Recently, I decided to consolidate my characters and moved all but one out of wormhole space. This due to the fact that our friendly neighbourhood Titan builder needs some help with the killboard.
Not that I’m that good at pvp but I have a bunch of combat toons that can pretend they are.
I was spread out a bit too thin, having my main in Jita for the time being after deciding to take a break from C5 space, and then two of my toons in a C2 C4/HS hole with a bunch of friendly people that were so nice to take me in.
But I decided to switch a few things around and joined the C2 corp fully with one of my toons and then fully committed my other characters to null.
Which is, weird.
It’s very strange for me to go through space and see so many “allies” or “blues” as one would say in the game.
or the past seven years, I’ve been primarily focused on wormhole space. Only recently having started doing more in known-space with my little industry venture that I’ve been talking about in previous posts. So suddenly making my base in a Horde owned piece of space is a bit.. Weird to say the least
But whatever, this is a whole new adventure and I’m going for it.
I haven’t done much yet, but today was a day where due to extreme insomnia the past few days I decided to explore a bit.
And what better way to explore than by grabbing my trusty pacifier, a cloaky proteus and go out searching for the space I just left.
The amount of relic and data sites that are not being done in null is crazy high, but eventually I found a wormhole.
Eventually I found a Gila in a C1 that was obviously not paying much attention, I use combat probes to scan, and I wasn’t paying attention and all so it took me a few minutes to realise I scanned down someone doing sites.
I honestly thought it was bait for a second, but turns out he wasn’t.
My first kill on my main in over a month, it felt nice.
In the past year I made most of my ISK by dabbling in some station trading and doing hybrid reactions in wormholes.
At one point myself and my buddy plonked down a Raitaru in a C1 that had a high-sec static just so we could easily roll for a Jita connection and do our reactions. Profit in that is good, despite the fact that every time someone on reddit asks “How do I make ISK” the answers usually have reactions in them too.
The C1 adventure was nice but I got burnt out a bit on it and sold the hole a couple of months ago. Doing reactions every other week in AD home.
A couple of weeks ago I was asked if I wanted to move my industry things to Null-sec.
An old buddy of ours that was part of Yacht back when I started actually really playing the game back in 2016/2017 is renting a few horde systems and wanted to expand the amount of people playing in the systems. As well as starting to recruit a bit to get into horde in the new year instead of just being a renter. But to do this he’d need a few people that knew how to PVP and that’s were myself and my reaction buddy came in.
I figured it would be a fun change of pace and would probably be able to ramp up production a bit. Seeing that what I usually do is take a DST or two and move stuff in wspace whenever there’s a Jita connection.
In nullsec, I would have access to Jump Freighters.
Our industry friend put us up in the new system, helped move in a few billion worth in materials and ships and got me going.
The ease of seeing that Jump Freighter do the hauling made me realise I needed one, so for the first time in my eve career I made two cyno alts. Just one injector was needed per alt to get them into a cyno venture so that was nice.
I already had a character basically trained to run in a Rhea so quickly got that done too and bought myself a Rhea.
I’m sure that the ones here that know how jump freighters work know about the ease of use. But I had no idea whatsoever how much easier it would be.
It takes me less than 5 minutes to get from Jita to my new system carrying 450k m³ worth of materials/ships/whatever.
I thought to myself quite a few times “I should have started this earlier”
Obviously, when thinking of Industry, reactions is not the only thing there. I used to dabble in T2 invention, making myself bouncer IIs, having made a shit ton of isk when venture and the prospect came out and whatnot.
So, I figured, let’s have a look at what else I can do.
We’re currently in the middle of making some cap parts. I have been given a few Orca BPOs, we found a Moros bpo in one of the hangers.
And I bought myself a Scorpion BPO, because what better way to go back in T2 invention, but by making one of the ships that makes Wspace so much fun Widows.
I should probably look into making Bhaalgorns too.
“E’dyn, it’s been ages, where have you been” asked nobody ever but I will tell you anyhow.
The last time I wrote a story about what was going on it was February 2023. We’re a year and 10 months since that time.
And in all that time, I was still subbed to EVE, still playing the game. I just didn’t really bother with writing, I’m not sure why. I kept telling myself I should but never actually did.
I quite enjoyed that time in the C4, it got me back into the game, but it also made me realise back then that I like it when “bigger” things happen.
