every type of ore there was (except moon ores) you now only have six broad categories of crystals, reducing the amount of crystals you have to pack for certain endeavors. I really like that!

And there’s at least one more thing in the works to look forward to: at some point the Orca will gain in-space ore compression using this new Core! I totally can’t wait for that to happen! 🎉

Doctor Who Crossover

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Some days ago CCP announced a Doctor Who crossover event that is going to start this week. And for some reason many people on many Discord servers, forums, and other platforms are complaining.

Because apparently it is not allowed to like both a TV show and a video game. And of course there cannot actually be an overlap between people liking a sci-fi TV show and a sci-fi video game. Whatever these people are smoking, can I have some of that?

One of the most ludicrous “arguments” (if it can be called that) was that a Doctor Who crossover would somehow “break the immersion.” Are you bloody kidding me?! You are playing a space-based video game where ships move like they’re under water, top speed has nothing to do with acceleration, energy is basically free, asteroids respawn like clockwork (and their distribution depends on the social construct “security status”), you can be cloned, your consciousness can be transferred over many lightyears within fractions of a second, assembling a ship that is 15 km in length takes literally 0 time — but a Doctor Who crossover breaks the immersion? Get the fuck out of here.

Apart from that I can understand the reluctance in accepting mixing intellectual properties (or fandoms, if you prefer) like that. What has worked for others (LEGO vs. pretty much everything comes to mind as something that’s both fun and incredibly successful) doesn’t necessarily have to work for EVE and/or Doctor Who. I do have the feeling that EVE players will have more problems accepting this crossover than Doctor Who fans; Doctor Who is a show that thrives on change and the inherent challenges whereas while you could say that EVE is also a lot about adaptation to changing circumstances usually the first reaction of reddit and other forums frequented by EVE players is to throw hissy fits left and right as soon as one value changes from 0.123512 to 0.123511. In an environment like this CCP can only lose, no matter how awesome the event turns out to be…

Anyway, while it is totally possible that New Eden exists somewhere in the Doctor Who universe we all know that the Doctor usually hangs around near Cardiff, Wales because apparently that’s where all the alien action happens! I am for my part looking forward to see what events there will be and how much of the Doctor Who feeling they will actually have. And when it’s over I’m sure New Eden will be back to its usual old self…

Killmark!

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Do you know what else there is in wormholes, except valuable ores and gases? Right. Other people who also want a piece of that!

So there I was, sitting in an Ordinary Perimeter Deposit, nibbling away on a piece of Arkonor when I spot this Venture on D-scan. I immediately cloak up and prepare to wait for what is going to happen now. Only seconds later, the Venture lands on the beacon of the Deposit and starts burning to the rock right next to me! I put a bit of distance between me and the rock they’re going for so they don’t accidently uncloak me when they overshoot. They start mining without a care in the world and so I decide that maybe I could try to take them down? I knew that at least on the first try I was very unlikely to succeed because they were in a Venture which has built-in warp core stabilization and I didn’t even have any warp scrambling equipment so the chance of them warping off before they took serious damage was very high…

So, I moved closer to them, uncloaked right on top of them and set my drones on them. After a few seconds they responded by launching their drones (but not sending them towards me because I never took any damage) and after a few more seconds they warped off, leaving their drones behind!

That went slightly better than expected. I collected their drones and as they were still visible on D-scan, I cloaked up again. And guess what? Only a few seconds later they warped back in and approached the same rock as before! How… what… WHY?!

Anyway, I repeated the little dance: uncloaked on top of them and set my drones on them, only this time they didn’t have any drones to respond with so they warped off again.

At this point I must shamefully admit that I got a bit blood-thirsty. I went back to high-sec and my corp’s HQ which was only two jumps away and has a corp hangar full of useful stuff. I switched my Shield Extenders for two Warp Scramblers and made my way back into the wormhole system. And behold, the Venture was still in there!

