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First day in our hole

Two nights ago (Thursday on Friday), we officially moved into our own little wormhole. It took a while to anchor and online the tower, to set up the guns etc, but we finished around 2am. So all in all, a good night.

So yesterday was our official first day in our own little hole in space, our own little C2. It was a good day, a fun day, and content was had.

Not only, did we get our first official Corporation kills in the hole, we laughed a bit, and we made some ISK doing sites.

My little PvE Tengu

My little PvE Tengu, she’s a beast

I’m not sure if we’re going to top yesterday, I’m pretty sure we hit a peak there somewhere. That was one of the jokes that was made on TeamSpeak.

It started out, when logging in, with seeing a little Cheetah on scan. Nothing special, I tried tracking him down and failed there. When I was checking out one of our statics I noticed him warping back to the wormhole and off he went.

That could have been our first target, but alas, that didn’t happen. A few minutes later I noticed a Venture on scan. The same guy, had reshipped to a Venture, he was coming to mine our gas! Targets!

I told my friend and we were getting ready, I’m 90% sure that he wasn’t checking out D-scan because he must have seen us reship into a bomber etc (Literally only cloaky ship I got in there atm that isn’t a scanner)

I tracked him to a gas site and I was slowlboating my way to him cloaked. However, my friend couldn’t curb his enthusiasm and he warped to me, in his Heretic, while I was still 40km off the venture. The plan was for me the scram him, so we could also catch his pod with the bubbler. Unfortunately, he uncloaked me and I guess the guy was paying a bit attention because warped off into the sunset, never to be seen again. We miserably failed on scoring our first target. I will not let him down for this.

Half an hour later, while we were scanning down our sites, I suddenly noticed an Astero on scan. This guy didn’t rename his ship to something else so I could check out his Zkillboard, he already lost an Astero once, maybe we could let him lose another one.

Queue me training to D-scan his position, only to realize he was in a signature that we hadn’t scanned down since it arrived about 5 minute earlier. Good job on us there.

My friend took out his combat probes, and well, the Astero wasn’t paying attention to d-scan because he could pin him down. We warped in our cloakies to the site, and 26km from the Astero….

My friend de-cloaked due to one of the collideable objects in the site. The Astero noticed us, and warped off. Talk about anti-climax right?

Again, will not let him live that one down.

As you can imagine, I thought that would be it, the Astero wouldn’t come back. I was wrong. Imagine my surprise when 10 minutes later the same guy popped up on D-scan. He was in a relic site, and this time, we did have it scanned down.

I warped to the site, stayed away from the collideable objects and when I was 20clicks off, I de-cloaked, scrammed him, and my friend de-cloaked his ship and then warped in his Herritic.

Turns out, bombers aren’t that good to kill frigates. It took us ages, but, we got him, and the bubble made sure his pod didn’t escape.

I’m 99% sure that if he took out his drones, he could have killed both our bombers. Those things had no tank. But I’m also pretty sure that he panicked and just wanted to try and get away from us.

First kill! Yay us!

We had a static not far from Jita, which we wanted to use to bring in some more ships. And while my friend activated the hole on his Occator, he had travel control happen to him, and after that a static close.

I warped to the hole to see if it was still there, it wasn’t. There was however, a Heron, which either just got in, or wanted to go back to high sec and had the wormhole collapse right in front of him.

I don’t think he saw it coming, he definitely didn’t see me coming. I scrammed him, told him I’d get him home and then let our newest hole-mate warp in on his drake to get in on the kill.

Turns out the pod was worth about 200m. In a 41m Heron, that was an odd choice.

But we got a few kills out of it, I’m super happy with this move, and definitely looking forward to what else might happen.

Stay tuned o7

Round two, start.. Preparing

Little over a year ago, me and a friend of mine tried to settle in a C4 wormhole. We failed, but it was fun.

In the past few days we got to talking again. He had joined a C5 corporation but still felt the itch to settle in a lower class one. Which brings us to yours truly.

I’m enjoying myself in the Null sec corporation I’m in, however, I have other alts. Alts without a purpose, they are just sitting in shiny ships in Jita or Amarr or whatever other system I logged them out in last.

Which brings us to another little plan that has been forming up and coming to closure. We’re going to try out another wormhole adventure. But this time! We won’t be going into a C4, no we’ll be settling in either a C3 or a C2. Since that’s a bit easier to run sites in solo without having to scan more exits, pay a LOT more attention etc. etc.

We’re currently busy scanning down holes, checking if there’s any activity in them, checking out the planets etc. etc.