I am one of those people that tries to have his buddies join in on whatever he’s doing. So when I was loving my time in the C4 I talked to a few old corporation buddies and they joined the C4 corp too.
After a while it became clear that the way myself and my friends thought when playing around in w-space, was a bit different than the mindset of management of the corporation we were in.
Nothing wrong with that, when you have your own corp you want to run it your way. What we wanted to do was punch up a bit.
Poke the big baddies and see what could happen.
When you’re in a smaller corporation, that stuff is scary, especially in wormholes. Because when you start kicking around, someone might come and kick down your sandcastle, and in wormholes, your sandcastle will drop literally EVERYTHING if it gets destroyed.
So a decision was made and we decided to leave and revive The New Eden Yacht Club in a C5/C5.
The plan was to drop a Fortizar, grab a few dreads and see what we could do.
We recruited a few people, we had a few people join in group, and we did a LOT of things.
I even had a little sideproject going on to make some ISK (more on this in another post)
Fun things, but unfortunately C5 space was (and still isn’t) easy to live in when there’s only 10 of you, and the people you’re punching up against have 20+ on comms.
We became known as a group that would take all fights, we welped expensive stuff just for shits and giggles. And it was fun, until it wasn’t fun anymore.
I think it was September last year that most of us became a bit exhausted with what we were doing. We were no longer winning fights, people kept coming with multiple dreads, and we figured that at some point, the sandcastle would get kicked down.
So, we went on a bit of a hiatus, eventually unofficially closing down. The C5 was sold, and I was back in Jita spinning things, wishing for more C5 time.
At some point a few months later I wanted to go back into wormholes, I missed them. I was doing some station trading in Jita but not really using my characters for anything else. So, it was time to find a corporation to join once again.
I decided that I would try to join one of the bigger corporations in high-class space, No Vacancies.
I was there for a couple of months but never really felt like I belonged. Not that they didn’t make me feel welcome but it’s a whole lot different when you come from being on voice with 10 people, to being on voice with a lot more people.
This was all right before the “big” wormhole war happened. When I noticed what was going on I decided I did not want to be part of it, mostly because I knew people on both sides and didn’t really want to pick a side.
I left with the idea of coming back when the dust settled but was no longer welcome. Due to a few friendships that I have.
After that I joined Almost Dangerous, which was another corporation I knew from my time as Yacht club, people that I fought against, lost against and felt like might be a good fit.
I’m currently still part of AD but my wormhole adventures are put on hold for the moment. Once again due to a bit of a burnout with the way that high-class space works in the days since the war.
Luckily for you dear reader! I have quite a few other things going on in the universe. One of which that started a couple of weeks ago but that I dabbled in back in 2016. Industry!
If I had waited for two more months, it would have been two years since I last did anything in this little blog of mine.
And funnily enough I’m still playing the game, I just haven’t really been writing for a while. It’s time to change this.
A lot has been happening in the game since last writing here. I was in a C4 corp, revived my old 2016 corp, which then died again, moved to C5 space, and once again revived part of the old corp.
All stories to tell, and I plan on telling them.
Alongside of all of that, in the past two weeks I have for the first time in literally 8 years set up in nullsec. And the previous time it was only with one character, now I’m doing something completely different there, manufacturing.
It’s time to write again, and I’m feeling good.
I also need to update this site a bit, just starting to write this thing feels slow. And the UI is… Just bad. I’ll see if I can find something nice for all our eyes!
The /r/eve subreddit gets a lot of these questions, more so in the past few weeks than I’ve seen in the past. Maybe because I just browse it more often these days, who knows.
But there’s always people wondering if EVE is still viable a game to play, is it fun? Is there much to do? How do I start playing this game?
I answer them from time to time, tell them that they need to figure out if they want to PvE or PvP or do both. Do they want to kill NPCs, do they want to do industry (or crafting as they know it in other games). If they want to PvP do they want to do it solo, do they want to do it in a big alliance where they’ll be a number for a long time until they can make themselves more known.
Do it in a small group but probably not getting the big blingy kills?
