Outside Abyssal Space, Life Continues

A lot of people seem intrigued by the new Abyssal deadspace zones CCP is introducing to EVE Online in the Into the Abyss expansion coming on 29 May. Perhaps the reason is the DDoS attacks last week only hit Tranquility, so players went and took a peak at what is on the test cluster. Or maybe the usual suspects just like to whine about change. I try to keep an open mind, which is why I will test on Singularity over the coming weeks. I did run a site Sunday night. If we learn more from failure than success, I am a lot smarter player now than before.

I only ran one site because life doesn’t stop on Tranquility, the only shard that counts. I have goals to achieve, deadlines to meet, and ships to build. My overarching goal is to get myself back to playing mostly in low sec, although I may wind up doing some ninja mining in w-space to meet my shipbuilding goals. I completed one of my key goals, access to a second low sec factory station. Access is probably the wrong word. To minimize build costs, I only build in NPC factory stations in which I have standings with the NPC corp of 6.67 or greater. I performed the standings grind in 8 days by running mining missions in low sec. I know, apart from the Loki that dropped in to try to gank me, pretty boring stuff. As a bonus, I did pull in over 160 thousand loyalty points, two +4 learning implants, and some intelligence on the residents of the area.

With the factory situation set, my next step was setting up pings in the new mining system. I’m a little less risk averse in my old age and now use an interceptor to set up perches and other points so I can stay aligned while I mine. While the bookmarks I have around each system work well so far, I need to set up one or two more using the interceptor around each asteroid belt, then I can settle down and bookmark cosmic signatures for additional spots. Give me a couple of months and I’ll have a home-field edge when avoiding a gank attempt.

Of course, mining is pointless if I don’t have a use for all the ore I mine. I usually come up with a ridiculous battleship to build, and this year’s effort is constructing a Marshal.  Technically I began the project in early December, but the plan was to have a CONCORD battleship sitting in my hanger by the end of 2018. I’m a little ahead of my goal as Wandering Rose is currently at level 458 in Project Discovery, only 42 levels away from receiving the blueprint copy. The last time I checked, she had earned over 1.1 billion ISK in Project Discovery rewards which should pay not only for the tech 2 materials needed to build the battleship, but hopefully the Pacifier and Enforcer as well.

Don’t get me wrong. I probably will spend more than a few hours on Singularity over the next few weeks, and perhaps even months, researching the new Triglavian content and its evolution. But for now, I have a few billion ISK worth of ships to build and I want to finish up that task before diving into the new content.