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!