2024

My Biggest HS Win To Date

stargrace April 5, 2024 0Comment

Yesterday I wrote about how I wanted a new Tengu fit, and that I had spent the evening cobbling one together that did what I wanted it to do (ie: things I actually enjoy) – and then I took it out and played with it in some HS combat sites. I lucked out.

The first site I scanned down was called ‘Serpentis Lookout‘ – and what’s most important about this site is that there is ore here that you normally cannot get in high sec.

Scarcity Update: This site, like other cosmic signatures, contains ore.

As of 15 February 2021, this site contains the following units:

First room: 3x 5,000 Hemorphite (15,000 units, 45,000m³), 25,000 (50,000m³) Jaspet

Second room: 85,727 Omber (51,436m³), 835,762 Plagioiclase

3,192,395 Veldspar (throughout)

The acceleration gate permits expedition frigates, exhumers, and the Orca to enter the site. An Orca and Skiff were sufficient to kill all NPCs present.

Warning: Once the Boss has been destroyed, the site disappears from the Probe Scanner.

Once this happens, the site will despawn immediately if you abandon the site.

Keeping at least one character in the site will prevent the despawn.

While mining after the site is complete, an additional frigate may occasionally spawn.

Since I was in my home system, it made things pretty easy. I started working away on collecting the ore once I dispersed of the site, and then that little tidbit at the bottom about the additional frigate happened. Well.

When I killed and looted that frigate, I managed to pick up an additional 44,000,000 ISK worth of value. That brought the total value of this single HS site to over 100,000,000 ISK – That was the biggest payout I had in HS to date. My overall ISK gained for the day (between a few sites, industry, etc) was: 349,904,003 and all of it was done in HS. Peanuts compared to the big guys, but I’m less than a month back in game, and I was so excited! I know there’s all sorts of comments about folks who live in HS, and I hear about how the ISK/h is very low – but none of that really matters when I’m enjoying myself playing the game the way I want. Overall, the entire day was just a gigantic win.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

EVE Gaming

Learning What I want to Fly (and how to Equip it)

stargrace April 4, 2024 0Comment

I admit, I’ve never really gotten ‘in’ to EVE before. I know there are pirates, I know there are players, I know that there are different types of ammo that is strong against certain ships vs. others. I know my Tengu has a bonus for kinetic, so that’s what I use as ammo, and it works great against most pirates in my areas, but it’s not so great against others from other factions. I know that some pirate sites have hefty mechanics, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you which ones by name (I still look them each up) and I know that there are ‘triggers’ in each wave that spawn the next wave, so on tough encounters you have to be careful about what order you kill. I rarely ever create my own fit for a ship, I usually look one up – but I’ve recently started learning to adapt them, and really understanding and learning what each piece of my fit actually DOES. I’m paying attention to the numbers – and while I have zero interest in doing anything min/max or FOTM (flavour of the month, Loki, I’m looking at you) it IS quite helpful to make builds that focus on what I’m actually doing.

I tend to explore. I’ve been using a helios, both in WH and out, and I scan down sites. I have it fit with relic/data modules (and of course a cloak), but that thing is basically a tin can and cannot complete any sort of combat what so ever. If I’ve scanned down something I’m actually interested in that involves combat, I go back home and swap for my Gila.

The Tengu that I have got nerfed a few years ago and that is just the nature of games – I couldn’t find a good fit that I actually enjoyed, so it’s just been collecting dust in my hangar. Then I watched a video on YouTube about a mostly pve Tengu fit that was doing C3 sites, and I thought to myself well, I don’t need to jump right into C3, but it would be nice to have a fit where I could maybe take down the sites I scan and maybe I wouldn’t always have to swap ships. I didn’t want anything with too much bling (Tengu has some pretty expensive parts as it is) but something that could hold its own in some of the lower tier WH or even just for HS combat sites. After a bit of shopping, I cobbled something together that I’m quite happy with, and I even got to test it out a bit. I briefly looked at the Zeugma Intergrated Analyzer – but holy crap that thing is more expensive than all of my ships (minus the Orca). No need for that sort of bling right now.