Once we find a hole to live in, the move will start. I’m looking forward to starting another adventure in w-space. I have tried before, I have failed, but it was a lot of fun and that’s what matters. And if we can make some more ISK in the process, well, that’s even better isn’t it.

While doing all this I’m also training up an alt as a jump freighter pilot. This was done with the idea that it would make things easier for me to start a little Null sec trading hub in my new home system.

This freighter pilot will also be used as a bit of a service for the wormhole, so two birds, one stone kind of thing.

I just need to learn how it works, but I’ve got Singularity for that, once the skills are trained at least.

Now to figure out if I want to keep producing T2 stuff or if I’m going to be giving up on that. The profit on some of the stuff I made has literally dropped 80% in the past few months, on some things even going as far that the price to sell it, is the same price as the resource cost. Something I’m used to when talking about ships but never about components.

We’ll see what happens, the good thing is, I still have a few other sources of income and I just keep expanding my little empire.

Stay tuned o7

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Learning to scan

Every day that you learn something new, is a day that’s not wasted. Or so I’ve been told.

Today I learned about Ghost Sites, more specifically, I learned that they can get me killed. How you ask? Well, one of them got me killed.

A long time ago I bought myself an Astero, this was to be a ship I could use to scan, and still defend myself in. I never really used it much until yesterday, when I decided to scan our pipe a bit, looking for wormholes and meanwhile doing relic and data sites.

I was doing ok. It was the first time I ever did sites so I was learning how the mini game works and all that. And as you might have read in previous posts, scanning something down takes me a while. So time was passing by rather nicely since it took me ages to pinpoint the signatures.

After a few relic sites I found a data site, little did I know it was a Ghost one. Those of you that know what Ghost sites do, already know what obviously happened to me.

Thos that, like me, have no idea what Ghost sites are all about, well. As it turns out, when you warp into a ghost site, a hidden timer starts. When it runs out, rats will come, and shoot everything in the site, and warp out again. I did not know this. So I’m just hacking the first cache, clicking the nodes, when all of a sudden I see a warp scramble icon popping up.

I checked local, wondering what the hell was happening, there was nothing there, I switched through my tabs to see if there were rats, didn’t see any of them. By this time I was in 50% shield, something was shooting me and I had no idea what.

By the time I realised I must have missed something, or done something wrong, the tower next to me blew up. And all of a sudden I’m in a pod.

I quickly went back to my home base, reshipped and went back for my own wreck. There was 60m ISK of loot in there so I could recupurate some of my loss.

It’s funny because I let zKillboard use my api to automatically update deaths and kills. And for some reason the tower blowing up counted as something I did to myself, I guess it sorta is. So now I have a kill/loss of myself on there.

I now know better and will keep my eye out for the site name. I’d rather not lose another ship to my ignorance.

My first ever

Yesterday was a good day and a bad day. Bad, since I lost another ship. My fourth, well fifth, since moving to null. Which, I guess isn’t all that much if you look at it.

Good, because I had my first ever solo kill. Yay! And it was a bit of an accidental one too.

I’m building up a little moon goo empire in Null, meaning that currently I have 6 towers working for me. Which is nice since it’s some sort of passive income generation like PI. Only thing I need to do is make sure that there’s no people stealing it, and that it’s fueled/emptied on a monthly basis.

I currently try it on a bi-weekly basis because I can. And means just a little less ISK in the Occator.

So, while getting my monthly supply of fuel, I was scouting for my hauler and saw a Helios at 10km from the gate. I figured that he would warp off but that did not happen, so I locked the Helios, burned towards him and started shooting. I can only guess that they were AFK, I didn’t even have a scram fitted. But I don’t care, I got a kill! Also got the pod but that one was worthless.

About 10 minutes before I had gotten the pod of someone whose ship was just destroyed by someone in the alliance. So another lucky kill there.

After the fuel run I was asked to join on a quick little roam. I was planning on going to bed early, but, that didn’t really happen.

So I reshipped to my Cynabal Mark II and went on my way to the wormhole we were going to use to get to a more target rich environment.

It started of nicely with two Cerberus, a Vexor and Caracal kills. When we did that and jumped around the systems some more they decided to try and stop us, getting together a little 12 man fleet. We jumped on an Armageddon but when going to the next system they were waiting on us. There were only 6 of us so we couldn’t handle that…yet.

We went back to our own system, called in some more people and decided to see if we could get them to make a fleet to stop us again. On paper we would do pretty well, but unfortunately one of our logi pilots was pretty new at doing what he was supposed to do and was out of rep range for most of us when the fight started. Partly due to miscommunication and just not paying enough attention.

