Bearbarin

Observations about Eve Online from a Careful Carebear

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<10 Metal Scraps = Shuttle

In the Small Secure Container that I put in every ship I fly, I put modules like MWDs and Expanded Cargo, and various ECM flavors,  so that wherever I end up, I've got the tools to do the job.  I also take a  Shuttle blueprint copy and some metal scraps. That shuttle can be handy to zip around with if you decide to stay in a system to run missions and want to go back to your base to get a salvaging ship to speed up the looting. 

I used to put 30m³ of Tritanium with the Shuttle blueprint copy in that container, and thought I was so bright.  But 10 metal scraps only take up .1m³, and when reprocessed (depending on your Refining Skills) makes more than 3000 units of Tritanium, more than enough for a shuttle.  If a mission will take 30 minutes or more to salvage, you have time to reprocess the metal and make a shuttle.  So instead of just selling off your scrap or reprocessing it, you can use it like a bunch of little dehydrated taxis.

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So this happened.  Pantone's 2013 color of the year is this shade of Green: "Emerald"  that looks quite à la mode Gallente - n'est-ce pas?  it's sort of a funny coincidence that many of the words used to describe the color by Pantone PR also bear a certain congruity with Gallente characteristics....

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Awaiting Retribution.....with Householding Tips

So Retribution comes out tomorrow.  I think the most interesting things  to me will be the new Destroyers, the Micro Jump Warp Drive, and the Salvaging Drones.  I'm not crazy about some of the nerfing of ships that I finally feel comfortable fitting and using.  Oh well.  It's a game, I guess CCP knows how to keep it fun by now. 

So below is an inverted color, partial screenshot of my Item hangar inventory.  Maybe veteran players can just use the Filter to find what they want quickly, but I'm still learning that whole types of modules even exist, so I had to come up with a better way to organize.  I'm using Secure Containers, of different sizes.  20 Small and 10 Medium are a good start.  I keep Minerals, and my favorite Ammunition free and breezy in the hangar.  Stuff that I plan to reprocess or refine, or salvaged burned out modules, they stay free too.   Everything else is locked up tight.  Not for security, as much as just sanity.  I name each can with a capital letter for the Base Station, then a small letter for the category of the contents ("a" for ammo, "d" for drones, "h" for high slot, "m" for mid slot, etc.), so it makes a coherent list in order, and then the explanation of what's inside it.  Does this mean I have OCD?  

Since I took this screenshot a month ago, I've decided that it makes better sense to just lump all the ammo with its particular type of guns. And I've got rid of the "Reprocess" can.  The "Valise" is a handy little container that contains a shuttle blueprint, various Electronic Counter Measure [ECM] modules, expanded cargoholds, a Salvager, etc.  If I don't already have that stuff in a Small Can in a ship, I can just grab the Valise and take it with me.  The cans labeled with "X" have modules that either I don't know a use for yet, or I don't need at all  - like remote armor repairers, (i.e. stuff for Fleet support. )  I've been using "Smalls" for Blueprints and skillbooks that I don't have the prerequisites for yet, but now I think it might be better to put module and ammo BPOs along with the stuff they make. For my screen, with the inventory window all the way open, I can see about 27 or 28 cans at one time, and this makes it easier to sort salvaged modules without having to scroll.  

I wish there was a folder system with the Inventory, maybe CCP could call them Bins or Cabinets or something. Organizing with secure containers costs a pretty penny, and it's a hassle to haul the cans around initially. Also when you look at the Assets Menu, you have to open  a specific container to see the contents, and the "Search" function won't reveal what's inside cans.  Using cans for organization also makes using saved Ship Fittings a bit more work, because you have to take all of the modules you need out, and let them swing free in the Item Hangar if you want quick fit switches. But on the plus side, when you do want to move a ton of stuff to a new Base station, having everything already packed up makes it easier, and fit tighter in your hauler.

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Beelyuns and Beelyuns...well the first beelyun at least

Carl Sagan

My first billion ISK.  I finally reached that amount in cash a day after my Toon turned 5 months old.  I know I could have reached that much quicker, but I decided that I was bound and determined to get my Standings up with a NPC, so that my Refining Yield would be better.  And grinding out those Missions took more time.  Mining with a tricked out Retriever and Mad Mining Skillz has brought me nearly $7 million an hour, after refining and selling the minerals at a good tradehub.  Missioning might bring $2 million an hour if I'm lucky.  My downfall has been buying pretty little ships and their modules that keep eating into my profits.  I think I'm a Ship Hoarder, although I can ruthlessly reprocess shuttles and rookie frigates and low level named modules, with my other ships, even if I've figured out that they're not really useful, I can't bear to sell or shred them.  

