stargrace

Suitcase Challenge: Day 25 – Locked out of the Hole

stargrace May 30, 2024 0Comment

Today marks 25 days living in a wormhole (an Orca as my home base). So far I haven’t come up against too many terrifying situations, but there have been a few close calls. These close calls change day to day, sometimes my connections are to empty lands and I never even see anyone, sometimes they lead to nullsec, lowsec, or near Jita – those days are busy. I’m extra observant and vigilant on those days.

Today I took a bunch of items to high sec to leave for my marketing character to deal with. This character just stays in an NPC corps station bound 90% of the time. She’s trained up a bunch of marketing skills, and she’s also trained in some hauling skills, nothing fancy (for now). When I went back to the WH to jump back in – it had closed behind me while I was doing my thing. Now, this isn’t really a big deal because I always have 2 other characters still in the WH who can probe the new HS entrance, but there’s also a chance that it’s really far away from where I got locked out from, and that was the case today. Since I’m so used to scanning down everything I don’t even bother caring too much if a hole is EOL (end of life).

47 jumps later, I was back safely in the wormhole, surrounded by the comforting black darkness of an empty local channel.

There was a C5 connection that lead to mine, so I decided to check it out. Unfortunately it was a chain that had been picked clean, probably a WH corporation lives up there some where. I followed it for a while, C5 which lead to C5 which lead to C5 which lead to (you guessed it) another C5. When I turned around to head back home, the exit was gone. No big deal, I scanned down a LS exit instead, jumped into that and got lucky, no one was around. Two more jumps lead me back to HS, and 14 jumps lead me back to my WH. It was a lot of traveling and very little profit, but that’s OK. Not all days have to be all about the ISK. Speaking of, I’m doing very well on that front, too. I’ll post more details about that in the future.

What exactly am I doing in this WH? Well, so far I’ve been doing gas huffing, combat sites, mining, data & relic sites, and just general exploration. Each day everything is new, so if there’s people around I tend to either leave up the chain to find some place quiet, or I wait it out. I’m trying very hard not to draw attention to the fact that I’m living in the wormhole, which is why I’m not putting up a POS, and living out of the Orca. The POCO I’m using has low taxes, and PI has been treating me very nicely. So far, this experiment has been lovely! YMMV though, I know from experience it’s difficult to give up the inferred “safety” of high sec.

Fly your way! o7

EVE Gaming

Station Trading Success

stargrace May 29, 2024 0Comment

My experiment in station trading seems to be going well, so far at least. We’ll have to see how the market shakes up after the 11th when the changes to moon mining go through. I imagine the price of things that use isogen will fall, but we’ll just have to see. In the meantime, I’ve been using A4E (adam4eve) to look at profit margins, and to help decide what markets I want to get into. This is a lot like world of warcraft, I am not doing sales in Jita, so my markets move a bit slower – but they do move.

Guaranteed sellers? Consumables. Ammo, drones, and to a lesser degree, boosters. Popular sales? The ships everyone uses when starting out, and the FoTM popular ships (though I’m only dealing in T1 frigates at the moment). A simple thing I’ve been doing is placing buy orders for ventures at 250,000ISK, and then I’ve been selling them at 350,000ISK.

PI is also selling very well for me. I have PI set up in a wormhole with 4.5% tax, and twice a month I haul everything out when it’s safe. My WH has a HS connection, and I log in once a day to re-set the extractor. It takes a few seconds. I don’t bother changing the extractors around unless they dip below 1m resources collected. Then I might move them. I haven’t really had to yet though, so I’ll just continue as I have been.

I have decided to hang on to my exploration loot so I can use it for crafting. I’m crafting drones, they sell like hotcakes. I’d like to be able to do this on a larger scale, but for now things are moving forward at least and that’s all I really want.

