90 Day Suitcase Challenge: Day 1 (Preparation)

It’s been done before a bunch of different ways, but here’s my latest adventure – 90 days living in a WH out of an Orca, also called the Suitcase challenge.

How it works: Three accounts (all Omega).

  • Account #1 is flying an Orca which is hauling everything I need to live in a WH for 90 days (the timer may go longer or shorter, if I lose the Orca chances are I’ll give up the challenge all together). I’ll post the fit I’m using in follow up posts.
  • Account #2 is my main, meant to ‘do all the things’ like gas, mining, running anomalies, etc. Not restricted to the WH, can day trip to HS to sell – NOT taking the Orca. Orca stays in the WH. This account can also fly a TC3.
  • Account #3 is for scanning & doing PI in the WH. I may add another alt doing this from the same account, I’m not sure yet. We’ll have to see how it goes.

The Goal: Spend 90 days living in a WH out of a ‘suitcase’ (in this case, the Orca) and not a POS / citadel or whatever they’re called these days. Why? Because the second I put up a structure, I draw attention to myself. “Oh, someone LIVES here, let’s bother them!” – I want to try to prevent this from happening. Plus, let’s face it, my blog is called ‘nomadic gamer’ it’s what I do. I love unique and interesting ways of playing games.

Preparation required: Finding the perfect WH for me – I think I’ve already completed this stage, I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now, and I’ve been checking out a specific place for almost a week. I haven’t been ‘living’ in it per say, but I do log out in it, and have made bookmarks, etc. If you’re going to live in a WH one of the first things you need is a bunch of ‘safe’ locations. Way off grid from anything, places where you can log out (and in) and won’t be on top of anything, hopefully. No one else lives there, it has to be large enough for an Orca to fit through (C2-C3 typically), and in my case, I wanted it to have a static high sec connection. At the end of this challenge I’ll post the name of the WH, but for now I’m keeping that quiet.

I don’t have Orca skills on an alt – yet. So I’ll be investing some skill points into a character to get them situated. That means buying some skill injectors. I believe this cost should still come under the cost of installing a citadel, and for less risk. I’ve got an Orca already, and I’m not actually using it lately since I haven’t been mining, at least this gets it back to being used.

The Ships: This list I’ll update once I’m actually in the WH, because I don’t know 100% yet. It may also change over time, we’ll see!

I know there’s many ways to do this, with lots of different rules people add for themselves but this is mine, and I’m excited to see how it pans out.

Good ISK – Tough Event

The Capsuleer event is running for the entire month of May, and so far I’m not finding it terribly exciting. Anyone else? I’ve been sticking to the exploration path because that’s what I enjoy doing, and the cans never reward that much. When I was doing the combat sites they at least rewarded me with skins and other goodies. I managed to work my way up to the 3rd level of relic site before deciding that it simply wasn’t worth it, and deciding to sell off all of the spare materials I had collected. Jita might be over flowing, but I managed to sell everything I had to some whales in another system, for well above baseline prices – and I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve been back in game for almost two full months, and I’ve been having a great time refreshing my knowledge as well as learning a bunch of new stuff. Turns out I never really knew much about the game – and that’s alright. I feel like these days I have a MUCH better grasp on things, which is probably why I’m enjoying myself so much, too.

I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to live in a wormhole. I recently stumbled into a quiet C2 with C4/H connections. I’ve heard about people living out of their ships, but I’m not sure if that’s the route I want to go. I did some reading, and I realize that setting up some sort of POS could be fun – but also could turn into a job, and requires a lot of dedication if you’re just one person. That leaves me with perhaps finding a WH corp to join, but I’d want it to be industry / mining / PvE heavy, I simply don’t have the blood lust required for PvP and I do not enjoy it.

For now, I’ll continue to think on it and try to figure out what it is I want to be doing.