I name each of my ships, I started doing it because it made the Ship Hangar Inventory List so much easier to organize.  All my Gallente ships are named for animal species.  They remind me of mollusks and fish and other kinds of sea life. The first letter of the ship name is also the first letter of the class of ship.  That way all the classes line up nicely.  And for the ships from the other races, Amarr ships are called terms from Catholic dogma, Caldari ships are named after minerals (don't look like birds much, more like crystalline minerals), and Minmatar ships are named after authors.  Because they've been  pioneers who had to homestead, and couldn't waste resources on mere pleasure, so the things that would have been most precious (and free) to share would have been books.  

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That Elusive Level 5

image from K162space

I've been playing for a little over 3 months now. I've been careful to keep my Skill Queue full, and I've reached 4.5 million skillpoints. And what I've found out is while there are many Skills that are useful at low levels just to access types of ships or modules for instance, it seems that increasingly, every skill I find I need I really ought to take it all the way to Level 5.  Sometimes the bonus bump per level is paltry like 2% so that leveling up to 5 will only give a 10% increase.  But when the bonus is 5% and up, and especially when it's something like Drone Interfacing which gives a 20% bump per level to drone damage and drone mining level - it makes it seem crucial to eke out that full Level 5. I mean, I'm running those damn drones, I paid a helluva lot for them, so I want them to deal the maximum DPS! ( Damage Per Second)  Of course you can't even inject the skillbook for Drone Interfacing until you've reached the Level 5 Drone Skill.  The question of course is time.  Most of the Level 5s I've needed so far have been able to be completed in 3 or 4 days, but now I'm looking at topping off a few skills that will take 2 weeks to finish.  Argggh.

When I looked  on the forums to see the sort of Ideal Fits for ships, I was surprised to see that some people came up with setups that seemed to deal outrageous amounts of DPS - even on little frigates. It didn't make sense until I realized that it wasn't just the Tech 2 or Navy Issue guns, it was also the accumulated skillpoints in Gunnery and Engineering and Electronics and what have you that exponentially increased the lethality of these tiny hulls. These sort of chains of skills leading to greater bonuses is what makes me quite content to just stay in Empire space for now, around people that haven't had the time yet to amass huge hordes of skillpoints.  

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"Named" Modules & Why You Want Them...

Tech 1 modules are what's readily available, there are blueprints for them so you can make your own, and go into Manufacturing if you want, and they're very cheap compared to Tech 2 modules - which don't have blueprints readily available, so can't be reproduced easily.  There are also "Named" Modules that carry descriptive terms like Experimental, Limited, Phased, Beta, Anointed, Prototype, etc.  You want these.  

Most capsuleers discover these wierdly named modules when they're salvaging the wreck of an NPC rat or Mission rat.  Often the modules require skills to fit and use that you don't have yet, so they get sold off cheaply by newbies.  But if you can afford to keep them, do so, because as your Skills increase you'll be able to find ways to use them and they are much better than unnamed Tech 1 modules.  How so?  If you click on the little blue "i" circle for a Tech 1 module you'll see a tab called "Variations" click on that, and you'll see it in a list of other similar modules.  There will be the Tech 2, and sometimes Navy issues and superduper Faction and Officer issues that drop out of high level missions.  

Now look  for the "Compare" button at the bottom of the window.  There you can click on different attributes for the modules and by clicking on the Headings, rank them.  "Range" for guns - "HP" (hitpoints) for defensive modules - "Capacitor" and "CPU" to determine what's feasible for your ships power and processing abilities.   The "Named" modules do better in almost every way, except sometimes they do use more Capacitor (cap) and CPU - although most of them use less.  

What's interesting too is the price of these modules.  The very best "Named" Module costs as much or more than a Tech 2 module.  But I've found that the very next best ranked Tech 1 "Named" Module often costs way less but does nearly as well as a Tech 2.   For more experienced players that are swimming in billions of ISK, it's not worth their effort to scrimp on modules, they can pay for the Tech 2s or the Faction or even the very rare Officer modules.  But for Recent Newbs and the fiscally careful, the 2nd ranked "Named" Modules do quite well. 

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Shield Extenders & Passive Shield Tank Modules - Why I Love Them...

