CrazyKinux's Musings

The Safe Spot episode guide: all episodes so far!

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000

One of us has spent 18 years living in New Eden. The other came back after a long absence and still has questions. I co-host The Safe Spot with Rixx Javix, and this is the place to find every episode, newest first. Pick a topic, read the full post, or jump straight into the conversation on your preferred platform. I’ll keep this list updated as new episodes go live.

Episode 16: Rixx Javix's 18 Years in EVE Online

Rixx looks back on 18 years in New Eden, from the first spaceship his son showed him to building Stay Frosty. I bring along a few lessons from my latest hauling adventures, and we talk about the people and risks that keep us undocking.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 15: The Mike Azariah Interview

Mike Azariah joins us to talk early EVE blogging, the Magic School Bus, his years on the CSM, and why helping another player can matter more than any amount of ISK.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 14: The AI Debate

Rixx and I tackle AI in creative work and in EVE, from the line between assisted and generated content to Aura Guidance, Fenris Creations, and the parts of New Eden we don't want to lose.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 13: Jim Halescott

Jim Halescott takes us inside his enormous highsec business, from thousands of characters to a would-be network of convenience stores. We get into markets, industry, community, and making your own career in EVE.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 12: Winning in EVE

Can you win a game that never ends? After a summer break, Rixx and I talk about piracy, loss, friendship, and the different ways players decide what counts as a win.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 11: Summer Rules

A summer catch-up turns into a conversation about EVE's unwritten rules. We also talk corp changes, returning to PvP, and why the game still works when those underlying principles hold.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 10: Black Rise Regional News

For our tenth episode, we welcome Burn of Black Rise Regional News. He tells us how a faction warfare pilot became a militia diplomat and the person behind New Eden's own regional newspaper.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 9: Featuring Oz

Our first guest, Oz, joins us to talk EVE's economy, market trading, his Oz Report, and what he learned from serving on the CSM. I came prepared with too many questions; Rixx came ready to roam.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 8: Our EVE Fanfest 2026 Reaction

Our immediate reaction to EVE Fanfest 2026: Rixx's Polaris Award, Cradle of War, the Google DeepMind conversation, Vanguard, Frontier, and what we're keen to try for ourselves.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 7: Pearl Abyss & Fanfest

Pearl Abyss's sale of CCP gives us plenty to talk about before Fanfest. We also revisit past Fanfests, look at the Faction Warfare Yearbook, and trade a few hard-earned PvP lessons.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 6: Exordium

Exordium's proposed PvP-free starter region puts the new player experience under the microscope. Can a safer place to learn prepare pilots for the EVE they'll eventually undock into? We also recap the Frigate Free-For-All.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 5: Bad Patch

A patch upends my usual play loop while Rixx has been busy finding fights. We get into ship balance, Pochven, blockade runners, and why the pilot who just destroyed you might be the best teacher you have.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 4: FF4A & Beyond

Stay Frosty's Frigate Free-For-All takes centre stage. I recount a nerve-racking lowsec hauling trip, and Rixx shares practical advice for surviving gate camps and the moments when a plan falls apart.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Episode 3: More Questions

I bring my returning-player questions to Rixx: where to make a home, what to do with assets scattered across New Eden, how to set up an overview, and when you're actually ready for PvP.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify (show)

Episode 2: The Depths of EVE Online

I'm rediscovering how deep EVE goes, and Rixx tells the story of his path into lowsec piracy. We wander through exploration, ship skins, Pochven, and why New Eden keeps pulling us back.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify (show)

Episode 1: Why Are We Back?

The first undock for The Safe Spot. Rixx and I talk about why we started a podcast together, what it's like returning to EVE after years away, and why this strange universe still has a hold on us.

Blog post and show notes | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify (show)

What does the leader of EVE's largest coalition actually do all day?

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:13:54 +0000

I just spent nearly 90 minutes listening to SchadSquatch—Schad—interview The Imperium leader Asher Elias.

There's a lot to unpack.

Asher Elias leads both Goonswarm Federation, as well as The Imperium, EVE Online’s largest coalition of alliances, but his job sounds less like commanding a space armada and more like managing a room full of very smart corporate toddlers. He has to keep directors working together, settle their arguments, and get a huge organization moving when it would rather sit still. That work matters because many Goons have jobs, kids, and perhaps three hours a week to play. The Imperium gives them the logistics, fleets, and people to make those hours count—even if getting everyone pointed in the same direction sometimes requires a little herding. The Imperium works because it lets members with limited time share the load. Someone handles logistics, someone organizes the fleet, and a player with one free evening can still be part of something much bigger.

That’s also why Asher’s answer to “How do you defeat the Imperium?” is so good: “Get 50,000 20 year olds to play this video game.” He reckons the established alliances couldn’t match that kind of free time.

That gap in free time shapes how Asher sees the proposed force projection changes. Making travel and logistics take longer won’t necessarily weaken the big blocs; they have enough people to spread the work around. It may simply eat into the few hours their members have to play, while doing little to make claiming space worthwhile for smaller groups. He’d rather see more affordable, valuable ships out in space, where taking a risk can lead to a fight.

At some point in the interview, Asher goes back to his own first day in Goons at a time he was flying aimlessly around VFK until a player named Ted messaged him and invited him along on a hunt. They spent 45 minutes chasing a target, caught it, and Asher was hooked. He's fairly certain he might have quit without that invitation.

Now he’s trying to make it easier for veterans to do the same for new players.

There’s a lesson here for players, corps and other alliances, and perhaps for Fenris too: sometimes the thing that keeps a player in EVE isn’t a new feature. It’s another player asking them to come along.

Have a listen.

Millions of assets later, I'm finely done. For now...

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 23:50:22 +0000

Last night Arya, Mantis's CEO, and I finished collecting the last of Lonetrek's assets. It was by far the biggest region I had to cover this time around, with an almost ridiculous amount of stuff spread across far too many stations.

That brings this latest run to four completed regions: The Bleak Lands, Devoid, Molden Heath and Lonetrek. Altogether, that meant collecting assets from 153 systems and 501 stations. More than four million items, spread across those regions. Most were small individual items, while others took more than half of my Hecate's 1,700+ cargo hold.

For the last three and a half weeks, whenever real life gave me a little time to play EVE, this was ALL I DID. Fly out. Dock. Load whatever fit. Fly back to a central location in highsec. Unload. Repeat.

Again, and again, and again.

On the surface, it probably sounds like one of the most boring things someone could choose to do in EVE. And yes, parts of it were tedious, I won't lie. But it also became one of the best ways I could have learned more about New Eden as I caught up on my skills as a player (not my character's skills).

Moving slowly through each region gave me time to understand its geography. I started recognizing the routes, the quiet systems, the busy ones and the places where trouble was more likely. The first rule was, obviously, always checking Local—because whether I was alone in a lowsec system or carrying expensive loot through a populated corridor, that one habit determined everything else. I could decide if bookmarked safe spots were needed, change my approach to gates, watch other pilots, and stop treating an uneventful trip through a losec system as a mundane one.

I even lost a Hecate halfway through covering those regions.

None of these lessons arrived all at once. They came one jump, one warp to a station and occasionally one fatal mistake at a time.

Slow and steady isn't the most exciting way to learn EVE, but in my case it worked out fairly well.

Early next year, we get to do it all over again.

Fly safe. o7

Book review: Crawlspace — A slow-burn science-fiction mystery

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 02:57:00 +0000

A quick note before I get into it: I’ve tried to keep this review fairly spoiler-light, but I do touch on the book’s tone, setup and a few elements of how the story unfolds. If you want to go in completely blind, you may want to read the book first.

A lot of the reviews I read mentioned that Adam Christopher’s Crawlspace was too slow and not scary enough for something being sold as science-fiction horror. They were right about one. They were wrong about the other.

I picked it up because the premise sounded interesting—a small crew, an experimental spacecraft, a prototype SLIP drive that takes them nowhere they expected to go. Going in, I was braced for the complaints. But what kept me reading the whole way through wasn't being scared; it was not knowing what the hell was happening.

The real tension comes from active uncertainty.

You're in the crew's headspace—things are going wrong, the ship's systems aren't behaving like they should, and nobody understands what's actually happening around them. Slowly, you realize their assumptions are cracking. I spent the whole book trying to figure out where the story was going, where the actual danger was, and how they were possibly going to escape the situation they were in.

To me, that's not slow, that's simply a compelling reason to move forward.

And yeah, I actually enjoyed all the attention given to the XK72 and the SLIP drive. I like understanding how the machinery works, even if the science is fictional; it's why I loved Andy Weir's The Martian and Project Hail Mary so much. Understanding the ship made it feel like an actual place, not just a set the characters happened to be standing in.

The audiobook was excellent—8 hours 38 minutes, brilliantly narrated by Jennifer Pickens. The narration especially helped during the more technical sections. Switching between the narration during my commute and the paperback when I was home worked surprisingly well.

There are a couple of small things that pulled me out of the story. The repetitions stand out once you notice them: spacesuits fogging up multiple times, similar descriptions of bile rising in someone's throat. Once you mention something, move on. Find something else. Those moments yanked me out of the narrative. Annoying for sure, but not catastropic.