All questions that a person needs to ask themselves when going into EVE online. In many MMOs really, it all boils down to “What do you want to do with your time in the game”
I myself realised a long, long time ago that I liked being in wormhole space. All because of the things that have happened to me in wormhole space. And mostly because of me joining a corporation back in 2016 that invited me to an expenses paid trip to Prague the day after I joined them and me just going “why not”
That corporation no longer exists in the way it did but I made some really good friends there. One of which poked me months ago to join the current corporation I’m in.
What do I do in EVE though? I like to think of myself as someone who mostly PvPs and just trades to make himself ISK to pay for said PvP.
And I do need the ISK because I tend to lose expensive things.
I do sometimes escape in cheap stuff
Less than 12 hours ago I lost a Loki and pod that cost me around 2.5b. For those of you that don’t know the abbreviation that is billion. 2 500 000 000 isk, which equals exactly one month of gametime.
It was a painful loss for about 30 mins, where I was wondering why I was so damn stupid to go into that hole. But in the end, it’s what I enjoy doing, and the battle itself was quite fun.
What happened you ask?
Well, this all started when we found a few prospects huffing gas in a neighbouring wormhole, we were setting up a gank. Me in my sabre, the two other guys in a sabre and a proteus themselves.
Unfortunately, before we were even able to set up the gank correctly a few of our targets decided to go back home and saw us.
We still tried to go for it but the prospects escaped. The guys that saw us came back in 3 other ships, Gnosis, Deimos and Proteus. We had them bubbled and I figured that I should quickly reship in a ship that could easily tank them and then some.
They did get my sabre killed but I was able to go reship.
So I came back in a Loki. At this point their 3 people fleet turned into a 6 or 7 people fleet.
But whatever, I could probably tank this, let’s go!
And tank them I did. Although it was close for a while.
We were fighting on our home connection at zero. Meaning that if anyone was about to die they could easily jump in the wormhole and quickly try to make it out.
Which basically happened to all the guys that we were fighting except one unlucky Legion who I think was polarized.
But we were happy, we killed one of theirs. They were now in our home hole and we were on the connection they needed to get back. A little Mexican standoff.
This took a bit too long to our liking so what do we do? We go back into home and start pretending to roll the connection. This is what you do when you put a bunch of mass through a wormhole in order to make it collapse.
All of this, from when we saw the prospects to us doing this was about 40 minutes. Plenty of time for people to get pinged. Unfortunately for us, my corporation had nobody else online, and it turns out that theirs had a few more people online.
The guys went onto the connection about 2 minutes after I jumped back home with my Loki, my two Corp buddies went after them. I heard them go “oh shit that’s a bit more than before” but didn’t really think much of it. If they were in cruisers I’d be able to tank them for a bit longer and we might be able to at least kill one of them.
Some of them were not in cruisers.
I died at zero on the wormhole back home and got podded too. Why? Well, one was because they brought a big bad Paladin to kill us, and two, because I was polarized for about 20 more seconds when my ship died, and 10 more seconds when my pod died.
Polarisation happens when you go through a wormhole, if you were to go back through the same hole, you won’t be able to use it a second time to go back to where you come from for about 4 minutes. It’s a little countdown timer that was made to make things a bit more interesting in wormholes. And some groups know how to use it well, others do not. Especially when it’s late and they are on a pvp rush.
I died, ended up in Jita, and am currently waiting for a few buy orders to be filled for a new Loki and pod.
It’s a good thing I can easily afford these things, it would hurt a lot more if I couldn’t.
But I can’t imagine myself doing anything other than wormholes anymore. Every other space is just too boring.
Safety is relative, but in wormholes you have no idea who else is watching.
Every time I write here, it’s because I want to tell a story. I want to entertain my reader(s) with the words I put down. I like to think that most of the time I succeed in doing so. Mostly because 99% of the time I feel like I’m the only one reading my own blog and it does entertain me somewhat!
And sometimes I want to show you pretty things
Despite the fact that I’ve been playing EVE Online for more than a decade, I have never ransomed anyone. Until a couple of days ago that is.
I shall now regale you with what happened.
It was a Tuesday like most Tuesdays, working from home and reading up on the news and discord. One of my corporation buddies found a reinforced POCO and decided that he wanted to be there for when the new owners of the system would turn up and bash it.
What he had failed to say was that it would take about 9 more hours, meaning that today we wouldn’t be using our static C3 much. Luckily, we had a random pop up and were able to use that for some other content.