The Gila I fly is lovely, but it’s a completely different type of ship, it uses drones and can take a heavy hit. The Tengu needs to keep moving, and I didn’t realize it but I was also lacking a bunch of the subsystem skills – they were sitting at rk1. Yikes.

I’ve been enjoying myself so much that I decided to up my account for another two months (renewal was coming up on April 10th) and I picked up one of the packs CCP offers. It came with 500 plex (I could turn this into a 3rd month of game time, or I can exchange it for ISK), 500,000 skill points (which I was going to save, but promptly spent), a bunch of skins for ships (which I can also sell, or just add them to my collection) and a booster so I can learn my skills faster. Overall, it felt like a good deal. I was surprised that EVE is much more expensive to play these days, they raised the price back in 2022 which I’m sure people were not very happy about. I’m OK paying for my account (for now) but ideally I’d love to make the ISK for it to become self sufficient like I do in World of Warcraft (at the time of this post I’m sitting on 130 million gold in Warcraft, and $800 in bnet balance across two accounts…) but I know it will take some time. With the small invention I’m currently doing I’m making about 30-50 million ISK a day, to afford a month of game time I need to earn around 83-86 million ISK a day. I think it’s obtainable, but again it will take time.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

EVE Gaming

Back on the Belts (and other stuff)

stargrace April 2, 2024 0Comment

It has been a little over two weeks since I’ve returned to EVE Online, and as I mentioned in a previous post I’ve finally settled into a bit of routine. I try to get a bit of ice mining done first thing, do my dailies, and I re-set my PI. PI is really treating me quite well. I’m not selling the components but instead crafting bits with them which I sell. My hangar was filled with a lot of BPO/BPC so I’ve been working through the backlog and making some ships to sell (when profitable). Looks like I had stocked up on Viator BPs for some reason, I don’t think I intended on flying one (at least I can’t find any mention of it) so I’m crafting those for a few million ISK of profit.

There was some drama in the Jspace version of my corp yesterday, which doesn’t affect me since I live in the Kspace version, but it still didn’t sit very well with me. I’m thinking I might try to find a more pve/industry/exploration aligned home, if one exists. One of the issues I have is that the corp has an open policy on pvp, if it’s not blue/green (alliance/corp mate) then you’re free to attack no questions asked. I prefer a more passive method of gameplay – defense is fine (and encouraged) as well as attacking those with negative standing, but there’s some great kind people out there just doing their thing, and I don’t really like the idea of just being a random asshole simply because they’re not known. I understand that’s a very me mentality, and a lot of EVE is “bully, or be bullied” but it’s just something that has been on my mind. I also don’t really appreciate some of the snide comments from the Jspace corporation towards the Kspace one, like we’re lesser. Again, purely me thoughts on all of this.

I’ve been doing a LOT of exploration this week. I watched a few videos on how to get pathfinder working, and now I’m mapping my way through Eden. I enjoy this a HUGE amount, I found my very first C6 WH! I did not peek inside as it was EOL (end of life), but it was still a neat discovery. Doing this sort of exploration is fun – and sometimes it can be pretty rewarding if I happen to stumble into some relic/data sites. My industry adventures are keeping me well supplied, but I don’t think there are any other ships (at this time at least) that I want to add to my rotation. I’m pretty set for everything I enjoy doing – what I do want to spend a little ISK on are a few more BPO to round out my collection.

Back to exploration – I was scanning down WH yesterday and found one that went from Agal to another high sec, Fabum! When I manually made the path between those two destinations, it was over 40 jumps away, so it was a really neat little shortcut for anyone who may have wanted to head out there. I thought that was a cool discovery. I also learned about some POI (points of interest) that I may want to explore, thanks to Signal Cartel, and TripTik. I love this idea and everything about it, so expect some posts in the future talking about it a lot more.

