Suitcase Challenge Day 5: Let’s Eat Pi

Today I learned you can set up PI while cloaked in an Epithal – interesting! I’ll probably upgrade this to a blockade runner down the road, but for now I think it should work for what I’m doing. I set up four production planets, a factory planet, and a spare one for resources. I do have two other alts who are trained in PI that I might haul out here, but they’d also need to add cloaking to their list of skills, and that one takes a bit of time. Or, I could just be brave and attempt this mission uncloaked! Which sort of seems like it would be a death sentence. I’m hoping to collect PI each day, and run it through to highsec once a week. It will of course depend on where the HS entrance is and what’s going on, and all that good stuff.

For anyone else who is attempting to set up PI in a WH that they don’t ‘own’ I have one bit of advice – check out the POCO first to see if you have access. There’s tons of these around but access is either limited, restricted, or 100% taxes. A lot are from abandoned corporations that are no longer active, too. You CAN blow up someone else’ POCO, but it takes forever, or you hire someone and that’s not cheap. Then you need to install your own POCO which is a whole other adventure. You CAN also technically jettison your items into space – but that has a few issues, number one, the amount of items you can send off at a time is limited. Number two, there is a 10% tax on this for every can you jettison. Keep in mind that you could also have your access removed. It might not be a bad idea to contact the owners and see if they can give you access although that might also just give you away.

Trying to find content isn’t difficult, but prioritizing the content and trying to figure out exactly what I want to do and when I can do it, that is the challenge so far. I’ve seen a few people pop into the system, but they didn’t stick around to chatter. Ah well!

Fly your way! o7

Suitcase Challenge Day 4: Settling In

It took just over an hour of jumps (before and after downtime) but I finally made it, my Orca made it to the wormhole. Probably one of the more terrifying things I’ve done, to be honest. I had my scout on the inside watching for the hour to make sure no one entered (and checking d-scan, there’s a C4 connection right now, so someone could come in from there) and I warped to the wormhole and then cloaked with the Orca to approach it and keep an eye from outside to see if anyone was scanning the system or if anyone was on grid. When I hit 2,000km away my cloak dropped and I jumped into the WH. I immediately warped (well, ‘immediately’ is not a thing with the Orca, it takes me 38 seconds to initiate warp) to the safe I have set up, and cloaked. Shew. Safe (as safe as one ever is). I logged the Orca out, for now. I don’t plan on ever logging her in unless I’ve confirmed the WH is ’empty’ (as much as I can), and I’ll log in a scout character first to take care of that. Immediately after logging in, I’ll cloak. Since the Orca isn’t going anywhere for 90 days (or more) I think this should be OK. I don’t ‘need’ the Orca unless I want to swap out ships or drop something off. I do plan on day tripping to HS to drop off goods / sales.

Next up? I’m going to wait for the current HS entrance to expire, and then figure out where it opens to next. If it’s quiet enough, I’ll bring in my ‘main’ character who will be doing all of the things. I’d like to get PI set up as my first real adventure. I just need to place the command centers, the rest can be done remotely from within the system (I’ll warp off to a safe and cloak once I place the command center). I haven’t decided what I’m crafting yet, I did bring the command centers for the planets available, and I’ll have to work within that. There are already POCO set up here with 2% tax, and I’m comfortable with that.

For now, it just feels good to be getting set up.

Fly your way! o7

Day 3: Move in Day

I’ve been waiting for the ‘perfect’ move in day (ie: path from my staging to the WH) – one that is .6 or higher, and not too busy. A few days were absolutely no-go, with gank fests happening along the route. The Orca has almost 600,000 EHP but I’m still not absolutely comfortable flying it great distances. I *think* I’ll be OK, no one knows the route I’m taking (not even me before this point, hah) and I’ve scouted ahead, and I’m pretty prepared. That being said, it’s EVE, and you’re never 100% safe, unless you’re docked at an NPC station.

Today is the day – I’m making 44 jumps to get to the entrance of my WH, home for the next 90 days. It takes me approximately 20 minutes for 10 jumps. The Orca is a massive slow beast, and I’ll need a stretch of time and some patience. I’m making the trip in the early morning around downtime, which I hope will work to my benefit. I created a shard folder so that all of my characters have access to the same locations, and I’ve included the the HS location of the WH. The goal is to log in my scout (who is in the WH), confirm that it’s clear / safe for me to enter, bring the orca to the WH outside, cloak, wait a while, confirm that it’s quiet / no one around in the HS side, and then pop through. Once through, I will immediately warp to one of my safe bookmarks, off grid from anything, and this safe is JUST for the Orca (and for when I want to do ship transfers), it would be really bad to decloak my own ship by flying someone into them.

At the time of this post, I’ve got 20 jumps left.

Day 2 Suitcase Challenge: More prep

With the site picked, it was time to get everything else together. First, train up an alt in Orca skills. This was pretty simple, I contemplated using MCT but ultimately decided it would be better to just use skill injectors. The Orca is sporting the fit above, but unfortunately right now the WH is 40+ jumps from where I have staging, and even in high sec I don’t really want to jump that far. Orca are slow. I did some scouting and there’s some gank fests going on, too in between where I’m at and where I want to go. I opted to be patient, I’ll wait until the WH is closer before I decide to move in.

What am I bringing?

  • Prospect – fit with a mobile depot so I can swap between mining / gas
  • Tengu – my T3C of choice, a bit expensive for this sort of thing, but that’s what I’m comfortable flying, so that’s what I’m bringing. I don’t know if I’ll actually use it much, maybe just to get rid of rats.
  • Helios – Just a spare probing ship in case I need one
  • Epithal – Yep, I’m dragging along a PI hauling ship. I am hoping with vigilant scouting I’ll be able to sneak items out of this WH to whatever HS system I’m connected to and get some sales going. We’ll see!
  • Some shuttles/T1 frigates

I’m also bringing along the command centers for PI, and a few spare cloaks. I’m not sure if there’s anything else that I want to bring, I might just pick things up here and there as I need it or as I figure it out. The Orca will stay in the WH for at least 90 days (longer if I’m enjoying it) but my alts are free to come and go. I’m hoping to get some marketing done but it will depend on where the WH has settled for the day. As I’ve already said a few times I’m just not a fan of Jita, so it would have to be one of the outlier hubs. Hopefully the next post will be about my big move!

Fly your way. o7

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.