So I'm Gallente, and all the Fitting Guides for Gallente Ships seem biased toward Armor Tanking, because Gallente Ships have better armor resists - yada yada.  And I'm sure that later on when I get into PvP combat, I'll yield to these greater authorities.  But now, I'm just building up ISK and learning how to fit and use different ships, and doing missions and Planetary Interaction and Skilling up, so until I jump into the PvP pool, I'm developing some Carebear strategies that might be useful for you.  One of these is going against Received Knowledge and using Passive Shield Tanking on my ships.  

I don't like Red in my Instrument Display.  I don't wig out now like I used to when I was just doing the Rookie missions.  But I still don't like Red much, and the less Red means less attention I have to pay to Defensive strategies and more fun I can have with Offense and the Pew Pew.  That's why I love Shield Extenders.  What they do is add time, sometimes doubling the amount of Shield resistance.  They take the place of your Shield Booster in the Mid Slot.  The link above has a good article on Passive Shield tactics.  Right now I use the basic Shield Extenders in my Destroyers on up - Cruisers, Battlecruisers, and Battleships, along with a Shield Power Relay module in one of my Low Slots. 

So far using Shield Extender-Shield Power Relay setups I've never gone through a shield into Armor Damage  - all Red is confined to the outer ring of the Display.  Granted I'm only doing Mission 1 Security missions now.  So that info is only accurate for Mission 1s.  I still fit an Armor Repair module in one of my Lows just to be prepared, but I never hit it now. 

So instead of the basic Frigate Defense of having a Shield Booster and an Armor Repairer, 2 modules that have to be activated in the midst of battle.  I've got 3 modules that I never (at least in Mission 1s) have to activate.  That's a relief.

But I doubt that the use of these modules would work for you unless you also have the relevant Skllls, you need Engineering and Electronics leveled up to 5, and then 3 Shields Skills: Management, Operations, & Upgrades.  It's never enough to have a good module, you have to Skill up to use it to the fullest. 

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Patience & Eve

“Impatience led to our expulsion from paradise, and impatience stops us returning.” - Franz Kafka

After all those weeks of training and ISKing to make and afford and insure and fly and fit that Dominix, my own Space Potato, it still seems that until I can fit it with the right dual large hybrid guns that I'm not going to get the Damage Per Second - DPS - that it's really meant for.  So Gunnery to Level V - yay - another 4 day queue.  Patience is what this game really teaches you.  Impatience leads you to make mistakes, waste ISK, train the wrong skill, increase standings with a less useful Corporation.  

With computers and the internet and the creeping societal ADHD, I can be impatient to click on things, it's tempting to over rely on intuition, all in the name of "saving time".  But what I had thought was going to be a big use for my multi-purpose Dominix - mining -turned out to be inefficient.  I hadn't considered a Retriever mining barge because there was another of those Level V - 4 day Skills to slog through: Industry.  But when I realized that I could eat up asteroids about twice as fast with a Retriever and two strip miners than I could with a Domi and 6 Miner IIs, much less do away with the jetcan chaining and multiple Iteron hauling trips then it all made better sense.  And Retrievers are relatively cheap, you can make the price of purchase back in about 3 or 4 hours of mining, and pay for modules and insurance with a couple hours more.

But the best thing about mining with a Retriever is that if you pick good large asteroids with a Survey Scanner, and release some combat drones, then instead of having to offload ore every minute with a Vexor, or every 3 minutes with a Dominix, you can sit back and read a book for about 22 minutes, checking the Overview for little red crosses every time you turn a page.  Not really AFK, but pretty peaceful, especially if you still use Mission Mining.  

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Dominix and Delayed Gratification in EVE

It's taken me so long to be able to make and fly my Dominix.  I bought a blueprint copy weeks ago, and then I started training my Refining and Production and Mining and Astrogeology skills so that I could mine most of the materials and save on the amount needed to produce it.  And Science Skills and Electronics and yada yada yada.  There's always more skills needed to get something working or optimal in EVE.  I probably spent close to 16 hours mining in my Vexor for it.  I probably would have done better just doing security missions and selling loot for ISK and then buying the minerals or the ore to refine myself.  But for all the work I did to make it, making a spreadsheet for material costs, researching online, buying modules to fit it with - it really feels special to me. I was so happy when I finally completed building it.  With the blueprint, and skillbooks, and the zydrine and megacyte I bought -  it cost me about $18 million ISK out of pocket.  Not so shabby compared to the $83 million median price (eve-markets.net)

Too bad I can't fly it yet.