Only now they apparently switched to gas huffing so they did refit somewhere which probably also meant they re-equipped some drones (or at least one would hope so). Anyway, I warped in to the Reservoir they were at and imagine my surprise when I found them sitting directly on the beacon! That couldn’t have been easier!

In a few seconds they were warp-scrambled and my drones were once again at work. They did have a Shield Booster installed so every now and then the red bar shrunk slightly but all in all it kept growing. They launched a drone (and one drone only) and targeted one of my drones but it couldn’t get to work fast enough… after about a minute my drones had chewed through all of the Venture’s defenses and I got the killmark you can see above!

All in all there are quite a number of things that could have and maybe even should have gone differently. I initiated a conversation with them and asked them if they wanted to talk about what happened but I never got a reply. Anyway, here’s a list of things that I would probably do different, had the roles been reversed:

  1. D-scan. D-scan, D-scan, D-scan! When jumping into a wormhole, your D-scan window has to be open and visible all the time! So upon entering the system I would have spotted an Endurance and would have known there’s somebody out there.
  2. If you know somebody is out there, try to find out where they are. Change your D-scan settings to smallest angle (5°) and scan all anomalies to see if they are in one of those. If you do this in your first minute after jumping into the system you have the advantage that you can see them but they cannot see you, due to the cloak of the wormhole. Invaluable!
  3. At this point I would have known exactly where the Endurance was. Great! I would have warped a couple of times around the system and created a small number of safe spots. While doing that I would have noticed that the Endurance is now no longer visible on D-scan. As all known anomalies and celestial were well within D-scan range (it was a small wormhole system) this means that it has either cloaked up or left the system. No way to know for sure.
  4. Alright, so, I want to mine. Where? Definitely not in the same Deposit where I spotted the Endurance earlier! There were two other Deposits in the system and I would have picked a different one.
  5. Okay, I picked a Deposit and started mining. Oh, there it is, right on top of me! Okay, I’m not being scrambled so I know I can run at any time. Drones, do your thing! Shield Boost, do your thing! Cap Boosts, do your thing, too! Dang, their drones are better than mine, plus they have one more. Not fair! 😢
  6. I’m still not being scrambled so I’d grab my drones and head out. See you!
  7. Now the Endurance has disappeared from D-scan again. I know in which Deposit it just was, and it’s either still there, cloaked up again, or it has left the system. Which means I will now pick the third Deposit to mine at.
  8. Wow, another Endurance decloaking on top of me! Weird where they all come from! 😀 Anyway, not being scrambled I warp off and everything’s fine.
  9. If it had gone this way with the Endurance chasing me through two Deposits I would at this point probably have ditched the system altogether. Wormhole ore is fine but even losing a Venture over it is not my idea of fun. But let’s assume for a second that I would now decide to still go back but now try getting some gas out of it.
  10. I jump back to high-sec, to a station where I have some gear, equip the gas scoops and go back into the wormhole. Initial D-scanning shows an empty system. Awesome! Off to the Reservoir it is!
  11. There are two Harvestable Clouds, one directly at the beacon and one about 70 km off. I pick the second one so if a hunter is not using Combat Probes (which show up on D-scan) I can see them coming for 70 km.
  12. D-scan shows an Endurance again. Is it the same as before? Oh shit, it has the same ship name! I warp to my safe spot and try to see where they are, watching D-scan all the time to spot Combat Probes. Now, I either spot the Endurance again at some point because they decided to decloak and go about their business and when they are not where I want to be I’ll come out to continue gas mining (always ready to warp off when they arrive) or I will at some point decide that today is just not the day to mine in this particular system and will leave, to probably never see that system again. And good riddance, too, it’s full of Endurances that want to kill me! 😄

So Much Mining

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Happy new year, everyone! While everybody has been out celebrating New Year’s Eve, I have used the opportunity to mine the more valuable stuff from all those places that are normally a lot more dangerous than my usual mining grounds: low-sec and wormholes.

With just a couple of an Endurance’s cargohold’s worth I have collected almost enough non-high-sec minerals to build a full Combat Battlecruiser. That’s really not too shabby for a few hour’s worth of mining!