Suffice to say that I lost Cynabal Mark II. But not to worry, Mark III is ready for action.

I won the ISK war last night, killing more than I lost, so I’m happy.

Stay tuned o7

 

And it continues

A few days ago I made a post about technical difficulties. Well, it’s still going on and I’m still trying to fix them.

I’m currently at a bit of a loss and wish I just bought the domain name instead of hosting too. But unfortunately it cannot be helped now and I need to go on and figure out what on earth is making the site so damn slow.

I made a little change to my RSS feed, I signed it with feedburner, this in order to purge all the requests that came through from it and they should now be going through feedburner.

It can be found at http://feeds.feedburner.com/AlwaysaNoob

Other than that I’m checking out logs, playing with my wordpress plugins and everything to try and determine where the error is. Luckily the people from the hosting company have been very patient with me and my questions towards them. Problem about not hosting it on my own servers means that I can’t access all logs so I need to forward my remarks to them. I honestly thought I fixed it on saturday but alas, no such thing.

What I did notice, after checking out the stats is that there seems to be a huge influx of visitors in the past few months. Although I honestly think that there must be a mistake here.

According to the providor’s stats, over 20k unique visitors checked out my site in December. Now, this would be an awesome and amazing thing. IF not for the fact that the months before that, only 150 people checked it out. And I very much doubt that there’s even over 1000 people reading this stuff.

I know it can be interesting to read, but honestly, with that many viewers I’d expect more comments!

It does seem that most of the views came from the /feed page. Hence another reason to use feedburner, that way I can analyze it too.

But if you’re here, feel free to say hi! I love knowing that people read my ramblings. I’ve gotten mails ingame too in the past, don’t be shy, say hi 😉

I apologize if the slowness effects your reading pleasure, I assure you that I am not liking it one bit either.

Stay tuned o7

Lost a ship

I lost a Cynabal the other day.

We had a wormhole close to home, that led us all the way out to Venal. So we decided to go roam over there, find us some targets. The system we came in at was currently experiencing an incursion. So, there were incursion rats here. Remember this, this will be important later on in the story.

There were about 13 of us, Cynabals, Vexor Navy Issue, Sabre, etc. So we were a small group, out looking for targets.

Going from Venal to Deklein we came into Goonswarm territory and we killed a few Goons. Ishtars were killed, capsules were destroyed. All in all, we did okay.

It was about time to go back home, it was starting to get late and turns out that near our home system someone had undocked his Nightmare. So we wanted to go kill him. Onwards, back to the wormhole!

Now, as you may, or may not know. Incursion rats have warp scramblers. I did not know this, neither did some of my fleet mates. So as we were chugging back towards the wormhole some of us went faster than others. I was one of them.

While being at the front of the fleet is nice for catching things, it’s not nice when you get caught. So imagine my surprise when I suddenly see a warp scrambler lighting up my UI. And slowly, but surely, my shields were dropping. Meanwhile I heard someone on TS say that they died to the rats.

In the end, 4 of us died to rats. None of us got killed by players, and yet some of us had to return in a capsule. This because we didn’t stick together in the end and the rats were able to pick us off.

I learned a valuable lesson yesterday: “Don’t be at the front”

I lost a ship I was having fun with, but I still have 5 others in my hangar. The only real shame is that I lost the killmarks. Guess I’ll just need to go make a few new ones.

At least the Nightmare died too. Although it wasn’t as shiny as we hoped.

Stay tuned o7

Back-end troubles

The one problem about deciding that you’ve outgrown the free sites like blogger or wordpress.com, is that once you decide you want to create your own little site and have your own hosting. You’re going to run into issues while playing around with certain things.

The past two days I’ve noticed a certain slowness on my site. I’m not sure if this was new or already existing but turns out that one of the plugins I use/used was causing for way too many I/O requests due to which my hosting decided to throttle back my usage. Yay, shared hosting and all that.

I think and hope that I fixed it, took me a few hours of debugging something I know nothing about, so there’s that.

We’ll see what happens.

stay tuned

o7

So much to do, so little time

The wheels of my inner mind have been working overtime in the past few days on what I will be doing in EvE the coming weeks. Not because I’m bored and have nothing to do, no, it’s the exact opposite. I have no idea where to start this time.

Since joining the corporation I currently fly with I finally have things to do. I’m finally going out on roams, plan on new things etc etc.

I lost a ship the other day. The third one in a few weeks. And I don’t mind as much as I used to when losing something. Why? Because I’m having fun that’s why!

And that’s the whole point isn’t it, you’re supposed to have fun flying the ships you fly, instead of worrying about losing them. I’m starting to finally learn this lesson, it took me a while, and dozens of different corporations but I’m getting there.