As for the ending—Christopher doesn't hand you closure. Some readers hate that. I understand why. But it also reinforces what makes this book work: that uncertainty never really goes away. It's not the ending a straightforward horror novel would give you.

Crawlspace is solid science-fiction suspense with mystery and some minor horror elements mixed in. If you pick it up expecting Alien or Event Horizon, you'll come away disappointed. But if you're in the mood to puzzle through a situation alongside a crew that's just as lost as you are, it works.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

Where to get Crawlspace:

🎧 Listen to the audiobook on Spotify
📘 Buy the paperback on Amazon.ca
📘 Buy the paperback on Amazon UK
📘 Buy the paperback on Amazon.com

The Safe Spot 16: Rixx Javix's 18 Years in EVE Online

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 03:21:00 +0000

Rixx's been flying around New Eden for 18 years, so this episode turned into a look back at how he got here and why he still undocks. We also get into my recent hauling adventures, the things EVE keeps teaching us, and a few ideas we’re saving for another day.

Table of Contents

Hauling, safe spots, and a possible pirate alt — I share what moving assets across New Eden in my Hecate has taught me about low-sec travel — and why I’m tempted to join one of Rixx’s Stay Frosty fleets.
Rixx’s 18 years in EVE — Rixx takes us from the evening his son showed him a spaceship in a hangar through their early adventures, pirate years, and the beginnings of Stay Frosty.
Does EVE ever really click? — We talk about learning the game a little at a time — including the mechanics that can still catch you out after 18 years.
The people who keep us logging in — From EVE Fanfest and local meetups to friendships formed in fleet, we get into why EVE’s community lasts well beyond any one fight.
Keeping the game fun — Rixx explains why he still seeks out risky fights and new challenges — and how doing the same thing for too long can drain the fun from EVE.
What comes next for EVE? — We briefly touch on the game’s long-term future, my recent ideas for improving New Eden, and a larger conversation we’d like to have in a future episode.
Making sense of the Alliance Tournament — We close with a question for anyone who’s tried to follow a match: could the broadcast make it easier to see what’s happening?

Have a listen and let us know how long YOU have been playing EVE!

Fly safe. o7

Where to find us!

And if you're watching on YouTube, do us a solid — like, subscribe, and drop a comment. It helps more than you think.

If we had six months to make EVE Online better, where would we start?

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:07:45 +0000

A few days ago, I asked a fairly simple question on r/Eve:

“You’ve been given 6 months to "fix" EVE. What are your top 3 priorities?”

These could be mechanics, balance problems, old systems in need of reworking, new-player issues, economic problems, PvP, PvE, industry, sovereignty, Faction Warfare, whatever.

The only real constraint was that I wanted people to choose three. Not twenty. Not an entire imaginary expansion roadmap. Just three things.

Predictably, some of the responses were jokes. Some wanted Hilmar gone. Others wanted multiboxing restricted, Local removed (would be interesting to remove it in null sec for sure), citadels changed, nullsec shaken up, ships made cheaper, or Fenris to stop spending time on anything that wasn’t EVE.

But buried among those shorter answers were some genuinely thoughtful responses.

Players wrote detailed proposals about resource distribution, sovereignty, PvE, exploration, structures, force projection, industry, small-gang warfare, new-player retention and even how information itself works inside EVE.

I also shared the question privately with a longtime EVE player whose opinion I trust. His answers went in some very different directions—dynamic space weather, huge asteroid belts, mineable comets, shifting resource availability, abandoned structures that could be captured rather than destroyed, and wrecks that salvagers could actually hunt down.

Once I stopped looking at the individual fixes and started looking at why people wanted them, something interesting happened.

The dozens of suggestions started collapsing into three much larger ideas.

1. Make New Eden feel truly alive again

Imagine logging in and discovering that a constellation a few jumps away is suddenly producing better mining yields because of a temporary space-weather effect.

Miners would move toward it. Haulers would follow them. PvP corps would certainly notice all this new activity. Scouts would start checking routes, markets would react, and corporations would have to decide whether relocating ships and equipment was worth the trouble.

None of that requires a scripted quest or a special event fleet. The universe changes, and players respond.

That idea appeared in several different forms in the Reddit discussion. Some players suggested resources that migrate or deplete. Others proposed boom-and-bust systems where the profitability of an area changes over time. One suggested that repeatedly farming a system should eventually exhaust it enough that people have to go elsewhere.

One pushed the idea further with dynamic space weather. One system might receive a mining bonus while another suffers a penalty. Different conditions could affect scanning, capacitor performance, certain weapon systems, warp behaviour or NPC activity.

What matters isn’t whether the bonus is 10% or 15%. What matters is that the universe has changed enough to force a decision.

EVE is enormous, but many activities eventually become somewhat predictable. You learn where a resource appears, find a profitable system, optimize the activity and repeat it.

Optimization is part of EVE, and players should benefit from understanding how New Eden works. But there’s a difference between learning how the universe works and knowing exactly what to expect from it.

Resource distribution could/should become less rigid as well.

Rather than thinking entirely in terms of highsec having one set of ores, lowsec another and nullsec another, much of New Eden could contain overlapping resources whose quantity, quality and concentration vary dramatically.

Highsec might contain heavily depleted deposits because the empires have been exploiting those systems for centuries. Lowsec could offer richer concentrations because extraction is more dangerous, while nullsec might hold enormous deposits because much of it remains frontier territory.

Those concentrations would not necessarily remain in the same places forever.

Asteroid belts could work differently too. Instead of a handful of rocks conveniently sitting at one permanent warp-in, imagine the belt treated as a vast region of the solar system containing several temporary mining locations. One area might hold a rich deposit, another might have been largely exhausted after heavy use, while a third could appear after a survey or environmental shift.

The belt remains. The useful places inside it change.

Then there are comets.

Imagine thousands of them moving through New Eden. Some contain conventional minerals, others are rich in ice products, and some carry rarer materials.

Suddenly, comet hunting becomes a profession. A player might find one, scan it down, bookmark it, mine it, sell the location, defend it, or steal the opportunity from someone else. PvPers might simply wait for the people who found it first. That is much more interesting to me than adding another static anomaly, because the comet itself is not really the content.

The content is what players do because the comet exists.

We’re not asking for one big fix. We’re asking for a universe that moves more, surprises us more, gives us more ways to interfere with one another, and makes our presence in space matter.

2. Give us more ways to affect New Eden — And make power harder to project

EVE contains an astonishing number of objects, structures and systems, but our interactions with many of them eventually collapse into a surprisingly small set of behaviours. We own things, farm them, defend them or destroy them.

What if there were more ways to interfere with the universe without simply reducing everything to hit points?

Several players suggested infrastructure that could be hacked, disabled, stolen from, captured, siphoned or sabotaged without requiring its complete destruction.

That could mean temporarily disabling an installation, interfering with an Ansiblex, siphoning moon output, raiding a supply depot or stealing physical resources before they reach their owner.

Several people independently raised the idea of structures that could be captured rather than simply blown up.

Imagine finding an old Astrahus whose owners disappeared years ago. Instead of treating it as space debris with hit points, another corporation might be able to recover it by hacking its systems, establishing a claim, surviving some kind of takeover period and eventually restoring it to service.

Stored player assets would obviously require careful handling, but the underlying idea is compelling. Something another group built could acquire a second history rather than simply disappearing in an explosion.

Salvaging could become more active in the same way.

Imagine old wreck fields being detectable with combat probes. You might find traces of a battle, launch probes, track the wreckage down and piece together what happened before salvaging what remains. Perhaps some of that salvage produces alloys or industrial materials that feed back into manufacturing.

Another player’s activity has left a physical footprint in New Eden, and you have discovered it after the fact.

This matters especially for smaller groups. A six-person frigate or destroyer gang does not necessarily need to capture sovereignty to matter. Give them targets they can hunt down, infrastructure they can disable, goods they can steal, logistics they can disrupt and resources they can siphon. Small groups do not have to overthrow an empire. They should be able to make the empire notice them.

This is also where questions about scale begin to converge.

Multiboxing came up repeatedly in the thread, particularly when one person is operating enough characters to function like a fleet or small industrial organization. Blue donuts came up. Huge null blocs came up. Citadel proliferation, asset safety and accumulated wealth all appeared too.

These are not identical problems, but they share something: scale compounds advantage.

That does not mean the answer is automatically to ban multiboxing, cap alliances or dismantle large organizations. Players will organize around hard limits if cooperation remains worthwhile. EVE has taught that lesson repeatedly. The better question is what increasing scale should cost. And interestingly, Fenris appears to be moving in that direction already.

Later this week, on September 22, the Force Projection Revamp arrives as part of the Cradle of War major update.

The Ansiblex changes are particularly relevant. Jump bridges will operate from limited capacitor reserves, different ship types will consume different amounts of that capacitor, and moving forces farther from an alliance’s capital system becomes progressively more expensive.

Coalition members will no longer simply use another alliance’s Ansiblex network either. Access will be restricted to the alliance that owns it.

None of that makes large nullsec alliances impossible. Nor should it.

Instead, geography starts imposing a cost on power.

