Jump On Contact

For every wonderful moment in EVE, there’s a lot of monotony. You can think of EVE as being a lot like life — there are things you really enjoy doing, things you do to pay the bills (and fund your fun), and there are chores.

Today, I’m doing the third category. It’s packing time.

I’ve spent about nine months in EVE, on and off, and I’m joining up with a corporation that lives in a different part of space, and I have seven days to move all my assets I want to bring with me to a rallying point at the edge of Empire space.

It’s kind of astonishing how much junk I have strewn around the galaxy. A quick skim of my asset list shows stuff in probably 40 different stations. There are thousands of these stations in EVE, and each one has, effectively, a storage hangar with my name on it.

Looking through these asset lists reveals a lot about what I was doing at these stations. At Rens VI, there’s about a million credits worth of miniature electronics, remnants of a side career in trading commodities. I made money looking for items that I could get cheaply in one part of the galaxy and sell for more in another part. I must have bought these and forgotten to move them to a place where I could sell them. There’s lots of this stuff around the galaxy – ideas I had to make money that didn’t pan out fast enough and I was left holding the bag.

Another station has what amounts to space dust – left-over bits of ore from a mining operation. Most systems in EVE have asteroid belts that contain a bunch of different kinds of asteroids. With the right ship and the right equipment, you can extract ore from these asteroids. Take the ore to the right kind of station and you can get the ore refined into minerals. Those minerals, in turn, can be sold or used for manufacturing items that can in turn be sold or saved. It was good money for a while (and I could do it pretty much with my eyes closed), but it was going to be quite a while for my character to learn the skills to be effective at it. The bits left over from this processes were the remainders from refining – small amounts of ore that were too small to be refined into something else.

My most recent way to make money was running missions. I would go ask a character in the world for a job to do, and she would tell me to go somewhere, kill some enemy ships, and come back for a reward. After I blew up a ship, I could go look and see what was inside – often there would be an item of some sort that I could take with me. I’ve accumulated these items in my hangar. Some of them are worth a lot of money, most of them are worth nothing. Figuring out which is which is trickier than it sounds, and the subject of a whole other post.

If I really cared about squeezing every drop out of these items I could spend a week running around collecting this stuff and selling it off to someone who can make good use of it. But most of this stuff is from my inefficient youth as an EVE player. When you start out, you don’t have any good ways to earn lots of money quickly. I might make 200k ISK on a good day in the first month of playing. Now, I can easily make 10-15M ISK/hour running missions, so the opportunity costs of picking up a few hundred thousand credits worth of items here and there just aren’t worth it. I’ve moved into a different league, financially, so I’m going to leave almost all of these items to collect virtual dust forever.

I can’t ignore my fleet of ships, though. I have lots of different ships to do lots of different kinds of things in EVE, and I want to bring most of them with me. Moving ships around the galaxy is much harder than moving items. Ships are really big. It’s like trying to put a car inside your moving van – it takes a much bigger kind of ship than I own to move anything but the smallest kind of ships: frigates. All my larger sized ships–cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships–I’m going to have to fly myself, one jump at a time. It’s tedious work, but it becomes a kind of lifestyle. You can set a destination and your ship will auto-pilot its way there. It’s slow way to travel, but you’ll get there eventually, and you can do other things while you wait. This is how EVE starts to pervade your life; you start viewing chores around the house as things that will be easy to do while you’re waiting for something to happen in EVE.

I know it seems kind of stupid to play a game where you have to spend hours moving your virtual space ships around the galaxy. Like a lot of the type 2 and type 3 tasks in EVE I’m always a little embarrassed to tell people what I spent my evening doing. Why do this kind of tedious work when I could be doing something that’s straight-up fun? It’s not a question I can answer now, but it’s something I’ll touch on in future articles. EVE is satisfying in a bunch of hard to explain ways, and part of writing all this out is my own quest to better understand what it is that makes it so compelling, even when I’m staring at the engines of a freighter for hours.