It turned around midnight eve time and the poco came out of reinforcement. We had not seen anyone yet but suddenly someone logged onto the POS and then another and another.
The first thing they did was scan our hole down.
We were ready in Leshaks but the moment we saw the scanner we decided to quickly dock and log of our leshak pilots. I had a sabre cloaked on the hole, waiting in case they would decide to roll it.
And they did in fact decide to roll it. 2 praxi and an onyx came to the hole. Little did they know that we were watching them.
Seeing that at the time I was only in a sabre and my buddy was with his eyes on their side, I was only able to catch one praxis.
We killed it with the Leshaks that had logged back on and then just stayed on the hole for a little bit, only to then decide “Hey, let’s see if we can have them fight us, let’s go shoot the pos”
While doing this I kept the hole bubbled seeing that I also wanted to catch the praxis and onyx. Another one of my Corp mates then decided “I’m going to see if we can get him to pay to stop us”
At this point we thought that the pos might not have any strontium in it. Meaning that if we would get through the shield, it would not even get reinforced and we could just grab everything in there.
But we’re nice people at heart and offered him a ransom. He had a Kronos floating around in the POS so we told him that if he gave it to us we would stop shooting.
I did not think he would, but he told us that he was ok with that, he just needed the Onyx back in the hole because that pilot was the one able to fly the Kronos.
Just like you dear reader, at this point most of us thought “No way, he just wants to try and roll us out”
But no, once I released the Onyx pilot and let him warp, he went into the Kronos, flew it back to our home entrance and went out of it. Only for me to get in it and it up.
Now to sell or fit it
We stopped shooting the tower and went our merry way, One marauder richer. A badly fit one, but still.
The POS was more than likely not stronted at all, but I don’t mind, we could have left with a lot more loot, but we left with a marauder and someone new in wormhole space, who can now bat phone us if he needs help.
If we come across him somewhere we will still kill him, but if he needs help, we will be there for him.
That’s the wormhole life. We don’t really do politics, we just shoot each other, but we will be there for the friendly people that need help.
I’m enjoying my time in the C4 quite a bit, and I’m certain more good stories will come.
There’s content everywhere, we just have to find it.
I have a bit of a gambling addiction. Luckily it’s not one that is using my real life money, but I am addicted to the EvE Online Hypernet.
For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s basically a raffle lottery. You buy a few tickets and you have a chance that your ticket gets the win. Usually it’s for certain ships or modules and such. The owner of the ship/module puts it up for x amount of tickets, 8/16/32/../512. Each ticket costing the amount that the owner puts the total price up for. And then you just wait until every ticket gets sold and see if you won.
With the hypernet, the owner usually buys 50% of their own tickets and then sells off the rest. The reason behind this is math. Or at least so I’ve been told. Supposedly if you buy half of your own tickets, 80% of the time you will win your own prize back and you’re making a bit of money on top of it.
I’ve actually tried it a couple of times and sure enough I won my prize back a few times, but I’ve not done it often enough to get to that 80% mark.
The reason why I’m so addicted to the Hypernet is because I’ve been EXTREMELY lucky.
I was able to have my wealth go up by about 20bn just doing raffles. I’ve won myself a few marshals, a dread and some small stuff I just put back on the market.
I lose a bunch, but I am all the way up there in ISK positivity that I just can’t stop myself from being “Just one more”
It’s bad, I know, but at least it’s not with actual real-life money.
As I’ve said before though, I’m having a good time in EVE again, all thanks to the C4 corporation I joined. Wormhole life is good.
I’ve also joined a few Thera operations but I still feel more like an F1 monkey when I join them. Which again, isn’t a bad thing. It’s just not what I like about EVE. It’s good if you want to just relax a bit and not pay too much attention though, perfect for those times.
Eve is still as pretty as ever, so here’s a few screenshots I’ve made over the past couple of weeks
Anyhow, it’s New Year’s Eve! Tomorrow it will be 2023. Time is truly flying.
I hope you all have a good one, and make yourselves some resolutions that you won’t stick by, and a couple you will.
I’ve been rather active again on EVE the past couple of weeks, 14 days to be exact. Why’s that? Well I joined a new corporation with a few of my characters.
The past couple of years I’ve been part of a group of wormholers called “Dead Terrorists”, who when I joined them were living in a C2 with a Null/C5 static.
