Badger Appeal

I just discovered the purpose of Badgers: hauling stuff. Just the other day I was wondering how I would change stations…I’m basically done with the opportunities in my current system and the mining there is pretty generic, so my eye is starting to wander towards greener pastures. But! I have all this stuff! Including a half-dozen ships now. Yeah. One of those ships is a Badger. I just loaded my beginner Ibis, a Bantam, all my ore and refined minerals, and all my captured equipment into the Badger.

So, now that I know how to get there, where should I go?

Wandering

I finally managed a bit more EVE time last night, so I decided to polish off the last of the mining tutorial, which involved collecting some materials to manufacture a Bantam.  I had plenty of tritanium, pyerite, mexallon, and nocxium from some my other mining trips, but had not refined anything that had given me zydrine or isogen yet.  I did a bit of poking around and found this handy cheatsheet of ore products and scrawled a few notes on the pad of paper on my desk.  Kernite, omber, jaspet… hm… I also wrote down the systems where I might find these things.  Having spent most of my time in Caldari space, I could see it was time to do some wandering away from home.

I opened up my map of the universe and found… dots!  *cleans glasses* To make a very long story short, I then spent the better part of an hour warping around to systems that seemed like they matched what I was looking for in terms of regional sovereignty and security.  At each hub, I’d travel out to the asteroid belts and either find nothing or more veldspar and scordite.  Great.  I kept an eye on Rookie Chat and someone else happened to ask about the empty asteroid fields.  One of the more experienced folks responded that some of the asteroid fields got mined out pretty quickly, so it was important to time your mining missions carefully or find asteroid belts off the beaten path.

I persisted.  I played with autopilot a bit and warped to other systems while I did a bit more searching on the internet.  I looked for maps and clues to where I might find these other ore types, but didn’t find much more info than what was offered on that cheat sheet.  It does make sense — all EVE players share the same server, so why would they divulge their mining secrets to their competitors?  I saw a player say specifically, “oh yes, I’ve got a steady kernite source, but I’m not telling where it is!”  It truly is another layer of PVP.  My wandering continued.

Warp. Jump. Warp. Veldspar. Warp. Veldspar. Warp. Scordite. Warp. Jump. Lather. Rinse. Repeat…. Kernite!  Finally, I found some damn kernite.  I mined as much as I could carry (aggression countdown?) and then made my way to the nearest station to refine that bastard.  Turned out I didn’t have enough kernite to refine.  NoooO!  It was nearly midnight, so I checked the market and found some that was relatively cheap two jumps away.  I traveled there, topped off the stack, and then refined it.  This gave me more than enough isogen for my Bantam, but I’d still need to find a source of zydrine.  Screw it, it’s late, I thought, and harvested some from the market.

I hauled everything back to my home station and queued up production of the ship to complete the mission.  It turned out that the assembly lines (or whatever they are) were full and the soonest I could begin production was two hours.  I definitely wouldn’t be completing this one within the time frame… heh…

So, I completed the mission this morning over breakfast.  I now have a Badger that I can’t fly yet, but I may start working toward that next.  I also know where to find kernite.

Where in New Eden is Wara?

At the time of this writing, Vidar Hannu is at the Todaki VI – Moon I station, the School for Applied Knowledge. Come say hello! I might even figure out how to respond one of these days.

I’ve gone through the introductory mining missions — Making Mountains Out of Molehills — and have a lovely ship that I can’t use yet (a Badger, I believe). At least, I can’t use it until I cough up the money and pay for the full version of the game, so I can learn the training skill to fly it, which is sitting in the station waiting for me. Anyway, I’m still enjoying mining with the Bantam, so no huge hurry.

I’ve also started the combat and …business? tutorial series — Cash Flow for Capsuleers and Balancing the Books. I don’t have much of interest to say about those, yet, since I’ve just started, but I love the different feel of the ships used in the mining series and the combat series. Since I started with the mining series, I got used to flying a Bantam around. When I did the first combat mission in the Condor? Holy crap, was that ever fast! I kept crashing into (and bumping off of) the wrecks, since I knew how far away I had to turn off the engines in the other ship. Such fun!

