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

GMs still Exist!

** Before I start this post, I do want to say that I know I pretended to be new when I wasn’t, and that isn’t the greatest behaviour, but I *was* on a new account, and I thought it was neat that they reached out **

I have 3 EVE accounts. One account has my ‘main’, and is in a corporation of just me right now. I did try out Catskull Cartel but it wasn’t for me. That’s OK, not every corporation is going to be a forever home. I have a second account, far less skills, this account has my Signal Cartel (love this corporation, can’t say enough good things about them) character on it and two PI alts. The account has been around since 2009 or so, but I barely ever kept up with it.

Then I have a 3rd account, this one is brand new, and is linked through steam. I created a character on the account in the hopes of doing something completely different from the norm (for me, at least), and I wanted to get some blog posts in about starting a fresh account and doing the AIR Career path along with whatever happened next. I also wanted to see what was available as an alpha, and test out content without having the omega skills. I see lots of YT videos following this path, and I find it interesting.

While I was finishing up the AIR Career path a GM Maverick reached out to me, and asked how I was enjoying EVE. They said they saw I was a new player (the account is 41 days old, alpha). I didn’t mention that it was just an alt account, instead I went forward as though I was a new player. I explained what I thought about the introductory quests, and they offered some advice on what I should do next, and where I should go. The interaction was wholesome and I loved it, especially in an age where very few MMORPG have these sorts of interactions any more.

They gave me a few beginner friendly ships (the same ones the AIR Career will provide) and a Gallente welcome package, which was neat.

In fact, the more I play EVE, the more I fall in love with parts of the culture – and that’s not to say there isn’t also a lot I dislike about the culture (it can be pretty rough) but surrounding myself with positive influences has been key. Anyway, I hope GM Maverick knows that their interactions made a difference and were greatly appreciated.

Fly your way. o7

Spreadsheets? We’ve got Those

I’ve been back in EVE Online since March 15th, and of course one of the first things I did was set up a spreadsheet to start calculating industry profits, and then another spreadsheet to calculate my total daily ISK earnings (across two accounts). We already know that in order to afford one month of game time, you need 500 plex, which (at the time of this post at least) comes to approximately 2.5 billion ISK. That means each day you’d want to earn roughly 84 million ISK in order to afford a single month of game time.

Earning currency doesn’t change much from game to game. Learning the markets takes time, but you already have a pretty good foundation if you’re already doing it elsewhere. It’s also not reasonable to expect a brand new player to be earning as much money as someone who has been around for a number of years and knows how to optimize (and who also has higher skills in the game, and higher skills in general). Most of the ISK on the main account (account E) came from industry. I’m just shy of the 2.5b mark for the month, but considering I just returned to the game, I’m very happy with those earnings. The ISK earned on my second account (S) is from selling off components of a package I got (I think I got the platinum bundle?) which included skill injectors (I sold them empty, I can’t afford to give up skills). Those numbers are highly inflated, and shouldn’t be considered ‘real’ numbers considering the lack of effort I put forth.

It does give me a nice nest egg. I’ve got a few months of game time on each account, and enough ISK to invest further into industry. I need to swap some PI around on my 2nd account, right now the components I’m making have almost zero market in my system, and while I know a lot of people adore the instant shopping in Jita, I prefer to stay away and sell slower (but for a slightly inflated price). Figuring out what sells, is the new game.

In the meantime, there are the constants. Ammo, drones, and a few meta ships. Consumables always seem to do quite well and you can really push out some nice numbers. I live in a system that happens to have ice mining, so I’ve started selling items related to that – and people are buying, even though they’re a higher price than other systems. The next challenge will be to beat this months earnings.

Fly safe! o7