I thought "Battleships" was the next step after "Gallente Cruiser", and of course it's really "Gallente Battleship" .  Duh.  And of course to train that, I have to be at Gallente Cruiser Level 4.  Which means at least 5 days of training time left to go, while my Domi sits pretty in the Ship Hangar.  

I read on the forums how "oh, you can train up to a [massive ship name] in just a week or a couple of weeks".  That is complete crap.  Theoretically you can do that, if you don't train any other skills at all, but what's the use of a bigger ship if you can't fit modules that require specialized training?  Then you just have a neutered glass boat.  I've been playing about two months now, and it'll take another week at least before I can fly that battleship. But in a way, I'm glad that it took so long, because I've taken that time to learn other aspects of the game, like Planetary Interaction, and Manufacturing and Trading, and how and why to increase standings with corporations.  EVE seems to be a game where patience is rewarded, and impatience is punished - severely.

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Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong sets foot on the Moon, July 21, 1969

When I watched the Moon Landing, and Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon, I was 6 years old.  I was part of the first generation that took science fiction as science fact - science inevitability - space wasn't a dream anymore, it was happening now.  It was going to happen from now until forever.  Or so I thought.  I don't really miss the promise of films like 2001, I didn't really expect flying cars, or vacations on a space station, or meals in a pill.  I do miss manned space exploration though on the moon.  For all the money the world has wasted on wars and death, and all the expense we fritter away on trivial materialism, and experiences meant to enhance our "status", just think what we could have achieved as a species if we could have continued going to the moon. 

When I was little, astronauts were the biggest heros of anyone alive, no one else even came close, not musicians or athletes or warriors or poets or actors or kings or potentates.  An astronaut was seen as the summit of intelligence and bravery and adventure. He represented science and thought and action. It's wrong today that we still don't feel that way. We treat astronauts - and all those rocket scientists that support them, as just a bunch of nerds that are concerned with stuff that is peripheral to "real life".  Because real life is about making money, and fixing the problems of how to inject more flavor into processed fried snacks, or how to extract more prehistoric plant juice out of the ground. 

But space isn't peripheral to real life.  Space is our future life, and considering the literally earth shattering events that have happened before, space might be our only life as a species.  It was a shame that at 82 years old, Neil Armstrong had not seen the world realign toward a future in space by the end of his time on Earth.  There certainly were enough years to do so. We individuals may never get to space, never set foot on a moon or planet, but it is the very least we can do, and possibly ultimately the most beneficial thing we can do for our progeny, and our fellow man, to support space exploration. 

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Tractor Beam, and why you need one....and chaining jetcans...

picture by Kilgore Trout

When you fit a tractor beam on a ship you use for ratting, instead of flying to each bunch of wrecks to use your salvager, you can salvage the close ones, and tractor the distant ones until they are close as well.  Using an afterburner with a fast ship like a destroyer, flying 30km to reach a new cluster of wrecks isn't a problem, but with the larger ships, even the speed boost with a micro warp drive isn't as fast as using a Small Tractor Beam I, which pulls things at 500m/s, from up to 20km away.  (And if you are moving toward it, with your afterburner on as well, of course it's even speedier.)  Using a tractor beam lets you sit your fat Capsuleer butt in place and bring all the salvage to you.  You can also use it as a towing device, which is really handy when you're "chaining" jetcans.  

Chaining means keeping the creation time of your jetcan current, so that you won't have it expire and lose your ore when you're intensively mining for more than an hour at a time.  People say that cans and rat wrecks last 2 hours or so.  I imagine that they do, but rather safe than sorry, so reset my cans every hour, at 5 minute increments.  So if I have a jetcan that I've named as "7:00pm", then at 8:00pm I jettison some ore into a new can, name that cargo container "8:00pm" and transfer the contents of the earlier can into it.  At the most butt numbing session I've had mining on a security mission I had 4 jetcans chained together, 110k m3 of ore, named in 5 minute increments.  Not having to worry about whether an hour's worth of mining might go poof! is just one less concern.

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Mining on Security Missions, Part 2

Gallente Vexor made by pupumonkey

Hint about Mining on Security Missions: If the mission includes an Acceleration Gate, make sure that your hauler ship can get through it before you start mining.  I didn't do that on a mission the other day, after I had taken nearly 4 hours filling 4 jetcans with ore.  Big mistake.  AAAARGGGH.  Since I couldn't warp directly to the location of the containers, and going back and forth to base and docking and undocking with a load would have taken too long, I decided to make a Safe Spot in between base and the cans, and shuttle the ore there and then make trips with my Iteron later.  That still took way too long.  It took almost 8 hours to mine and shuffle this ore around, and even though it was Pyroxeres, rare in Gallente Space, and had more than half the nocxium I need to make my Dominix - worth about 20 million ISK - I wouldn't recommend the grief and drudgery it took to acquire it.  So check to see if your hauler can fit through those gates.