Unexpected sales of the week? Afterburners. Another great seller has been shield hardeners and shield extenders. I did also attempt to flip some Mexallon, I believe it’s used for a quest since people kept buying it in 5-10 amounts, and I decided it just wasn’t worth it. Sometimes the profit margins are REALLY tiny, other times they’re quite large. I bought some shield power relay II for 834,300 and sold them for 1,864,000 which was really nice profit. I’m still working through the skills my marketing character needs, but I can adjust prices remotely at least – and that is a big deal. I’m not sure what / if anything else I’ll skill this character in to, they tend to sit in station and not move. For now, that’s good enough.

Fly your way! o7

EVE Gaming

Moving (an alt) to a Wormlife Freeport

stargrace May 27, 2024 0Comment

I love how creative the players of EVE Online can be – see a need, fill a need. Which brings me to my next adventure. High sec PI tends to be expensive (via taxes), lacks resources (vs. other areas) and not a lot of fun. Someone told me about Wormlife Freeports over on Mastodon and I looked into what that was. Simply put, it’s some folks who have taken it upon themselves to create structures in wormholes with high sec connections, placing a fairly low tax on the POCO, and allowing anyone to utilize the docking privileges so long as they adhere to some pretty lax rules – the main one being, leave people alone in that system to do their thing (ie: don’t blow them up). Of course not everyone cares / respects / knows these rules, so combat does happen, and they do have a militia set up for certain situations like if someone is attempting to evict. Camps can happen, and hostiles like to make their presence known. Not really a big deal so long as you go about things in a safe way.

I joined their discord some time ago just to watch the happenings and to figure out which wormhole I might want to settle in. Yesterday I finally requested access to the entrance (I’ve stumbled into a few while traveling but not on purpose) and I’ve set up shop with an alt who is going to do PI within the wormhole. The taxes are only 4.5% – around my area of high sec they’re typically 20% (that’s 10% for the NPC and 10% for the players who set their own tax rate). Losing out on 20% each transaction when I’m already earning lower-than-normal PI components simply from being in high sec – sucks. Taking my time to decide which wormhole would be best for my needs also gave me some time to train up cloaking and a few other QoL skills on that character. I know I keep saying I’m going to downgrade from 3 accounts to 2, but now I’m contemplating keeping all 3 active. It makes sense, in Warcraft I also have 3 active accounts, I enjoy multiboxing but I don’t have a lot of experience with it in EVE (yet). The alt was never meant to do anything more than PI anyway, so I figure when the high sec exit is in a good location I can drop off my bits or even send my main in to go collect them. By ‘good location’ I mean close to where I currently live, and not a billion jumps away through shady neighbourhoods. For now I just have 1 of my PI characters at the Freeport, plus two characters doing PI in my suitcase challenge.

Let the adventures continue! As always, fly your way. o7

EVE Gaming

Industry & Marketing – Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

stargrace May 25, 2024 0Comment

In a move that surprises absolutely no one, I’ve started expanding my ISK empire in EVE Online. I’ve been watching market videos by Oz_Eve and even though I’ve never been a long term EVE player, I understand the basics of what he’s saying because of the economy I deal with in World of Warcraft. The items change, but the basics stay the same. I’m using A4E for most of my market needs, combined with a spreadsheet that comes from Oz_Eve’s discord. I also now have two dedicated market characters, each dealing with two separate market hubs. I plan on only keeping two Omega accounts (we’ll see how long that lasts) and letting one lapse back to Alpha on May 30th. That gives me 6 characters to play with. A lot of my income still comes from not-so passive activities, like exploration and a bit of ratting. I’m attempting to move one of my PI alts into a Wormlife Freeport, but that’s taking a bit of time.