Large organizations will still be able to control enormous territories, but moving a massive fleet rapidly from one edge of that territory to another should require more thought. Distance should matter, as should fleet composition, infrastructure and where an alliance chooses to establish its capital.

That’s a positive direction.

One of the recurring frustrations in the discussion wasn’t simply that large alliances exist. It was that scale can become too easy to apply.

Corporations and alliances should be able to become powerful. But that power should come with geography, logistics, exposure and consequences.

Fenris has described the Force Projection Revamp as an initial step rather than the end of the work.

Good, keep going.

The larger the territory, the harder every corner of it should be to defend. Not because the game imposes an arbitrary membership cap, but because distance, logistics, activity and local presence begin to matter again.

History’s great empires faced the same problem. Rome could expand across enormous distances, but every new province also had to be governed, supplied and defended. The British Empire faced its own version of that challenge centuries later. Expansion brought power and resources, but it also created longer supply lines, distant territories and more places where that power had to be maintained.

New Eden should work on a similar principle. Let alliances build enormous empires if they can. But the larger those empires become, the more difficult they should be to manage. Their borders should become harder to defend, their logistics more complicated, and projecting force from the centre to the edges should require real effort.

You can build the empire, but you should also have to manage the empire you built.

3. Make it easier to participate without making EVE easier

This is probably the most delicate one because friction is part of what makes EVE work. Distance, loss, preparation, training and logistics all carry consequences in EVE. Remove any one of those in pursuit of convenience and eventually you’re no longer improving EVE. You’re removing pieces of what makes it distinctly EVE.

But not every inconvenience creates meaningful gameplay.

Several responses circled around what I’d call time-to-content. One player wanted easier ways to find relatively quick fights. Another argued that ordinary ships should be affordable enough that people don’t spend more time replacing them than flying them. Others questioned reinforcement timers, where attacking certain structures or objectives can trigger an invulnerable period, forcing everyone to return later to continue the fight. What started as tonight’s encounter can become an appointment several days later.

Newer players talked about entering a 23-year-old universe where veterans don’t merely have better ships. They have accumulated wealth, skills, infrastructure, alts and social networks. Even finding the right corporation came up.

And that’s where the distinction between making EVE easier and making EVE easier to participate in becomes important.

Suppose I have an hour tonight and want to get into a small-gang fight.

Making EVE easier would mean removing danger, reimbursing my losses, teleporting me into combat and making sure the fight is fair. That’s not what I want.

What I do want is for EVE to be easier to participate in. Give me better tools to discover where fights are happening, help me find active skirmishes, keep common PvP ships reasonably replaceable, and reduce some of the unnecessary steps between I want to go do this and I’m actually doing it.

I’ve often wondered whether EVE could borrow just a little from the skirmish systems used by games like World of Tanks or World of Warships without actually turning EVE into an arena game. If I log in with 30 minutes to play, perhaps the game could point me toward active fighting a jump or two away, or show me where skirmishes are developing so I can decide whether to head there. If I’m about to log off, maybe it could help me identify an active area where I might want to stage a ship for the next time I log back in.

The important distinction is that the game wouldn’t create the fight for me or teleport me into it. It would simply do a better job of showing me where opportunities for a fight already exist.

Once I undock, everything that makes EVE EVE remains. I still have to travel there. The fight doesn’t have to be fair. The situation might have completely changed by the time I arrive. I can still make a terrible decision, jump into the wrong gate camp, get baited or lose my ship.

That’s EVE.

What I’d like to spend less of my limited playtime doing is trying to find the point where those decisions begin.

EVE’s real magic has never lived in its tutorial. It lives in corporations, fleets, wars, betrayals, expeditions, stupid mistakes and unexpected friendships. The challenge is helping more players reach those experiences without sanding away the consequences that make them memorable.

That doesn’t mean stripping friction out of the game. Au contraire. It means being more deliberate about where that friction lives.

Waiting isn’t automatically depth. Grinding isn’t automatically progression. Travelling isn’t automatically adventure. But uncertainty can create depth. Exposure creates tension. Scarcity creates competition. Distance creates strategic choices. Logistics creates vulnerability. Loss makes success matter.

Those are the kinds of obstacles EVE should preserve—and in some places, deliberately reinforce.

I don’t want EVE compressed into an instant-action lobby game. But I do want the obstacles I encounter during that hour to produce decisions, danger and stories rather than simply delay them.

And then there’s EVE Forever

There was one other suggestion that deserves its own section, partly because it sits outside the three gameplay themes above, and partly because it quickly sparked a conversation of its own.

My buddy, and podcast co-host, Rixx Javix’s number-one priority would be what he calls “EVE Forever”: begin the long-term process of rebuilding and modernizing the technical foundation underneath EVE.

The idea sparked immediate pushback. Something on that scale would take years, not six months. Rixx agreed: his point was that if he had the keys to EVE for six months, he would start the work.

Someone mentioned the ongoing move to Python 3, which Fenris is already doing. Rixx's "EVE Forever" asks a much bigger question: how far should that modernization ultimately go?

This doesn't need to compete with the three directions above. Fenris can continue changing sovereignty, force projection, resources and structures while investing in the technical foundation those systems depend on for years to come.

That's what makes it interesting. We're talking about a 23-year-old MMO we'd like to still be playing decades from now. At some point, maintaining EVE's future means ensuring the technology underneath New Eden is ready for what comes next.

Rixx put it this way:

“I’d immediately start work on the ‘Eve Forever’ server. Totally new, updated code written from the ground-up that would eventually replace the twenty-plus year old code we keep patching. Just do a data transfer one downtime and we’re all suddenly playing on the new server. Most people wouldn’t even know it happened. Then we can really deal with old issues without hearing about how hard the code is to change. To be honest, it is really time. Priority one.”

— Rixx Javix

But the larger question behind it is harder to dismiss: How much of what EVE could become is constrained by what EVE has become?

EVE has been running continuously for more than two decades. That means more than twenty years of systems being added, rewritten, deprecated, connected to other systems, replaced in part, patched and changed again.

Every long-lived software platform accumulates technical history, and eventually that history can become a design constraint.

A game mechanic may look simple from the outside while touching code written fifteen years ago. A seemingly isolated change may depend on several older systems. Developers may know exactly what they would like to build while also knowing that disturbing one piece could affect several others underneath it.

That matters because nearly every ambitious idea in this article depends on the game's underlying architecture being flexible enough to support it.

Dynamic resource geography, environmental effects that propagate across systems, more sophisticated infrastructure interactions, structures changing ownership, expanded salvage mechanics, more reactive sovereignty and more dynamic economies all require the game beneath them to be capable of changing too.

If the technical foundation makes those changes prohibitively difficult, then asking for better mechanics without addressing that foundation eventually becomes a liability.

Fenris changes what it can. Players ask why it doesn't change more. The answer becomes some variation of legacy systems being difficult to modify, and then everyone repeats the same conversation several years later.

Maybe one of the most important investments Fenris could make in EVE's future would be something players barely notice when it finally arrives.

Not a new feature, but a new foundation that lets the next twenty years of features happen more easily than the previous twenty.

So, what would "my" three changes be?

I wouldn't choose three specific game mechanics, but instead I would choose three broad directions:

1. Make New Eden dynamic: Let resources, conditions and opportunities change so players have reasons to leave optimized routines and react to what is happening around them.

2. Give us more ways to affect the universe and each other: Add theft, sabotage, capture and discoverable traces of player activity, while making geography and logistics matter to large-scale power.

3. Replace dead friction with meaningful friction: Make it easier for players to reach the parts of EVE where choices begin, but make those choices harder, riskier and less predictable once they get there.

Rixx’s “EVE Forever” idea also adds a deeper consideration: some of the most important work may happen beneath the surface, in the software systems that determine what EVE can become next.

The common thread running through all of this—dynamic resources, distributed power, reduced dead friction—points at a single problem:

EVE has become too "predictable".

Players optimize it into a checklist. They create decision trees. They map the unpredictability out of it. And once that happens, logging in feels like executing a familiar routine instead of asking, “What the hell do I do next?”

I think EVE needs more moments where the universe disrupts those plans.

Where the best resource isn’t where it was yesterday. Where controlling more space creates new problems instead of simply more advantages. Where a small group can interfere with something a much larger group actually cares about. Where experience gives you better tools to deal with uncertainty, but never eliminates that uncertainty completely.

That applies to the new player learning how New Eden works just as much as it does to the veteran who’s been optimizing it for twenty years.

EVE doesn’t need friction simply for friction’s sake. It needs the kind that forces us to adapt, take risks, make decisions and occasionally throw whatever plan we had out the airlock.

So, if anyone at Fenris is reading this: add more of that friction back into New Eden. We can handle it.

Is EVE Online still worth playing in 2026?

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:52:22 +0000

Is EVE Online Still Worth Playing in 2026? Short answer? Yes. Absolutely!

But I'm not sure I would recommend EVE Online to everyone.

That probably sounds like a strange way to start an article arguing that a 23-year-old MMO is still worth playing in 2026, but after coming back to New Eden myself, I think it might be the most important thing to understand about EVE.

EVE Online is difficult. It can be frustrating.

