June 2024

Suitcase Challenge: Ship Fit (Tengu)

stargrace June 10, 2024 0Comment

One of the ships I took with me on my suitcase challenge is my tengu. I’m using it as an ‘all the things’ sort of ship, in the cargo hold I have a MTU, mobile depot, relic / data analyzer, and a target painter II that I swap out depending on what I’m doing. I also have ammo, which I have to replenish frequently at a market hub because tengu eat missiles like they’re candy. I also have a helios (I’ll post the fit for this another day) when I’m doing pure exploration and don’t want to deal with combat. Sometimes I like clearing the C1-C3 signature sites though, just for a change of pace.

I’ve been able to fly a tengu for a very long time now, but I’ve never really focused on maxing out my skills for it. It’s an expensive ship, and I’ve lost a few of them over the years, too. There was no way I should have been flying one when I didn’t understand the very basics, but I feel like I have a good grasp on things now, and I’m pretty confident in my ability to stay alive through most things. Of course it also helps that I have more than enough to replace the ship if I did ever lose it, a few times, at that.

Anyway, now, I love this ship. It just took me a while to realize how best to use it. It’s the only T3C I’ve got the skills to fly, and I know it took a heavy nerf a few years back, but it still does exactly what I want/need it to do in my situation, which is a bunch of random things while I’m living in a WH. I swap out the 1 mid slot for relic/data/painter depending on what site I’m on, and I also have a defensive fit if I really need to beef things up – since I’m just hanging out in C1-C3 I haven’t had a need for that fit. I’m also cap stable, which is a big deal to me. It’s not the most agile ship I fly, but it’s one of the most used. If you’re curious about what other ships I’m flying while I live out of a wormhole, you can find my write ups here:

Helios
Orca

I’ll post about my prospect next, although that fit is pretty basic and there’s not much to it. Since I’m no longer doing PI out of my suitcase WH and have instead moved to a Wormlife Freeport with 2 alts, I don’t have the Epithal, but I might just talk about the basic fit anyway.

As always – fly your way! o7

EVE Gaming

Suitcase Challenge Day 35: Exploring the Chain

stargrace June 9, 2024 0Comment

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

EVE Gaming

Feeling Rushed? Do some Exploration

stargrace June 6, 2024 0Comment

EVE is not the sort of game that lends itself very well to randomly AFKing all over the place. I mean, in some aspects it does, but not really. Not if you actually want to make good ISK, at least. Yes, technically you could sit around in high sec all day and shoot rocks, and be mostly safe (never 100% safe, there have been HS gankers in my systems lately going after the ice folks) but there’s not a lot of ISK happening with regular asteroid belts, either.

When I know I’m going to be to/from the computer, I normally settle in for some exploration. Having covert ops is a must, I do this sort of exploration either on my tengu, or my helios. The helios is a far lower value ship and does data/relic sites fast and simple – other times I want a little combat mixed in, so I’ll use the tengu.

I warp 100km away from the site, then burn away and create a bookmark 150+km away so that the containers are still on grid, but I can warp to them individually. I check d-scan every few seconds as I do all of this, and I’ll just casually warp from perch -> container -> hack -> loot -> perch. Then repeat. If something comes up IRL, I can warp to the perch and cloak. If I complete the site, I rename the perch into a safe, and I use that if I need to get away from people / rats (especially in the helios). You can’t be uncloaked by mobile disruption units in a wormhole, you CAN be decloaked by other players if they happen to run into you, and that’s why I don’t hang around the wormholes themselves. The chances of someone running into me in a safe are pretty slim. I have sat AFK for hours before when RL wouldn’t let me play but I didn’t want to fly all the way home / log out. Of course if something were to happen and I *was* decloaked and killed, that would all be on me. It’s never 100% safe. Stuff happens. Be prepared to lose ships.

Still, I find doing exploration (specifically in wormholes) incredibly relaxing. Some times it takes me a bit to find a good (ie: unoccupied) site, but at least I don’t have to worry about randomly stepping away.

What’s your favourite thing to do to relax in EVE Online? Let me know in comments, and as always, fly your way! o7

EVE Gaming

Suitcase Challenge Day 31: One Month In

stargrace June 5, 2024 0Comment

I’ve now been based out of an Orca in a random wormhole for just over a month. When I started this challenge it was pretty much on a whim, after having debated with myself about whether or not I wanted to set up a POS. After looking into it (and how much attention a POS could potentially draw to yourself) I decided that living out of an Orca would be a much better idea for my situation. My wormhole has a static high sec connection, and each day brings about a new adventure.