I think EVE is still the only game I play where I need to have a minimum of 10 browser tabs open at once just to get through my gameplay and I am completely here for it. I have so many spreadsheets, have so many lists and notes and just bits of information I’m trying to retain all over the place. It’s lovely.

As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself.

Gaming WoW Gold Making

Weekly Review [Mar24-Mar30]

stargrace April 1, 2024 0Comment

It was one of the slowest weeks I’ve had in sales in recent history, but I also didn’t do anything with the AH on Sunday, in the grand scheme of things earning 8.6 million is still not a bad number. It just displays that we are well and truly in the ‘waiting period’ before S4 and actual content returns to World of Warcraft.

There are a lot of rumors flying around right now involving the game, and I think that’s adding to the ‘wait and see’ aspect of things.

Sales this week were a few pieces of high end transmog (two Blackrock Bullwark’s), and a handful of pets. Not many recipes (I actually need to refresh my distribution on those, so it’s probably more to do with me and my stock than anything else) and meanwhile the only ‘game’ time I have besides doing the AH daily is going for my 1 level of renown in Plunderstorm, which I dislike immensely. I dislike that it removes the population and splits them up (more than other versions of the game already do, classic I’m looking at you) and I just don’t enjoy PVP which I have said here a few times now, I know.

Anyway.

Gold making is very slow at this stage. If your numbers are low, don’t be discouraged. Wait for S4 to begin and then things should start picking up.

EVE Gaming

PI? What was I even doing?!

stargrace March 30, 2024 0Comment

I think PI was one of those things I was initially excited about – trained all of the skills, and then kept telling myself “one day I’ll optimize this” and never did. I was earning ISK from it, but I never calculated how much. I would re-set my extraction program once a day, and pick up all the PI stuff once a week. Some I would sell, some I would use.

This week I decided to watch some YouTube videos on how to set things up in a more optimized way, and it turns out that everything I had done with my own stations was completely wrong and was probably not even worth me having it set up. Yikes.

I spent last night removing the PI I had set up, shuffling all of my components around (I even ended up picking up the Epithal for this because it was cheap and why not) and figuring out what planets I actually wanted to do PI on. I wanted something closer to home, I enjoy where I have my base at the moment, it’s close to what I need and I don’t mind making the jumps to get to quieter space.

Anyway, after a few hours the old factories were removed, and then this morning I set about getting the new ones set up. At the time of this post, I have 4 planets set up with 8 factories each (I only had 1 single factor per planet before and I had split the extractions between two raws that were not even related to one another, it was honestly a disaster). I still have one ‘factory’ planet to set up, and that will produce the T2/T3 items. That planet will have 24 factories. Once PI is set up, you only need to check in every so often – but getting it all set up and linked and running, can be confusing.

Do you play Factorio? Enjoy it? Then you’d probably enjoy setting up PI and optimizing it. What I’m making won’t even come close to what I COULD make if I set up my PI in ls or null, but honestly I was content with what I was making before when it was 100% unoptimized and horrible. I just didn’t know any better. I understand that a LOT of people do NOT enjoy PI, and that’s OK. I don’t particularly enjoy PVP, so I’m glad that there’s other aspects of game play that I DO enjoy.

Once my PI is optimized I’m sure I will look at something else that I’ve been using that’s outdated and archaic and update that. I still haven’t finished raising my R&D faction yet either. I don’t lack for things to do, I just lack the time to do it all.

As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself!

My Biggest HS Win To Date

Learning What I want to Fly (and how to Equip it)

Back on the Belts (and other stuff)

Weekly Review [Mar24-Mar30]

PI? What was I even doing?!

You Missed

Personal EVE Economic Update (October)

Expensive Month (preparing for fun)

Locked Out (again)

What’s Going on?