It wastes your time. It lets other players interfere with whatever carefully constructed plans you had for the evening, and you can spend hours preparing something only to lose it in seconds because you made one bad decision. And somehow, those are also some of the reasons I've fallen in love with it again.

I originally started playing EVE in August 2004, and this blog grew out of that experience a year later. Over the years I wrote about EVE, helped build communities around it, podcasted about it, followed wars and politics, met people through it, and yes, eventually stepped away. For a long time. Then, in November 2025, I came back.

Not as the player I remembered being. That guy was a carebear, mining his own business. The returning version of me regularly found (and still finds) himself asking questions like whether my microwarpdrive still worked under a scrambler, what exactly I should be doing after a gate cloak dropped, how exactly Faction Warfare works, and why the ship fitting I thought looked perfectly reasonable was apparently the dumbest thing I could put together. In other words, I got to experience something unusual: I came back to a game I thought I knew very well and discovered I had to learn how to play it again.

And I'm having a blast.

So, is EVE worth playing in 2026?

Earlier today, I came across a post on r/Eve titled simply "I miss Eve…" The author had been playing for more than ten years, on and off, and described the exhaustion of repeatedly trying to find the right corporation. They had finally found one, stayed for almost a year, and then watched it disappear practically overnight when real life pulled the CEO elsewhere. Back to Faction Warfare. Back to setting up. Back to looking for another corp. Back to moving again. Eventually the cycle wore him down.

What caught my attention wasn't simply someone quitting EVE; hell, not a day goes by without someone on Reddit, X or the EVE Forums threatening to quit the game. People quit games every day. It was how much they obviously still cared about it. He missed EVE.

That Reddit discussion is what got me thinking about this series of posts: Is EVE still worth playing? Is it too late to start? Can you play solo? How do you find a corporation where you actually belong? And why do some of us keep returning to this ridiculous universe after years away? This is the first of those articles.

And conveniently, my Safe Spot co-host Rixx Javix put together a video called "5 Reasons 2026 Is The Year To Play EVE Online" not too long ago.

Rixx identifies five things: meaningful consequences, player-driven narratives, EVE's living history, the almost limitless roles players can create for themselves, and the human connections behind all of it. I agree with him and all those reasons. But having recently returned to EVE myself, I think all five are really symptoms of something deeper. EVE still does things most modern games have spent years trying to remove.

Your mistakes still matter

Barely a week ago, I lost a Hecate. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about losing a ship in EVE. Ships explode constantly, and it's part of what makes the player-run economy work. What mattered was everything that happened afterward.

What did I do wrong? Should I have stayed in Propulsion Mode? When should I have switched to Defensive Mode? What happens when I break gate cloak? Should I fit a better cloak? How should I combine it with the microwarpdrive? Should I spam warp or manually shut off the MWD? One dead Hecate became a lesson.

And those lessons stick because the ship doesn't magically reappear. EVE has softened around some of its edges over the years, but the fundamental idea remains intact: when your ship explodes, it is gone. When you undock something relatively expensive, you're taking a risk. When you jump through a lowsec gate and Local contains someone with a low security status, you suddenly become very interested in what happens next. That consequence changes your relationship with the game. The adrenaline is real because the possibility of failure is real.

Modern game design often tries to protect players from frustration. EVE frequently hands frustration a loaded autocannon and tells it where you live. Strangely enough, that makes success matter too.

The best missions are the ones nobody gave you

One of the things I've been doing recently would make an absolutely terrible official MMO quest: I volunteered to help another capsuleer consolidate hundreds of thousands of scattered assets. Nobody at Fenris Creations created the mission. There is no quest marker. There isn't an NPC waiting to hand me Loyalty Points when I'm finished.

Yet this little personal project has become one of the most interesting things I've done since returning. I've travelled across regions I hadn't visited in years, fitted ships specifically for blockade running, planned routes, created safe spots in dangerous systems, and learned to stop warping directly to stations in lowsec when someone suspicious is sitting in Local. Some stations contained only a handful of items. Others had hundreds, while some had tens of thousands. Some items had volumes of around 1,000 m³ each. Not ideal when flying a Hecate with only 1,343 m³ of cargo space. So off we go.

Back and forth.

And because this is EVE, those trips started generating their own stories. This is perhaps the quality I had forgotten most during my years away: EVE gives you room to care about things the developers never told you to care about. You invent the objective. You decide whether it matters.

You don't pick a class. You craft your own story.

Most MMOs ask you a question almost immediately: Warrior? Mage? Rogue? EVE asks a much stranger question: What do you want to do? And then mostly leaves you alone to figure it out. You can become an industrialist, pirate, explorer, fleet commander, market trader, mercenary, spy, diplomat, hauler, propagandist, scammer, corporation leader, journalist, broadcaster, or some bizarre combination nobody bothered naming.

My own EVE career certainly doesn't fit neatly into a character class. At various points I've been a miner, PvE mission runner, hauler, and have been on the losing end of PvP. It's also allowed me to become a blogger, community organizer, podcaster, and occasional commentator on the strange political ecosystem of New Eden. Now I've somehow added amateur lowsec removal company to the résumé. There is tremendous freedom in that.

Your identity in EVE isn't determined entirely by your skills or your ship. It is partly determined by what other players know you for.

Reputation becomes its own character sheet.

You are entering somebody else's history

Starting EVE in 2026 means entering a universe where things happened before you arrived. A lot of things. Wars have been fought, alliances have risen and collapsed, fortunes have been made and destroyed, and betrayals that happened years ago still influence relationships today. Some players you meet have been carrying the same grudges longer than many games have existed. That's wonderful.

The universe doesn't reset every few months so everybody can begin again on equal footing. New Eden remembers. Fenris itself leaned into that idea in its plans for 2026, describing war as something that shapes the economy, politics, borders, relationships, and stories of the universe. The June Cradle of War expansion pushed that further with Military Campaigns, an expanded role for Faction Warfare, new ships, rookie Starter Space, and ways for players with different playstyles to contribute to the larger conflict.

But EVE's history isn't really interesting because Fenris writes lore. It's interesting because players keep scribbling all over it.

The players are still the content

This might be the hardest thing to explain to someone who hasn't played EVE: some of the greatest EVE stories have very little to do with conventional game content. A corporation fractures. Someone steals something. A diplomat insults the wrong person. An alliance moves. A market crashes. A fleet commander makes a terrible decision. Someone decides revenge is worth spending six months pursuing. And suddenly hundreds or thousands of players are dealing with the consequences.

That's EVE. The developers build the sandbox. Then we behave badly in it.

EVE's 2026 roadmap is deliberately leaning back toward this interconnected idea of New Eden, with Fenris saying it wants conflicts where mining, manufacturing, PvE, Faction Warfare, and other activities can all contribute to larger objectives rather than existing as isolated activities. Whether all of those systems succeed remains to be seen. But the philosophy is the right one.

My mining should matter to your war. Your war should affect someone's market. That market should change what another player decides to build. Their decision should create an opportunity for somebody else. One universe. Consequences spreading outward.

Eventually, though, EVE becomes about people

This is where that Reddit post gets particularly interesting. The player wasn't saying EVE had run out of ships, or that there weren't enough skills to train, or even that there was nothing left to do. They couldn't find the right people to do it with. In one of their replies, they described what they wanted from a corporation: active players, engaged and competent leadership, and some way for individual members to contribute to the corporation's growth and long-term goals. That's not really a gameplay feature. That's belonging.

I've been thinking about that a lot since returning. I've moved between several corporations myself since November, had veteran players patiently explain mechanics I should probably have remembered, asked embarrassingly basic questions, and rebuilt connections with people from the EVE community. And The Safe Spot with Rixx has become another part of that. The spaceships brought me back.

The people are increasingly giving me reasons to stay.

There will be a whole article in this series about finding the right corporation because I don't think this subject can be dismissed with the usual veteran advice of simply saying, "Join a corp." Joining a corporation is easy. Finding your people is something else entirely.

So who is EVE actually for?

This brings me back to the original question: Is EVE Online worth playing in 2026? You bet! But there is an important qualification. EVE still expects something from you. It expects curiosity. It rewards patience. It assumes you're capable of setting your own goals. Sometimes it makes you bored.

Sometimes it makes you angry. Sometimes you'll spend an entire evening preparing to do something you never actually get around to doing. And sometimes you'll make one stupid mistake and spend the next hour wondering how you managed to be quite that stupid.

If you want a game constantly feeding you content, achievements, and clearly marked objectives, EVE may feel unnecessarily hostile. But if you want a universe where you can invent your own objectives, where losing something actually hurts, where other players can interfere with your plans, where twenty years of history sit beneath your feet, and where six people in a corporation can eventually matter more to you than a thousand NPCs—there still isn't much else like it.

Maybe that's why EVE has survived. Not because it eliminated all the things players complained about, but perhaps because it stubbornly refused to eliminate some of them. After more than twenty years, New Eden is still dangerous, inconvenient, occasionally infuriating, and capable of producing stories nobody planned. For the right kind of player, those aren't flaws you put up with.

They're the reason you undock.