I’ve started using combat probes any time I’m out, and I tend to keep my tengu uncloaked if I’m doing gas huffing or mining on my alt account. I’ve seen people peek into the hole, see my combat probes, the tengu, and the prospect, and they immediately leave. That’s exactly what I was hoping for. Sometimes something bigger will come into the hole – some encounters with Wingspan, and the Wormhole Police, and those guys know what they’re doing far more than I do, so I will warp off to a safe and cloak myself in those instances. I rotate through my safe bookmarks, any time there’s a relic/data site I turn the perch into a safe. Throughout the day I’ll scan down any new signatures that show up, and I clear out the ones that have expired. I have a shared bookmark between my accounts so they can all access whatever is up.

I’ve stopped doing PI in the wormhole I live out of, and instead I’ve moved it to the Wormlife Freeport that I’ve been using. It feels ‘safer’, and so I have two PI alts parked there. Once a week they check to make sure the wormhole is quiet / as safe as it ever is, then they fly around to each of the POCO, collect their goods, and pop out through the high sec static to drop off their loot. If the connection is close to home, I’ll just have them bring it the rest of the way, otherwise I leave it in an NPC station and pick it up later with my marketing character (who is also training into blockade runners).

I’ve started running the combat sites out of C1-C3 wormholes. I feel a bit foolish, but I had no idea that ‘blue loot’ is actually stuff you can sell to NPC for a static amount. I’m pretty sure I’ve been selling mine to players for below average prices. Even better, there’s an NPC station in my high sec home system who accepts them. It’s basically a bounty system but with an item that could potentially be pillaged (or lost) rather than straight ISK. I am not sure if these anomalies escalate, if they do I have yet to see one. I like that it’s guaranteed ISK (unless you get killed, of course) and I realized that the Tengu is actually the perfect ship for what I’m doing. Almost. I am concerned about adding too much bling, so I’m still swapping out for both relic / data analyzers, and I also added a salvager to swap into at the end of the combat sites – it’s not a lot of ISK, but it can add up, and it’s also stuff used for crafting.

Speaking of crafting, that might be something I focus on more in the upcoming weeks. My hangar is just full of BPO / BPC that I’d like to make better use of. A lot of industry is for very low profit, but I’m pretty sure I can find ways to reduce my overhead costs.

As always, fly your way! o7

EVE Gaming

Marketing Differences

stargrace June 3, 2024 0Comment

I’ve spent some time in the past talking about how market & industry in EVE is very similar to how it works in WoW, but now I want to mention some ways that they’re different.

The biggest one, is that in EVE when you put an item for sale, the tax you pay does NOT change based on the length of time the auction is up. When you’re putting an auction up you should always put it up for the maximum amount of time you can list it for. Instead of cancelling that auction, it will (usually) be cheaper to modify the price – how often you want to modify it, is completely up to you. I modify my sales stuff once a day, just after DT, and then I forget about it. I do not participate in marketing PVP or the rush to the bottom – and let me tell you, that works exactly the same in EVE as it does in WoW, except in EVE there’s fewer people (and no individual servers with their own markets).

It is critical to invest some skill points into trade if you want your capsuleer to be involved in working the market. As an alpha that can be difficult to do, lots of stuff is locked behind omega (that means you need a subscription). You pay taxes for purchases, you pay taxes for buy orders, you pay taxes for sell orders. If you do industry, there are taxes for the building you use as well as taxes for POCO, and if you’re in high sec there’s TWO taxes, one from the NPC faction & from the people who ‘own’ the POCO. Before I moved to the wormhole I currently do PI out of, I was losing 20% in taxes on every single transaction. 20% to remove the PI from the planet I was doing it on, 20% to transfer it down to the planet I had set up as a factory, 20% to have those finished products shipped off of the planet again. Your profit can easily get eaten up by these taxes if you’re not carefully tracking everything that you need to be which leads me to the tools I’ve been using:

There’s a lot of tools out there. I love using the spreadsheet from Oz, and I use it along with JEveAssets which uses java and was a bit confusing to get started with, but I think I have it mostly figured out now. I watch YouTube videos, joined discords, and over all just enjoy soaking in knowledge from other long-term players. I won’t ever be a grand scale tycoon player – but the little markets that I’m dipping into are quite fun, and I enjoy seeing the ISK go up.

As always, fly your way! o7

Suitcase Challenge: Ship Fit (Tengu)

Suitcase Challenge Day 35: Exploring the Chain

Feeling Rushed? Do some Exploration

Suitcase Challenge Day 31: One Month In

Marketing Differences

You Missed

The Search For Hrada-Oki Bivouac

Personal EVE Economic Update (October)

Expensive Month (preparing for fun)

Locked Out (again)