That was almost 2 years ago. Since then we’ve moved into Thera for both logistical reasons and to get more content on fleet nights.
The one thing I had a slight problem with, in my own time in EVE, is that I only seemed to be logging in for fleet nights. I never did log on any other day despite paying for three accounts.
The reason behind this is because I don’t really like doing things on my own. I’ve always enjoyed the social aspect of EVE and doing things solo is just not really my thing. I could always go out of the nullsec and find some content like that or join one of the many, many NPSI groups. But I want to fly with buddies, not alone.
And then CCP suddenly gives 7 days of Omega to people. For those of you reading who don’t know what that is, Omega is just EVE’s paid subscription. You can be an Alpha in the game which allows you to fly a limited amount of ships and train yourself up to about 5 million SP, after that you can’t really do more training until you pay. Couple this with some amazing Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals
But the fact that CCP gave people the option to activate their accounts again for free during a certain time period has brought a lot of people back to the game. Couple this with some amazing Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and you have a lot of people suddenly resubbing.
Including a couple of friends I used to fly with. One of which joined a wormhole corporation that lives in a C4 with a C3/C5 static. He poked me and told me to come fly with him on one of my alts and I did.
Within the week I had been on EVE more than I had in the past 6 months all together and I was also having a lot of fun. At which point I decided that I also wanted to move my main here.
But I still wanted to fly with my buddies in DT. Luckily both groups understood what I wanted to do and there was no issue for me to switch around a bit and now I have my two high SP characters in the C4 and my “dread alt” in Thera. He’s only got 80m sp but I used to use him for Naglfar ratting in C5, which is why he’s called the dread alt.
I’m flying ships I haven’t flown before, I’m free flying more than I’m used to and I’m even making some ISK on the side by doing marauder ratting.
Got myself a Naglfar and a pretty skinDon’t worry, this is perfectly safe
There’s a ton of content down the chain and all in all. Life in EVE right now, is pretty damn good.
Let’s hope that there’s more of this to come.
But when I see what the future holds for the game, I am seeing a ripple of sun through the clouds that have been hanging over it in the past years.
CCP is stepping up their game and taking a turn for the best.
I’ve been meaning to make this post ages ago, and a lot of it was already written up, but time has a way of creeping up on you. And I forgot about it.
As we are approaching winter, I have done the last bits of preparation for my hive. I’ve fed them a bunch of sugar fondant, made sure that they’re nicely packed etc and had a last inspection to make sure that the queen was still around and there were enough bees about to go into the winter.
In the next few months, I will only open the hive once or twice to give them a mite treatment. Something which is very important for the future of bees. More on this some other time, or maybe in this same post, who knows! I sure don’t…
Ok no that’s a lie, I totally know, I’m not doing it right now.
The girls did a good job, the past few weeks were hotter than they usually are and that gave them more time to bring in more pollen and some nectar, things they will need in order to make it through the winter.
Look at all that honey!
They will bunch up together in a ball, keeping the hive and each other warm and go from frame to frame, feeding on their stores.
And then in spring, it’s time for them to work again! And for me too, since I have decided to add at the very least two extra hives in my little apiary!
Not only that, we’re currently fully preparing to make something extra happen. Mostly because I want it, but also because if it does work, others will be able to enjoy my Boobees too.
What is it that I’m doing you ask? Well as you know in my previous blog post I have a site, one that I still have to translate to Dutch, but beside the fact that people will be able to buy Boobee honey. You’ll also be able to check them out.
I’ll be setting up a stream that will keep an eye on the entrance of the hive.
A trench is being prepared as we speak for power and ethernet!
The main reason for this is because I just enjoy watching them do their thing, going in and out of the hive carrying their pollen and other things is just a very relaxing endeavor.
At the hive itself I have setup two benches on which myself and my family go to sit and just watch the bees from time to time.
With the fact that I sit behind my computer screen a lot I also decided to make it possible for me to watch my Boobees from afar. So soon(ish) there will be live.boobees.be to enjoy.
Something that I’m sure will have people surf to it and them wondering why there’s bees instead of something else. But I kinda look forward to those reactions too. Because deep down, I’m a troll and as an eve player, harvesting salt is a thing we do too.
I don’t think there will be much activity on them during winter, but once spring starts, things should become very interesting.