---

This is the first article in my upcoming Should I Play EVE Online? series. Next I'll be looking at whether it's too late to start EVE in 2026, whether you can genuinely enjoy EVE solo, how to find a corporation you'll actually want to stay in, and ultimately why some of us keep coming back to New Eden.

The Safe Spot episode 15: The Mike Azariah interview

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 02:05:04 +0000

Mike Azariah has spent nearly two decades showing that trust often matters more than ISK in New Eden. When Rixx and I sat down with him this past weekend, he walked us through the early blogging days (him and I go way back, to my days as the Blog Father), Operation Magic School Bus, his CSM campaigns, and what it actually means to lead from the edges.

We talked some more about CSM work, what members do, why voting blocs matter, and how the council sometime steers decisions it won't always see through. We talk Mike's part in bringing the Bowhead into the game, his fierce independence, and the friendships that outlast elections and exploded spaceships.

Throughout the conversation, he's exactly what longtime EVE players know: thoughtful, mischievous, quietly sharp. He knows when to argue and when to listen. He also knows how to disarm an angry player in Rookie Help with a particularly dangerous form of kindness. Poor kid!

For him, the spaceships have always been secondary. They're just the place where we meet and help each other.

It was a lot of fun to talk with a legend who still shows up.

Have a listen and let us know your thoughts!

Fly safe. o7

Where to find us!

And if you're watching on YouTube, do us a solid — like, subscribe, and drop a comment. It helps more than you think.

Learning how to haul safely in EVE Online with a blockade runner

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 01:52:32 +0000

One red flashy docked with his wing mate in the same station where I was holding cargo. Both of them after following me in. And I had no idea what they'd do next.

This was the result of instinct kicking in. It had brought me straight to the station. The obvious place.

...

I'd been consolidating assets for a friend across dozens of stations. Thousands of items scattered across multiple regions. On one of those milk runs, System A was my endpoint. System E, four jumps away through low-sec, held most of the haul. Some stops had a single item. System E had somewhere over 600 or 700, across a few stations.

Multiple trips were inevitable.

The route was straightforward enough: punch through three low-sec systems (B, C, D), dock at E, load cargo, reverse the run. I always checked Local on entry, and warped to a moon whenever I wasn't alone. Safe practice, mostly routine.

Then I entered one of these mid-journey system and spotted Flashy. Red security status, −9.5 security status. And another pilot nearby.

And here's where I stopped thinking. Flight instead of fight took over. In a blockade runner, there's no third option. Panic pointed me straight at the station. The obvious place. The predictable one. Rookie mistake.

The problem with predictability

This is what I missed. A hauler, even a blockade runner, with a known destination is readable. Station route. Gate sequence. Predictable pattern.

Both pilots watched me warp out in the direction of the only station in system, after jumping through the gate. Both followed. Both docked. And for the next ten minutes, I was stuck watching Local, calculating whether moving was worth the risk.

Should I undock now or wait longer?

How long before they forget about the cargo?

Does staying look cowardly, or does moving too soon look panicked?

The nerve of it wasn't fear. It was the math. Survival is the goal here, not ego. But staying in dock wastes precious time when you've got dozens more milk runs to do. Then again, moving too soon risks burning my ship. The weight of that choice, sitting there, watching both their names in Local, knowing they knew I was there, docked with both of them. That's the ten-minute eternity a poor decision can buy you.

Flashy undocked. He eventually left the system, probably looking for another victim. I waited another couple of minutes after the second left the station. Finally, I undocked with a tad of nervousness, and quickly warped to a moon, any moon, before taking the gate.

Nothing happened. But I'd learned a valuable lesson. I need to be less predictable. I needed safe spots.

What that taught me

Safe spots aren't hiding places. They're breakpoints. They're the grid squares between what I left (a station or a gate) and where I'm going (the next gate, or another station). The predictable path in between.

After that run, I bookmarked mid-warp safe spots in Systems B, C, D, and E. I sit at them a second or two, at most. Just long enough to clear the warp trail, change angle, and make the final approach to the gate from somewhere they won't expect.

It sounds small. It's not.

I was predictable. They watched where I was going and followed. That's what kills you in EVE. Being readable, predictable.

And here's what hits harder: I lost a Hecate recently because I got distracted. I wasn't thinking. And by then I already knew better. That's when carelessness stops being a mistake and becomes a pattern.

Safe spots aren't hiding places. They're the waypoints between predictable and alive.

Hope that lesson helps.

Fly safe. o7

Coriolis: The Great Dark — We came to explore. Somehow, we’re solving a murder

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:26:18 +0000

When I created Safiya for Coriolis: The Great Dark, I had a pretty clear picture of the kind of campaign we were about to play. Or I thought I did that is.

Exploration. Expeditions. Ancient ruins. Dangerous places beyond Ship City where having a Roughneck who could repair machinery (and crack a few skulls when necessary) would come in handy.

Instead, we've spent our first few sessions investigating a murder.

So much for the plan.

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING

This post contains story details from The Flowers of Algorab, the first complete boxed campaign expansion for Coriolis: The Great Dark, published by Free League Publishing. If you're planning to play the campaign—or think you might someday—you may want to stop reading here. Part of the fun is figuring out what the hell is going on for yourself.

A funeral, a murder, and a missing tablet

Our story really began with the funeral of Levon Najjar, co-founder of the Explorers' Guild in Ship City.

Officially, Levon had committed suicide after falling from his apartment. Moska, the Guild's other co-founder, wasn't buying it. She pulled us aside after the funeral and told us she believed Levon had been murdered.

More importantly, two days before his death, Levon had been digging through the archives looking for a stone tablet dating back to the founding of Ship City. Apparently, he believed he was on the verge of a major discovery.

Whatever he had found—or was about to find—seemed important enough that someone may have wanted him permanently out of the way.

And suddenly our group of explorers had become amateur detectives.

Even at the funeral there were people who immediately raised questions, including the mysterious Coriolite Ser Aren Mir-Bilal, whose apparent longevity doesn't quite add up, as he was supposedly already serving some 80 years ago.

There was also the celebrant, who managed to earn himself a place on our increasingly long list of suspicious people.

Naturally, our next stop was Levon's apartment.

Breaking into the crime scene

Levon lived on Ship City's fifth level, and when we arrived, the apartment was being guarded by a young female police officer, a Zapty, assigned to the scene by Lei Kavani, a much more senior officer—and, as it happens, an old friend of Zahir, one of the members of our party.

With the Zapty watching the entrance, two of us managed to create enough of a distraction to get one of us inside. Amiraz, our Archeologist crewmate volunteered. Someone had thoroughly trashed the place. Among the mess, he found a strange collection of clues:

A large blue Garuda feather, roughly 30 centimetres long.
A crumpled page containing a sketch and a rubbing of an engraved stone tablet.
A strange thread suspended near the ceiling.
The reference 122-Y.

And three books Levon had apparently been researching: the Book of Glyphs, Salamander God, and another volume dealing with Nadzir.

It wasn't exactly a smoking gun, but it was enough to start pulling on threads.

Apparently people don't like us asking questions

The Garuda feather led us to wildlife expert Siran Gaffari, who identified it as belonging to a Garuda modified through underground networks.

That connection eventually pointed us toward Gar Boutaleb, a former dweller with ties to a criminal group called the Black Toads, operating around Aluminum Bay.

So off we went.

Someone clearly noticed.

While travelling down toward the space docks by funicular, five men attacked us. This was one of those moments where Safiya finally found herself operating in territory considerably closer to what I'd imagined when I created her. The fight got ugly quickly.

We managed to take one attacker alive long enough to learn that the group had been hired through an anonymous intermediary. Then Lei Kavani arrived.

Unlike Zapty, Lei is no rookie. He's a senior police officer, someone who clearly knows exactly what he's doing, and his history with Zahir added another layer to the encounter.

He coldly dealt with the surviving attackers and warned us that continuing our investigation was going to have consequences. At that point, I think we were well past the stage where any of us were considering walking away.

The Great Archives of Jumuah

Our next lead took us into the Great Archives of Jumuah, where we tried to track down the mysterious 122-Y reference. The records showed that three people had recently accessed that section: Levon Najjar & Gar Boutaleb. And a gold-masked Coriolite named Aldor mir-Zirtain.

Deep within the archive caverns, we eventually located the box that should have contained the tablet.

It was empty.

Instead, we found a black-and-yellow matchbox from a bar somewhere in Aluminum Bay, along with evidence suggesting someone had recently escaped the archives after stealing an archivist's robe.

And then things got personal.

When the others returned toward the entrance, they found Safiya collapsed on the ground, poisoned. Before losing consciousness, she was able to tell them that she'd been attacked by a remotely controlled automaton being operated by the gold-masked Aldor mir-Zirtain himself.

His message was pretty straightforward: STOP INVESTIGATING.

Fortunately for me and the rest of the crew, Safiya survived.

We got her back to the Explorers' Guild, where Moska managed to administer an antidote.

Our report also convinced her that Levon's death definitely wasn't suicide. The Black Toads and Gar Boutaleb were somehow mixed up in all of this, and the Guild gave us another **4,000 ruks** to keep digging.

