Suitcase Challenge Day 35: Exploring the Chain
stargrace 
At the time of this post, I have been to 137 systems, and 100 unique wormholes. To put that in perspective, there are roughly 2600 wormholes in EVE, so I still have 94.7% of jspace to explore. I stumbled into another shattered wormhole this week – I love the skyboxes on these locations best. They’re beautiful. Sadly it was already picked over, so I decided to travel up the chain and see what I could find.
C2 -> C1 -> C2 -> C1 -> HS
My connection took me from my shattered wormhole to a C2 connection and then I moved on from there. Along the way I scanned down a few data / relic sites and made quick work of those. I tend to stay away from the C4 and higher holes because there’s nothing for me in them when I’m out in the helios and I would rather stay away from WH systems of other players. The least explored systems I have been in have been low sec – but I realized that a quiet low sec system could be profitable, so when I find a connection I dip in to see who is around, and if it’s quiet I’ll take time to scan down whatever signatures I find. Since people show on local I don’t have to be very sneaky and I don’t have to mash the d-scan button (although now I do it just out of constant habit).
EOL (end of life) wormholes don’t bother me any more, I always leave 1 scanning character inside, and my wormhole has a static HS connection, so even if things close behind me, it only takes a little time to find my way back in. I’m not even stressed if I have to log out safely in space any more. Since my return to eve in March, I have to say that I’m most comfortable in jspace – just doing my thing.
I’d like to practice multiboxing a bit more. I’m not particularly good at it and I feel like there’s so much to watch and pay attention to in EVE that it’s easy for me to get flustered. Practice and time are both needed in order to get comfortable with it. So far my favourite thing to do is to scan down an empty wormhole, bring out my gas huffer, and protect her with my tengu. I normally drop some combat probes in the system, and just casually huff gas while waiting for the belt rats to show up. If anyone shows up on d-scan, I’ll warp the gas huffer away (she’s flying covert ops cloak) to a safe, and then I’ll stealth with the tengu. MOST of the time I’m left in peace, I’m patient, I wait for people to finish what they’re doing before I duck back out. I’ve got multiple characters and if things are too busy I’ll just log for a while and try again later. I’m not interested in hunting down other players or disturbing their method of gameplay. At least, not on these characters.
It will be interesting to see if I can take the Orca out of the wormhole alive once this challenge is completed. For now it doesn’t move, it just compresses ice / ore and barely logs in (aside from letting me swap my ships around) – which is fine, that’s all I need it to do at the moment. The patch is in just a few days, and I’m interested to see how things shake up.
As always, fly your way! o7