Other than roams I’m having one of my alts train for jump freighters. The one thing I don’t like about the place I currently live in is the lack of a market. So I decided to finally put all of my liquid ISK to use and set up a market over there. Or at least try to.

I just need to figure out which items to stock. I think I’ll start with the corporation doctrines and work my way up from there. I already have a bunch of buy orders in place in Jita. Now I just need to figure out the logistics of the place.

I’ve also set up my PI in one of the systems and was lucky enough to recruit a few people into shooting down the Interbus POCO’s still left in the system. I honestly don’t get why these guys are not doing any PI over there, I found three Plasma planets within our little pipe. So I was confused when I saw the Interbus POCO’s still there. Oh well, I helped them set up new POCO’s, paid for them out of my own pocket and everything. In the long run it’ll be more interesting for me anyhow with a lower tax rate.

And last but not least, I took over a bunch of Moon mining POS’. I have no idea how it works and how much they’re going to make me, or cost me. But it’ll be an interesting little experiment. Although I’m 90% sure that I’ll be making a profit off them once the month is done. Unless someone decides to shoot them down that is.

All of this, happening because I finally decided to make friends instead of staying in my own little corporation. I’m glad I got out of my little bubble.

And I’m curious to what will come next.

Stay tuned o7

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Let’s talk, Planetary Interaction (PI)

Let’s talk about, Planetary Interaction. Bear with me here, this is going to be quite a bit of text but worth it.

For those of you who have no idea what Planetary Interaction (PI) is, you’ll find out here. And even find out a bit on how to set it up.

PI is basically the extraction or reprocessing of materials from planets based in any given system. You can do it in High, Low and Null sec.

High Security planets are slightly worse for extracting materials but if you feel like setting up a factory planet (we’ll get there) it’s perfect.

The extracted and processed materials are mostly used in the creation of T2 items or fuel. Meaning that the items you extract and process, are worth quite a bit of ISK on the market.

In order to start with PI I urge you to get the following skills: Command Center Upgrades (Get it to lvl 4, your command center needs to be upgraded in order to get more buildings on your planet), Interplanetary Consolidation (Each level in this means one extra planet. At 3 you have 4 planets, at 4 you have 5 planets and at 5 you can have 6) and remote sensing (this is so you can check out the goods on the planets from a few light years away).

The main reason people do this, is to make a passive amount of ISK each month. Why passive? Well because you need to do a minimal amount of effort for a few hundred million ISK a month.
In general all you would need to do is set up your planets (20 minutes, ish) and afterwards come back to them every other day, press a few buttons (not more than 5 minutes) and be on your way again. And in the end you go get your materials (30-60 minutes) and get them to a market hub for sale.

Lava? I'm not afraid of lava!

Lava? I’m not afraid of lava!

Now! On to the good part. Setting up your planet.

I’m not saying that I know much about correct set ups or even what works well and what doesn’t. I’m just going to show you how mine are set-up. I’m sure that there are things I can improve upon and if you have any comments, feel free to drop them below, I’d be happy to discuss and improve upon what I’m doing now.

The first thing you need to do, is decide in which system you want to start your PI endeavours. Do you want to do it in your home system, or do you have a system your industry is based in? Well, click on the name and check which planets are there. You will see all different types of planets (Barren, Temperate, Storm, Lava…) every planet has a different kind of materials that can be extracted from them.

To know what you can do with the planets in your system, head over to http://eveplanets.com/ this site allows you to click on a planet, and it’ll tell you what can be extracted/created here.

Resources are split up into 4 groups (T1, T2, T3 and T4) T1 are the basic materials, the ones you extract directly from the planet. T2 and higher are created from the other materials. T2 uses T1 materials, T3 uses T2 materials and T4 uses T3. Easy right? Right.

In this example I will be using a Barren planet. And on it I will be creating Mechanical parts. These sell in Jita for about 10 000 ISK each at the time of writing. My planets can create 240 parts a day. Meaning that at the end of the month I have 288mill (4 planets * 240 parts * 30 days * 10 000 ISK). Not bad for only a bit of work right? Right.

Please not, that if you want to set up a planet, you need a command centre in your inventory, in my example it will be the Barren Command Centre.

In order to create Mechanical Parts, you need to extract Base and Noble metals from a planet. Go to the planetary overview and press scan. Press the base metal options and you’ll see a bunch of green and red, maybe white on the planet. These are the concentrations of the metals. Now, press Noble metals. You’ll see the same thing. What you need to do, is to find a spot, with Base and Noble metals concentrated near each other. Or at least near enough. Seeing as you will need to put an extractor on each. Place your command centre around here somewhere, I’ve been told that your command centre doesn’t need to be too close by but, just put it there, better safe than sorry.