Fly your way! o7

A Night Exploring

I wanted to try to make a little progress with the capsuleer event that’s going on right now – but I have to say, it is quite a slog. Basically, you collect what I’ll call T1 materials from sites, and then use those component to craft T2 filaments. Then you run the T2 sites, and collect materials to craft T3 filaments. See where this is going?

I decided to make use of some of my own filaments, the Noise-5 Needlejack ones. These drop you into nullsec, randomly. They’re supposed to drop you into ‘quiet’ areas, but things happen – like I was dropped into a 20+ Pandemic Horde alliance fleet. Whewps. There’s a 15 minute timer before you can use another filament, and in the meantime I was basically a sitting (cloaked) duck. I didn’t want to take a gate anywhere and risk getting caught (I’m in a corporation of one, and that never looks good) so I just stayed cloaked and eventually they moved off. When they did, I scanned down the sites in the system, looking for a wormhole to jump into. Didn’t find one, so I ran the relic / data sites that I found, and when I saw people poking in again I used another needlejack and jumped out. The next jump sucked. There were no signatures, and 5 people in system just hanging out. I decided to wait out the timer one more time, and the filament put me relatively close to ‘home’. Only 3 nullsec jumps out (and a single low sec).

I was in my speedy Helios, which is fit for this type of exploration and is not an expensive ship by any means. My only goal was exploration, and while it did take a fair bit of time, I think I did alright.

I have enough materials to craft one more ruined filament, and I have most of the supplies for a single devastated electrical filament. I know you can just purchase everything off of the auction house and work at it that way – and I know that I’m neglecting the entire combat side of things, but that’s how I like playing. I doubt VERY much I will get anywhere near the 5,000+ points required for the final items, but at least I’m making a little progress.

Fly your way! o7

Stratios: Doing the Math

It was time to do the math on the Stratios, and see where I would end up.

I paid:

  • 10m ISK for the BPC (thank you hypernet)
  • 260m ISK for the materials (I had already collected a bunch of them, but this is what their value is set at)
  • 990,075 ISK for the industry

Total: 270,990,075 ISK

If I were to purchase the ship in Jita today, it would cost me 314,700,000 ISK (this gets more expensive as you get away from Jita, which is not my preferred area to sell in, I tend to avoid Jita at all costs) so I saved myself some ISK by crafting it myself. This isn’t always the case, so it’s important to make sure you’re doing the math and figuring things out.

I’m very excited!

As always, fly your way! o7

Earning LP for SOE

The ‘easy’ way for me to buy a Stratios would be to just use ISK and buy it off of the market – but what fun is that! Having goals (large and small) in EVE Online is essential to game play. My goal, is to earn enough LP to purchase the BPC and then to craft the ship myself.

SOE sells the BPC for 120,000 LP (and 30,000,000 ISK). Because my game time is limited, and I don’t want to burn out by running missions (they’re not the most exciting things in game to do) I’m going to aim at earning around 5,000 LP a day. That will mean it takes me approximately 24 days to earn enough LP to afford the BPC. Give or take. Right now I CAN work with L4 agents, but I don’t think my Tengu is the ship of choice I want to use for that – so I’m sticking to L3 agents. If I can find a reliable L4 mission runner that I can actually fly, I will probably swap over. Getting into different combat ships has been difficult for me, I’m so used to flying just a tiny handful and doing pretty specific things. I think I’d like a little reprieve from the ammo heavy missiles I’m used to, and I might even head towards some sort of drone ship. Maybe an Ishtar? Rattlesnake? Marauder? There’s just so many suggestions out there. I’ve already got skills in drones from previous years I played, but I have no clue when it comes to deciding what to fly. It doesn’t help that EVE is so old that a lot of the posts that show up when I do a google search are from 14+ years ago, heh. I’ve taken to adding the year at the end of my searches so I can try to find something a bit more updated.

Speaking of updates! April 30th marks the beginning of Capsuleer Day, and it will be my first time ever participating! I’m excited. Expect future posts!

Fly your way.. o7