Meanwhile, we also began quietly investigating Aldor and the Coriolites themselves, including making contact with a love interest of Amiraz, Lucret Ventri, a prominent blue-clad Coriolite, who might know something about Aldor mir-Zirtain and whatever faction he's involved with.

Back to Aluminum Bay

Eventually, that matchbox from the archives brought us straight back to Aluminum Bay.

The port was already buzzing thanks to the arrival of a massive cargo ship from Dabaran, but we managed to trace the matchbox to a clandestine bar built into shipping containers called The Golden Ape.

There we met Maizy, the owner—and conveniently, a former member of the Black Toads. A little money and negotiation finally bought us the information we'd been chasing for several sessions. Gar Boutaleb was apparently staying at the Sadaalian Rose.

And that's where we left things.

Which means tonight's game session begins with us heading there to find him. Given what usually happens whenever we get close to someone who might actually have answers, I'm sure this will go perfectly.

The character I didn't realize I needed

One thing I've found particularly amusing about this campaign is how differently it's unfolding from what I imagined during Session Zero. When I created Safiya, I pictured us leaving Ship City relatively quickly and heading into the Great Dark.

Exploring ruins. Repairing equipment. Surviving hostile environments. Getting our hands dirty out there. Had Alamo told me, “You're going to spend your first several sessions investigating a murder,” I'm honestly not sure I would've rolled the same character.

Safiya isn't exactly built for detective work. She ain't no Sherlock Holmes. But something unexpected has happened along the way. Her toughness, her ability to hit ridiculously hard and—perhaps more importantly—her ability to take a beating have made her a pretty crucial part of the group.

When things turn violent, Safiya is usually the person you want standing between everyone else and whatever is trying to kill us.

She's become our tank.

Turns out investigators occasionally need one of those too.

And despite the campaign going somewhere completely different from what I'd expected, I'm having a blast with it. There's clearly something much bigger hiding behind Levon's murder, that missing tablet, the Black Toads and these mysterious Coriolites, and I'm genuinely looking forward to seeing how the story unfolds.

A big part of that is our GM, Alamo, who's been amazing at keeping the mystery moving while giving us plenty of room to make questionable decisions along the way.

Our sessions are always a blast.

So tonight, we go looking for Gar Boutaleb.

I'm sure he'll calmly answer all our questions.

The Safe Spot — Episode 14: The AI Debate

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:49:44 +0000

The messy line between AI-assisted and AI-generated

AI can turn an ordinary conversation into a minefield remarkably quickly—and EVE Online is no exception. Rixx and I wade into the debate from our sometimes differing perspectives, beginning with “AI slop” and the increasingly blurry line between AI-generated content and work that remains human-led but AI-assisted.

We discuss how we each use (or deliberately avoid) these tools in our creative and professional lives. Taste, experience, judgment, fact-checking and accountability don’t magically appear with a good prompt, but does every use of AI deserve to be thrown into the same bucket?

When AI enters New Eden

From there, we bring the conversation into EVE. Could Aura Guidance make New Eden easier to understand while unintentionally weakening the player relationships that make it special? How much friction can you remove before you also remove the uncertainty, mistakes and hard-earned knowledge at the heart of the experience?

We also explore the more promising possibilities surrounding Fenris Creations and Google DeepMind, including better testing, balance, accessibility, smarter PvE, economic analysis and a New Eden that feels more dynamic and genuinely inhabited. Nearly every exciting idea, however, comes with an uncomfortable question attached.

Hopeful, skeptical, and still curious

This isn’t an argument for or against AI so much as a conversation about where the lines should be drawn, who should draw them and what must be protected along the way. We remain cautiously hopeful, occasionally skeptical and fully aware that reality will probably be considerably messier than either the utopian or apocalyptic versions people like to imagine.

And then there’s that end track…

Stick around for the closing track! A suitably understated musical tribute to a certain well-known and thoroughly infamous character whose legend may be only slightly larger than his actual reputation.

Where to find us!

And if you're watching on YouTube, do us a solid — like, subscribe, and drop a comment. It helps more than you think.

AI didn't make me creative, but it did change "how" I create

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:17:59 +0000

I've been writing on CrazyKinux's Musings in one form or another since 2005. Long before ChatGPT, Claude, image generators, or any of the current AI tools existed, I was writing about EVE Online, about the community of players & bloggers, sharing things I had learned, interviewing people and generally following whatever rabbit hole happened to interest me.

So AI didn't suddenly make me creative, but it's definitely changed how I create.

Take The Safe Spot, the EVE podcast I co-host with Rixx. The conversation itself is ours. We decide the topics, who we want to talk to and what we're curious about. But afterward I can take a transcript and use AI to pull out themes, build show notes, identify things worth following up on, or even notice parts of the conversation I'd almost forgotten.

The same thing happens with the EVE guides I write about.

Quite often I'm asking questions because I've returned to the game after a long absence and genuinely need to relearn something. We, that is ChatGPT and I, might work through a ship fitting, a skill queue or some obscure mechanic. I'll challenge the answers, test things in-game and come back with what happened. Eventually I realize: there's probably a guide in here. Other times, I'll use transcripts from EVE players’ YouTube guides as raw material for written guides of my own, especially when I want something easier to reference while playing. When I do, I usually embed or link the original video and clearly credit the creator, while reshaping the information into a format that fits how I learn and how I write.

Fiction does get a tad messier. My recent story involving Caelin and Cassian Drake is a good example. I created the characters, their histories, their relationship, BlackCrystal, the favour between them and the meeting aboard Jita 4-4. But I also used AI to help turn that into drafts. Then I rewrote things. Cut things. Changed dialogue. Rejected ideas that didn't fit the characters. Eventually I even used Claude for another editorial pass.

So no, I didn't type every sentence myself, but I still it as my writing. but I'm also perfectly comfortable calling that AI-assisted writing if push comes to shove.

The visual side works much the same way. By the time I've spent a while exchanging ideas with an AI image tool, I usually have a fairly specific picture in my head. If what comes back doesn't match it, we go again. I change things, reject things, push it in another direction and keep working at it until what I'm looking at feels like the thing I was trying to create. It's a work in progress and so is my learning of these tools.

Final thoughts on AI and a good creative process

Which is why I've become less interested in the question, "Did AI make this?", and more interested in asking: "Where did the creative decisions come from?"

Because whatever AI contributes, I'm still the final editor and the gatekeeper.

Every word, sentence & paragraph gets read, and then reread. Every word can be changed. Every image gets judged against what I had in mind. I'll polish, tweak, reject, rewrite and reiterate until I'm satisfied with it. Sometimes ChatGPT gets me there. Sometimes Claude helps. Sometimes I use a combination of both.

Nothing gets published simply because the AI produced it. That applies to pretty much everything I create with these tools. AI can help me get somewhere faster, explore more directions, or work through ideas I might not have reached on my own, but it doesn’t make the final decision.

So maybe AI hasn’t changed whether I’m creative as much as it has changed what I, or it, can bring into the creative process.

I’m still the final editor, the gatekeeper, and the one deciding what is of good quality so that I'll be proud to put my name on.

And that's good enough for me.

CK out.

In Jita, debts come due — an EVE Online short story

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:12:11 +0000

The message arrived while Caelin “Crazy Kinux” Kinotsuki was only a dozen or so jumps from Jita.

He almost ignored it.

There was nothing unusual about receiving messages in space, but this one was different. No corporate header. No security tag. No context. Just a name he had not seen in a very long time.

Cassian Drake.

The text beneath it was short.

Jita 4-4. 2200.
The Glass House. Come alone.
I need the favour back.

He stared at it for several seconds, then checked the routing data attached to the message.

Drake was not the kind of man who crossed dozens of systems for a casual conversation. If he was willing to travel that far just to ask for a favour in person, whatever had happened was serious.

Reluctantly, he set course for Jita.

For most people, Drake was nobody. Just another capsuleer name among others. For Caelin, it reached back to a period of his life he rarely talked about, somewhere between the refineries of Haajinen and the pilot he had eventually become.

It had been after the ambush.

After his mining crew had been wiped out in a Gallente attack that the Federation later dismissed as another regrettable border incident. After the funerals, the reports and the polite language that reduced men and women he had known for years into numbers on someone else's screen.

Caelin had finished his contract with Kaalakiota because that was what a Caldari did. Then he started learning how not to be helpless.

Combat training came first. Ship command. Small-unit tactics. Navigation through hostile territory. Hunting rats. Eventually that brought him to BlackCrystal Logistics.

Calling BlackCrystal a logistics corporation had always been generous. It had very few regular pilots, a network of contacts, and manifests that were almost entirely creative.

It moved weapons, ammunition, restricted military hardware. Sometimes it moved people who did not want their names associated with their destination. Nobody in BlackCrystal cared much about ideology. Caldari rifles travelled to Gallente buyers. Gallente targeting systems found their way into Caldari hands.

Caelin had hated that part of it.

He stayed because BlackCrystal taught him things legitimate corporations could not.

It was also where he met Drake.

Drake was Gallente in the way that made it difficult for Caelin to appreciate the man — blond hair too long, expensive jackets worn without concern for what they cost, an infuriating habit of behaving as if nothing around him was quite serious enough to deserve panic.

Caelin disliked him immediately.