That is, if the hive survives winter. We will know in a couple of months.
But with all this honey they have, it should be fine!
Did you know that when creating honey, bees actually regulate the temperature and humidity in their hive to a certain point so that it’s just perfect for the honey. And that this is one of the reasons why honey can be preserved for basically forever?
If someone told me 10 years ago that I would become a beekeeper I would have smiled and gone “Sure, whatever you say”
But here I am, owning a hive with plans on getting a few more in spring. I never suspected that I’d enjoy it so much, that it would be so relaxing to just watch the girls do their job, coming and going from the hive. And seeing the transformation inside of the hive.
It’s one of the reasons why I’m looking into setting up a live stream on the landing board. Not because I’m thinking “Oh people will want to watch this and maybe sponsor the stream!” No, it’s purely because I want to watch it happen, I want to be able to look at one of my screens and watch the bees go back and forth.
Another added extra to that would be that IF something were to be happening to them, I can see it happen and act accordingly.
I even made a site for these girls, something that’s still a work in progress, but I own a brand name of sorts now. If you’re curious, feel free to go and have a look at the BooBees. Yes, I called them Boo Bees. Partly because I just think the name is funny and technically it’s also true that all the honey you eat, has been made by bees long gone. The site isn’t quite where it needs to be just yet. I’m still testing things and making it better. I’ll also do a dutch part since, you know.. I live in Belgium and most people here talk Dutch as their main language, they know English, but not that well. I also absolutely love our logo.
Ghost bees! Boo Bees! There’s even a few jars! But most are already gone
Right now, Winter is coming. And this means that the girls are getting towards their last days of getting ready for it. This means getting their stores of honey up and preparing winter bees.
Normally most of the worker bees only last for a couple of weeks, the only bee inside the hive that last for longer is the Queen, who can live up to 2 years, longer even in some cases. That is if she’s doing an ok job and the hive doesn’t decide that it’s time for a new Queen. Something I might talk about some other time.
But when winter is around the corner, the queen starts laying a different kind of worker. Namely the winter bee. They live for a couple of months and their job is to make sure the hive stays a nice temperature during the winter and that the queen survives too.
The queen, busy doing her job of laying more workers. The frame in question has honey on top, the queen is the one with the yellow dot.
Us beekeepers use this time to feed them if they need it, and make sure to get mite treatment done, since the varroa mite is one of the most important things that we need to handle in our hives.
In my case, they had their varroa treatment around the end of July, so that means I’ll only have to have a look at it in December. But what I am doing now is feeding the girls, and boy are they hungry. When I got the hive, they were using about 6 or 7 frames, I had hoped that in the past two months they would have grown to use a bit more but alas, that did not happen.
In an inspection a couple of weeks ago I had also noticed that only one frame out of the ones they were using was filled with honey, which is not good when winter is almost there. So what did I do? I started feeding them. I gave them a bunch of sugar syrup and the other day I gave them 2.5kg of sugar fondant.
“Why are we here? Weren’t we just in a jar?” “I think the human had to take the jar so he put us here at the entrance, so considerate” Exactly what I did, replaced their empty syrup bowl with fondant
I had hoped that the syrup would be enough and that maybe they wouldn’t want the fondant since they had enough in store, but I was wrong, they’re taking it in too.
One bite at a time
Seeing that the girls know best what they might need, I’m just letting them have it all and in a couple of weeks I’ll take the hive apart one last time. At that point I’ll change the current cover board with one that has no hole in it and add some news paper to the top to make sure it’s nicely isolated.
And then it’s mostly hoping that they make it through the winter because there won’t be much I can do to help more.
“What’s the human doing this time?”
I like this new hobby I have though, it’s definitely different than what I usually do (gaming) and it’s good for the bees! And let’s be honest, bees are awesome.
Even those among you that might be allergic to them realise that without them, we’d be properly fucked, since without bees to pollinate things, we’d have a lot less food going around.
That reminds me, I wonder if I’m allergic. I have yet to be stung by one in the past few months. I remember having been stung years and years ago when I was a kid. And despite there not being anything wrong at that time, people’s physiology changes as they grow older, so who knows I might react very different to it than when I was a child.
But there’s only one way to find out, and I’m hoping that me getting stung won’t happen for a long time.