In the meantime I also decided to take advantage of the MCT sale that’s going on right now, 40% off and I can train multiple characters at once. I need to get some cloaks on the PI alts, especially the one I want to move into the Wormlife Freeport. Like every single game I’ve ever played, there’s a bit of a market standstill in EVE right now as we wait for June 11th and the new ships that will be releasing. There’s a lot of controversy over these hauling ships so far – having risk in EVE is something that is absolutely required, but I feel like one of the ships presented is going to determine the future of hauling, and it’s going to make the other ships redundant – which is not a good thing. There shouldn’t be a ‘one ship to rule them all’ when it comes to EVE. A lot can change between now and release, so I’m not going to be all doom and gloom, we’ll just have to see how it pans out.

I’ve never tried to do any station trading before in EVE, so a lot of the concepts are new to me – like placing your orders in a player station 1 jump away from the major hub to help cut down taxes. I had no idea that was a thing. It’s going to take me quite a bit to learn all of the ins and outs but I’m excited about it. Just another method of game play to add to the things I’m already doing.

As always, fly your way! o7

EVE Gaming

Suitcase Challenge Day 18: My First C13!

stargrace May 23, 2024 0Comment

For exploration purposes, I stick to the C1-C3 range of wormholes. I’ve entered a few C4/C5 but don’t stick around as there is usually someone living in them (or someone being evicted). I prefer to keep a low profile, especially since I am casually living in a wormhole myself, out of an Orca I have parked at a safe. This week I managed to find myself in my very first C13 wormhole – which is a version of Shattered that only allows small size ships to pass through. Thankfully the Helios I’ve been using to explore fits that qualification no problem. There’s no moons and all planets are shattered in these WH, which is pretty, but useless for anything like PI.

The wormhole was filled with signatures. My usual method is to scan the entire hole and then proceed from there – but if there’s a site I want, I’ll stop scanning, go do the site, and then return to scanning. I’ve already posted about using the ‘perch’ method, and then I turn these perch bookmarks into a safe bookmark after the site has expired. This C13 had 7 relic/data sites for me to complete, and in about an hour I had 270,000,000 ISK in value in my ship. I never saw another soul, whether it was because of the C13 status, or because it was close to downtime, I’m not sure. My usual game play happens around 5am my time (Atlantic) until 7:30am, and then I get another hour at the end of the day. Some days I’m not in the mood for exploration, or there’s no good sites within range, and in those instances I’ll spend the last 1h before I go to bed doing something with guaranteed ISK reward, like ratting.

I haven’t been selling my exploration loot because I’d like to use it for crafting. In specific, I can save almost 100m ISK by crafting myself a zeugma analyzer instead of buying one off of the market. The thing is I’m not so certain I want to justify the additional ship value by adding one. I certainly won’t bother on the Helios, but maybe for the Stratios so I can free up the mid slot. I’ll probably sell the other two (the bpc comes with 3 runs). In any case, it was a very exciting morning, I ducked into the ice field just to nose around, and then spent some time jumping from hole to hole to find one that had a static HS connection.

I’ve finally gotten the hang of using pathfinder – and I love it. I tried Tripwire briefly, but didn’t really understand anything about it at the time, so I’ll try that one again when I’ve got some free time, but pathfinder makes mapping very simple. It tells me statistics about my wormhole at a glance, and you can see the C13 I went through, along with the connections it had. These connections of course won’t be the same any more at the time of this post, they change every 24h roughly, which is why mapping can sometimes be a bit of a pain. I just like knowing the path back home (you can also flag WH as EOL so you avoid it if required) and I like knowing what connections I can count on. I can also usually figure out if a WH is going to be busy or not based on those connections and where they’re at in kspace.

Any way, it was a great day for exploration, and my little helios has paid for itself over a few times now with plenty of profit to spare. This little ship might not be able to do any combat, but some days, that’s exactly what I’m looking for.

Fly your way. o7

stargrace

Suitcase Challenge: Day 25 – Locked out of the Hole

Station Trading Success

Moving (an alt) to a Wormlife Freeport

Industry & Marketing – Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

Suitcase Challenge Day 18: My First C13!

You Missed

Personal EVE Economic Update (October)

Expensive Month (preparing for fun)

Locked Out (again)

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