Podcast Goodness

In a way that’s incredibly timely, the latest episode of the Van Hemlock podcast includes an excellent description of What EVE Is. Fan-freaking-tastically well done and provides an excellent idea of what to expect as a newbie in EVE. It was so kind of them to record this, just as we need to hear it. What? You don’t think that’s why they recorded that one now?

Actually, the more I think of it, they may have made this blog redundant. Bastards!

Manufacturing for Maroons

Last night I started the mining tutorial and, as you might suspect, noobishness abounded.

I was doing the mission that teaches you the basics of manufacturing.  I was given a blueprint and told to make two afterburners using some of the materials I’d mined and refined.  Great!  I love crafting!  I made the items and in admiring my handiwork, wondered if I could fit afterburners to my painfully slow mining ship.  I dragged one of them into the slot and yes indeedy: it fit.  So, I dragged the item back into my inventory and opened the mission window.  Despite having the two afterburners, the mission was not complete.  Um…

The first thing I tried to do was restack the afterburners.  When it told me the items were not stackable, I realized what I had done.  In WoW terms, I’d essentially used a bind-on-equip item, so I could no longer pass it to anyone else, including the agent who had given me the mission.  /facepalm.  Oh well, I could just make another afterburner, right?  I had plenty of materials from mining left over.  I opened the manufacturing window and tried to access my blueprints.  There were none available.  DOH.

I asked in the rookie chat whether blueprints were actually learned (and remembered) and a helpful person explained the different kinds of blueprints.  I had evidently used up the BPC from the mission, so wouldn’t be able to make another afterburner unless I got another blueprint.  I checked the market and found someone selling afterburners at a reasonable price about four jumps away, so I decided to do that instead.  It seems the afterburner was slightly overpriced, but it was the lowest price in the region, so I just bought it anyway.  The money means little to me at this point.

Sheesh. It’s not that the missions are hard, it’s just that there’s so much that’s not intuitive about the game yet.  I can’t expect the tutorials to tell me everything — I realize there is just far too much to know.  It’s mistakes like these that tend to slow me down though.  I do figure things out eventually, but man, I sure feel silly…

What a maroon!

Humble Beginnings

About a week ago, I took the plunge and started the 21-day trial for EVE Online.  I’d known about the game for a long time, but it never particularly appealed to me.  It seemed too dense, too hardcore, and too time-consuming, especially given how much I had invested in my other MMO, World of Warcraft.  I still love playing WoW, but I generally feel myself reaching the “mastery” phase (at least for what I have the resources to accomplish) and, if possible, I’d like to avoid the dreaded phase that comes after that. Starting a new game seemed like a great solution and because EVE is so different from WoW, it seemed like the perfect choice.

As with WoW and many of my hobbies from the past, I wanted a blog to keep a record of the experience.  I didn’t have the foresight to make my WoW blog a general gaming blog, so I decided to make a new one here.  I invited my friend Wara to join me because he, too, recently started playing EVE.  He’s been a good friend for many years and is always a willing partner-in-crime.  Neither of us have time for a totally new blog, but we do enjoy writing about our experiences, so it seemed a natural thing to start a blog together as we undertake this next journey in gaming together.

And, just as a warning, there’s probably going to be a fair amount of cluelessness here for a while.  The learning curve in EVE is a notoriously steep one.  Help, advice, and resources are all appreciated as we get our footing.  For example, a day or so ago we were lamenting the dearth of EVE podcasts…

Wara: and you’re right about the lack of EVE podcasts…we’ll just have to start our own

me: that would be awesome:  “how the *^&# do you equip ammunition?”  -silence-

Wara: “um…there’s ammunition?”

me: heheh, the eve lolcast

I think he was joking, but I had spent about 20 minutes the day before trying to figure out how to equip ammunition.  Yes, indeed, we are noobs.  Noobs in Space!