Scanning a barren planet for Noble metals

Scanning a barren planet for Noble metals

Once this is done we can start with the extractors, click on extractor control unit, and set one at the edge of each concentration. Once you click on it, you can assign Head Units. Click on the metal of which the concentration you picked, and place four of them on it (check my below example if you wonder what I mean with this.) Once this is done, check the extraction size. I put mine on 3 days of extracting. Make sure that the areas don’t touch, you get a slight penalty when they do. Once this is done, do the same for noble metals.

You’ve just started extracting. The next problem to tackle is sending the good around your planet.

What I do is make a storage facility, send everything there, and from there on out send things to the different facilities. That way you have one local point on your planet that gets used for storage.

Set your storage facility, press control, click it and then click your extractor. You’ve just made your first link. These are used to send goods from one facility to the next. You can send your products by clicking your extractor, and the second icon (products). You’ll see that your metals aren’t routed yet, so click create route, press your facility and create route again. Now every single cycle it will get send to your storage facility.

Next, place a basic industry facility near your storage unit and link it with the unit. These are needed to create the reactive/precious metals. Click on it, press schematic and scroll down for the correct one (reactive or precious). Make sure to link up your facility once more. And make a route for the product created.

You also need to send the T1 product to this facility, so go to your storage facility, click on routes (4th icon) and make a route with your noble/base metals to your factories. There we go, you have just started your creation of T2 material.

One more and we’re almost good to go.

The last one works the same as the Basic facility. Put down an advanced facility, link it up, press the schematic and make sure they’re linked to your storage facility, set up routes and you’re now making mechanical parts (once the first few cycles have completed from your basic facilities).

In order to get your products off planet, you will need a space port. This is the last link in your chain. Put down a space port, link it with your last factories or storage facility, and set up a route for your mechanical parts to the space port.

PI extraction barren planet

Once a month, you will be going to the customs office of the planet, and transfer everything in your space port to it. Which you can then drag into your cargo bay.

Not, that you can transfer your materials from planet to POCO without being near the customs office, you just have to be in the same system. So make sure that you’re safe until you go grab it. Don’t blame me for dying 😉

As a little added extra, you can also make a factory planet. This usually means that you import the T1 or T2 materials to the POCO and from there on make it into T2/T3/T4. This is what high-sec planets are usually used for. Buy your T1/T2 in your local hub, and process it for a nice little profit!

Factories!

Factories!

I hope this was somewhat enlightening for you my dear reader. And may you make a nice little profit from whichever planet you decide on.

If you still have no idea, or want to learn more, there are some pretty good videos about PI on YouTube that can help you out too.

Stay tuned o7

Happy New Year and all that!

First of all, I’d like to wish you all a happy new year and that hopefully it will be a good one.

Normally people do resolutions, I decided to skip those this year, I don’t hold myself to it anyhow. I might go back and see if I can find the ones I made last year though, see if I actually did anything that was on that list.

I’ve spent the last few days eating way too much food. Christmas party, Christmas leftovers, some more Christmas stuff at family, New Year’s dinner, after the fireworks some more food etc. etc.

Safe to say that I ate way too much, in too short a span.

But! This is a blog about gaming, and mostly about EvE since I’ve been playing more and more of it the past few weeks.

I joined a Null sec corporation two weeks ago and have been slowly learning my way around null, going on roam, getting to know them and trying to figure out things to do when not on a roam.

The one thing I hate about null is the fact that every time I think about buying something, I can’t. Because there’s no market here, at all. Most people have the stuff they need in their hangars so the newcomers are a bit fucked from time to time. Which means that I need to use the corporation’s hauling service to get stuff from Jita to the home base. But unfortunately that still means I need to wait until someone does the hauling.

This made me think about maybe making a market there myself. It’s not impossible but without no knowledge of what other people might need, it could be a bit hard. I might just grab a whole bunch of the doctrines and put them on contract with a slight profit. Should get me some ISK at the very least. But I can’t do that with my combat alt, meaning I should get one of my traders over here etc. etc. We’ll see.

For some reason nobody here does PI. It confused me, since PI is such a great way to make passive income, or even supply your own things when you make T2’s. So I’m looking into it too. There’s still Interbus POCO’s around, they’re easy to destroy and claim.

Other than that, roams! And plenty of them. I’m finally having things to do, and as you can see, plenty of things I still need to work out. The New Year is off to a good start.

 

Stay tuned o7