Drake seemed to find this mildly amusing.

What made it worse was that Drake was good. Damn good. One of BlackCrystal's best runners, a hauler who treated gate camps less like obstacles and more like a dance. He made himself difficult to catch. A slippery target that always seemed to find a way to slip through the clutch of gate campers.

Drake monitored the local chats and scanned every corner of a system. He studied camps before approaching them. He could often tell the difference between bored opportunists and pilots who actually understood what they were doing.

He taught Caelin that a gate camp was not really about ships.

It was about expectations.

A camper expected you to panic, to take the obvious route, to behave like the last twenty pilots who had come through.

Drake survived by doing something else.

Caelin never liked taking advice from anyone, least of all a Gallente with too much attitude.

He took it anyway.

Their relationship might have remained nothing more than mutual professional tolerance if not for one run through lowsec.

BlackCrystal had split a shipment of illegal military hardware between a few transports. Drake carried the most valuable portion. Caelin had another section.

But someone had sold them out.

The camp was waiting.

Drake made it through.

Caelin did not.

His ship survived the initial engagement, but he was forced away from the planned route and eventually pinned down in system while hostile scouts began closing off his options.

BlackCrystal's response was immediate and practical.

Abort the run.

Preserve the rest of the shipment.

Caelin was considered compromised.

He remembered the language because it had sounded familiar.

[Acceptable loss].

Nobody actually used the words, but they did not have to.

That was the part that stayed with him.

Not the decision itself. BlackCrystal's logic was sound. One pilot was not worth exposing an entire network.

It was the ease with which a person could become a number once an organization decided the arithmetic no longer favoured them.

Drake had already delivered his cargo.

His contract was complete.

Then he came back.

Caelin never knew exactly what Drake did. He learned pieces afterward. False routing information had been leaked. A dockworker had suddenly become considerably richer. At least one BlackCrystal safe route was permanently burned.

The hostile group shifted position.

For a brief moment, a path opened.

Caelin took it.

By the time he met Drake again, he had lost a ship, a significant amount of ISK and at least one contact who never answered him again.

Caelin demanded to know why.

Drake looked at him for a moment before answering.

"They'd decided you were expendable."

Caelin waited.

"I disagreed."

That was all.

No ideology. No explanation. Drake had simply come back.

And something had shifted.

Caelin had stopped thinking of him as Gallente after that. He was simply Drake. The pilot who had decided that one other person was worth the cost.

BlackCrystal did not survive much longer. A director disappeared. Someone else took money they should not have taken. Pressure increased, clients became nervous and the remaining pilots scattered.

Caelin moved further into combat.

Drake resurfaced somewhere else.

For years, they had existed in parallel. Different corps, different operations, different spaces. Caelin had built a reputation, moved into systems where he could shoot back, surrounded himself with people who asked fewer questions. Drake had become something else — a name in occasional rumours, a ship that passed through Jita every few months, someone from a life Caelin had supposedly left behind.

They had not spoken since BlackCrystal.

Until now.

When Jita finally appeared ahead of him, the system was what it’s always been: crowded, loud and indifferent. Ships poured through the gates. Traders filled every available channel with offers, scams and promises of wealth.

He docked at Jita 4-4 and made his way toward the Glass House.

The bar occupied part of an upper commercial level, far enough from the main trading concourse to be quieter but close enough that its clientele still smelled faintly of money. Curved windows looked out toward the endless flow of traffic within the immensity of the hangars.

Drake was already there.

Of course he was.

Caelin recognized him immediately.

The hair was still blond and still too long. The jacket was still better tailored than anything Caelin would willingly spend money on. A glass sat in front of him.

But something was wrong.

Drake had chosen a seat facing the entrance. His jacket rested within easy reach. His eyes moved occasionally toward the reflection in the glass behind the bar.

And the drink in front of him was almost untouched.

Caelin sat across from him.

“You asked me to come.”

“I did.”

“After all these years.”

Drake glanced at him. “I wasn’t certain you would.”

“You mentioned the favour.”

“I thought that might improve the odds.”

“I’m not here to reminisce.”

“No,” Drake said. “I know you aren’t.”

For a moment, it almost felt familiar.

Then Drake’s smile faded.

"You said you needed the favour back."

"I do."

"What did you do this time?"

Drake looked toward the window. Ships of all sizes moved about in the hanger, tiny against the bulk of the station.

“Someone from my past has resurfaced.”

Caelin stared at him.

“A friend?”

“An acquaintance,” Drake said. “He remembers our association rather less fondly than I do.”

“A grudge.”

“An old one. Apparently very well preserved.”

“What does he want?”

Drake finally took a sip from his drink.

“At present? Me.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Take care of it.” Drake set the glass down. “But to do that, I need to disappear for a while.”

"Then disappear."

"I intend to."

Caelin waited.

"Issue is, I work for Mantis Acquisition now. I handle transportation. Certain clients. Certain routes."

Somehow, Caelin already knew all this.

"The leadership knows I'm stepping back. They've already reviewed your file. Vetted you."

That stopped him short.

"You already told them about me!"

"I had to."

"And they're okay with this?"

"They're okay with you filling in. Temporarily. While I sort things out."

Caelin stared at him.

"That's not reassuring."

"It wasn't intended to be."

Drake turned the glass slowly between his fingers, watching the amber catch the light from the hangar beyond the viewport.

“If I know you as well as I believe I do,” he said, “you’re going to like working with Jim.”

“Working for him?”

“With him,” Drake corrected, a faint smile touching one corner of his mouth. “The distinction matters.”

“Who is he?”

“Jim Halescott. The man behind Mantis Acquisitions. Though when you meet him, you’ll probably assume he’s someone’s security chief. Young looking lad, broad through the shoulders, military haircut. He looks like the man who stands behind someone important.”

“But?”

“He is the important man.”

Caelin waited.

“You’d never know it from speaking to him. No entourage. No expensive Gallente theatre. No implants advertising the size of his accounts. He’s remarkably humble, considering the wealth, information and productive capacity he controls.”

“How much wealth?”

“Enough that quantifying it becomes tedious.”

“And his network?”

Drake lifted his glass but did not drink. “Thousands of people contribute to his operations. Some knowingly. Many without the slightest idea that he exists.”

Caelin’s expression hardened. “That sounds less like humility and more like camouflage.”

“With Jim, it is usually both.”

“And you trust him?”

“I trust that he rewards competence, remembers loyalty and has no interest in making enemies when he could make suppliers.” Drake set down his glass. “He has accumulated extraordinary power without developing the tiresome need to perform it for everyone in the room. I suspect you’ll appreciate that.”

“You seem certain we’ll get along.”

“I think he’ll respect that you do what you say you’ll do. And you’ll respect that he never asks anyone to kneel.” Drake’s smile returned, easy and faintly mischievous. “He simply arranges matters so that standing beside him becomes the most profitable place to be.”

“And if I don’t like him?”

“You will. He’s a surprisingly decent fellow.”

A brief silence passed between them.

“By my standards, anyways” Drake added.

Then he leaned forward.

“I need you to cover my work. For a while. Someone people already know. Someone they’ll trust because they trust me.”

For the first time since arriving, Caelin noticed something beneath Drake's composure. Not panic. Pressure. The kind that had been building for long enough that even Drake could no longer simply outfly it.

That, more than anything, convinced Caelin this was real.

Caelin remembered the gate camp, BlackCrystal writing him off, and Drake turning his ship around.

He remembered what it meant to have one person decide you were worth the cost.

"How long?"

Drake's shoulders relaxed slightly.

"I don't know."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have."

Caelin studied him.

Time had done little to soften what he felt toward the Federation. The people he had lost were still dead. No apology had ever made that right.

Drake had never asked him to forgive any of it.

That was probably why Caelin had eventually learned to trust him.

The one pilot who had looked at the arithmetic and disagreed with it.

Caelin sighed.

"You're going to owe me."

Drake finally smiled, and for the first time that evening it looked genuine.

"I was rather hoping we were even."

"We're not."

"Of course not."

Outside the window, another ship undocked and made its way into the traffic beyond Jita 4-4.

Years ago, Drake had gone back for a Caldari pilot everyone else had decided to leave behind.

Now he had reached out because, for once, he needed that pilot to come through for him.

Caelin had no idea what Drake was running from, or into.

But he already knew how this was going to end.

That was what the favour was for.

That was what it had always been for.

The Safe Spot — Episode 13: Jim Halescott

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 02:52:00 +0000

This week, Rixx Javix and I sit down with Jim Halescott, one of EVE Online’s most unconventional entrepreneurs. From thousands of characters and an industrial network stretching across New Eden to an ambitious plan for something resembling a galaxy-wide chain of convenience stores, Jim has built an EVE career almost entirely outside the paths the game officially gives us. What sounds absurd at first gradually reveals itself as a remarkably sophisticated operation involving manufacturers, haulers, intelligence gatherers, market manipulation and hundreds of working relationships.

But the conversation goes well beyond ISK and spreadsheets. We explore why Jim considers highsec a legitimate endgame, how certain mechanical changes quietly weakened player communities, what EVE’s Freelance Jobs could become, and why the game’s greatest opportunities often exist in the spaces its developers never deliberately designed.