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Math is your friend in EVE

Not this: ↑  , not complex math.  Mainly what you learned by the time you were 12: Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, and Division.  There are a lot of numbers in this game: targeting range, hit points, mining yield, bonuses, standings, etc.  It can be overwhelming.  But whatever your question may be: what kind of ammo to use? how long will it take to mine a certain amount?  will this ship do what I want it to do? - the answer is yours with a calculator, or a pencil and paper.

For example, for the mining I did today, with my mining lasers and mining drones I could manage 376 m³ per minute, so I could fill up one 27k Cargo Container in about 71 minutes.  But as I was nearly done, I realized that I had another more powerful ship that I hadn't considered using to mine, and I could have greatly increased my yield per minute if I had used it, and filled up that cargo container in around 60 minutes.  Sometimes with the mission objectives, and the goal I set for a session of EVE, I forget to check out all my options - with math - with a calculator - and then later I learn I could have made the game more enjoyable if I had just taken a minute to run some numbers.  

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Mining on Security Missions

When you do Security missions, there are often fields of asteroids around the mission objectives.  Even though I've found out that mission running is the quickest way of making money (ISK), especially when there are a lot of loot items, if you need to mine anyway, for example to use the refined ore to make your own ships and modules,then using those mission coordinates to mine makes some good sense. 

Why? sometimes the asteroids are rare ores, usually not found in high security (high sec) space. But the main reason is that because you are virtually alone except for some Non Player Character (NPC) "rats" every 20 minutes or so, there is no danger from getting your ore stolen by a can flipper thief.  In Hi Sec space, people that try to steal ore out of a jettisoned cargo container (jetcan), which is called "can flipping" aren't doing it for the value of the ore.  They want to provoke you into attacking them, so if they fight back and destroy your ship, they get a "kill", and the chance to loot whatever weapons or enhancements you've made to your boat. They can do this "legally" because you fired the first shot.  While thievery lets you attack without CONCORD intervention, there's a good chance that the offender has played the game a lot longer, or is a member of a corps that has, and if you retaliate, you have a good chance of losing the battle. This "griefing" in High Sec is a pastime for some EVE players, like how a cat will "play" with a mouse or lizard.  

It's easy to say "don't take it personally" to you or the poor lizard, but then there's a reason they call it griefing.  It's not a fair fight, and there's a good reason that the game masters of EVE have forbidden can flipping in Rookie Systems.  You can petition them to ban the thief, which means he'll lose his whole character and his assets, and even worse, his skills and time.  

When I get a Security Mission that leads to an asteroid field, I figure out if the amount and type of ore will be worth my time to mine.  And then I look at the bonus reward that the station agent will give me if I complete the mission within a certain time.  The ore usually outweighs that bonus amount.  By millions and millions. 

After 6 weeks of playing, if I'm lucky I can make about a million ISK an hour from doing Security I missions, but if I combine that with mining, I can clear close to 5 million an hour with a cruiser level ship and a hauler.  I expect that will increase as I get better ships with better equipment, and move on to Level II missions.  But in EVE nothing's really free, since your time is money so to speak, and this wouldn't have been profitable two weeks ago when my ships were much smaller.

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"Bearbarin"?

   There's a lot of information on the web for Rookies or Noobs about how to play EVE Online. I'd like to keep links to some of those resources together on this blog, and to give you some hints and tricks that I've discovered that might be of help to you.  I thought I might as well blog a little when I'm doing repetitive tasks like mining. I'll be using tags on my posts, because it makes it easier to sort subjects.  The character Bearbarin was named after the first man in space - Yuri Gagarin.  Bearbarin is not my prime EVE character, it's an alternate character (alt).  

My main, original character is nearly 6 weeks old now.  A real baby by EVE standards. A friend of mine who plays Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), like World of Warcraft and Diablo, suggested EVE to me, and I became hooked.  I remember watching TV coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing when I was 6 years old, and outer space and science fiction have fascinated me ever since.  When I was a kid, I dreamed of visiting other planets, and while the science of EVE is probably more magical than feasible (warp drives, antimatter, tractor beams, etc.) , it still is a game that rewards rational and critical thinking, and maybe some kid who plays EVE today will someday set foot on Mars.