Along the way, we also reflect on how EVE can shape real-world careers, business instincts and our willingness to take risks. It is a fascinating glimpse into what becomes possible when someone stops asking what there is to do in EVE and starts inventing something no one else thought to build.

Where to find us!

And if you're watching on YouTube, do us a solid — like, subscribe, and drop a comment. It helps more than you think.

Dark Matter Season 2 is upon us in less then 3 weeks!

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:27:21 +0000

I went into Season One of Dark Matter knowing absolutely nothing about it—which, in retrospect, was probably the best possible way to experience it. A former coworker had simply told me I had to watch it. That it would blow my mind.

And yes, suffice to say, my mind was thoroughly blown.

There’s a point in the season where you think you understand the ramifications of the Box and the alternate realities it opens. Except you don’t. You’ve barely scratched the surface. By those final episodes, the full breadth—and potentially infinite consequences—finally begins to sink in.

That’s what stayed with me.

Not simply the science-fiction premise, but the uncomfortable personal question underneath it: how many different lives might each of us have lived? What if we’d been more cautious, less cautious, more direct—or simply made one different choice at precisely the right moment?

Season Two premieres August 28, so now is the perfect time to watch the first if you have not seen it — or in my case, binge it again so everything is still fresh for Season 2.

I've only watched the Season 2 trailer twice, so I genuinely have no idea where the story goes from here, and that’s precisely why I’m excited.

Silo: The strange grief of an adaptation

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 01:56:20 +0000

A note for show-only viewers: no major plot spoilers here — just one book reader's reflections on how much the characters have changed.

Watching Silo with my teenage daughter has reminded me of something I hadn't expected.

We're watching the same show. But we're not watching the same story.

She's experiencing Silo exactly as it unfolds on screen. Every mystery is new. Every revelation lands for the first time. Every theory is still possible.

I've read Hugh Howey's trilogy — Wool, Shift, and Dust — at least twice, if not three times. I've lost track.

I don't just remember the story.

I remember the characters. As actual people.

And that's made Season 3 a surprisingly more difficult experience so far.

Not because I think the television series is bad. Far from it. Rebecca Ferguson continues to carry the show with a fantastic performance, the production design is among the best science fiction currently on television, and Apple has built a world that genuinely feels lived in.

The problem isn't the quality.

It's that somewhere along the way, I realized I was no longer watching one version of Silo.

I was watching two.

This isn't new to Season 3 since the show has been charting its own course starting with the first season. Sims exists in the novels as the head of IT Security, but he occupies a relatively small role in the story. The television series elevates him into one of its principal characters, while the entire Judicial storyline—including Judge Meadows—is largely an invention of the adaptation. I noticed those divergences early on and, for the most part, made my peace with them.

But by Season 3, the accumulated weight of those differences finally caught up with me.

The conversations got harder

Normally, discussing an adaptation with someone who hasn't read the books should be fun. You avoid spoilers of course, ask about their theories, and quietly smile when they get close to the truth.

Season 3 has made that almost impossible. Not because I know what's coming. But because after three seasons of invented characters, merged storylines, and reshaped motivations, I don't always know anymore. The series has drifted far enough from the novels that every conversation feels like walking through a minefield.

For the first time, my knowledge of the novels isn't helping me enjoy conversations about the show.

It's actually getting in the way.

Grieving for the version of the characters as I'd imagined them

When people compare books and television, they usually focus on scenes that were cut or plot points that changed.

I found myself missing something else entirely.

People.

Not because the actors aren't good.

Not because the writing is poor.

Simply because many of the people I spent hundreds of pages getting to know either don't exist in this version of the story, have been merged into someone else, or have become fundamentally different.

Donald and Helen's bittersweet relationship.

Anna.

The version of Senator Thurman I had carried in my head for years.

Knox as I imagined him while reading.

Even smaller supporting characters whose personalities quietly shaped the novels.

Some disappeared entirely. Others survived only in name.

And that's a strangely difficult thing to explain.

Oh, Juliette

Rebecca Ferguson's Juliette is compelling, determined, and completely believable. But she's not quite the Juliette I've carried around in my imagination since finishing Wool.

And that's not a criticism of Ferguson. She's playing the Juliette the series has written, and she's doing it exceptionally well. The Juliette I remember was a mechanical engineer first.

A different version of MacGyver.

Faced with an impossible situation, her instinct wasn't to react emotionally.

It was to understand how the machine worked.

To figure out the problem, and build a solution.

The television series understandably leans harder into her emotional journey. Books can spend pages inside a character's mind. Television can't.

Neither approach is wrong.

They're simply different interpretations of the same person.

Reading is actually a collaboration when you think about it...

I think that's what I've been struggling with all throughout the series. Reading a novel has always felt like an act of collaboration to me. The author gives us the words, but we provide the faces, the voices, the pauses, and the expressions. We assemble these people in our own imagination, piece by piece, until they become as real to us as any character on screen. After reading a trilogy so many times, those imagined people become remarkably real.

A TV or movie adaptation doesn't replace blank spaces. It replaces your version.

I've often thought Peter Jackson accomplished something remarkable with The Lord of the Rings. Of course, Jackson made changes to Tolkien's masterpiece. Entire chapters disappeared, characters were reshaped, and timelines shifted. Yet I always felt I was watching Tolkien's story translated into another medium. The details had changed, but the soul of the story remained intact.

With Silo, especially by the third season, I find myself feeling something different. Not disappointment. Not frustration. Something closer to watching another talented storyteller reinterpret a world I already know by heart. That's neither good nor bad—it's simply... different.

I'll keep watching, not because I'm hoping it eventually becomes the books. That ship sailed a long time ago. I'll keep watching because I'm genuinely curious to see where this version of Silo wants to go. I just wasn't prepared for how much I'd miss the version of Howey's characters who existed in my imagination.

And maybe that's the unexpected gift of watching it with my daughter.

Every week, I get to experience Silo through someone else's fresh eyes, even if I can never quite watch it that way myself.

The Safe Spot — Episode 12: Winning In Eve

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 11:34:00 +0000

After a nearly month-long hiatus, Rixx and I are back from the summer lull and easing into one of those deceptively simple EVE questions that quickly opens up into something much bigger: what does it actually mean to win in a game that never really ends?

We start with vacation, heat, and the usual New Eden summer slowdown, then wander into sandbox metaphors, piracy, loss, leadership, friendship, aging, and why EVE is less a game you beat than a place you keep returning to.

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Back from summer, back to New Eden — We catch up after vacation, talk about the summer slowdown, and how EVE tends to get quieter when real life, heat, travel, and family time pull people away from Discord and New Eden.
Can you actually win EVE Online? — We dig into the main question of the episode: how do you define winning in a sandbox MMO with no final boss, no ending screen, and no single path everyone is meant to follow?
The sandbox within the sandbox — Rixx and I stretch the sandbox metaphor into a full playground, with different players coming and going, playing their own smaller games, leaving stories behind, and returning years later to find the world still there.
Small wins, long goals, and pirate victories — We talk about the many different ways players create their own victories, from finding a good fight or moving goods safely to running events, supporting a corp, planning ahead, or simply logging off satisfied.
When losing still counts — Rixx shares stories about failed objectives, painful early losses, and mistakes that still turned into something valuable, which leads us into one of EVE’s oldest truths: sometimes you lose the ship but still win the story.
The corp that keeps you playing — We talk about how important the right corp can be, especially when you are new, frustrated, broke, or convinced you may never figure the game out. A good group can turn a hard loss into the reason you stay.
The meta keeps moving — From old ship fits to changing mechanics to locals adapting to your habits, we look at how EVE constantly pushes players to relearn, adjust, and avoid becoming too predictable.
Leadership, scale, and knowing what works — Rixx reflects on Stay Frosty, A Band Apart, coalition projects, and the point where growth can stop feeling like winning if it turns the game into too much management.
Quitting, returning, and the community that remains — We push back on the idea that quitting is the only way to “win EVE,” while also recognizing that people leave for good reasons, come back years later, and often remain part of the wider community even when they are no longer logging in.
EVE as an experience, not an endgame — We close on the idea that EVE is not really something you complete. It is a world you experience, shape, step away from, return to, and carry with you long after you close the client.
Closing it out by rolling the hole — We wrap with the usual links and sign-off, then hand the episode over to this week’s song: “Roll the Hole,” a wormhole-flavoured sendoff full of statics, scouts, Bob, probes, and the quiet terror of ending up on the wrong side.

Where to find us!

And if you're watching on YouTube, do us a solid — like, subscribe, and drop a comment. It helps more than you think.

The Foundational Rules of EVE Online

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:09:14 +0000

Before we recorded Episode 11 of The Safe Spot, Rixx sent me three simple rules for EVE Online: all rules apply to all players equally, EVE is about spaceships, and nowhere is 100% safe. That was the spark for the episode — the idea that beneath all the mechanics, balance passes, doctrines, wars, and player drama, there are a few foundational principles that explain why EVE works when it works.

But the idea stayed with me after we finished recording. Those three rules felt less like a closed list and more like the beginning of a larger conversation. They made me think about loss, trust, information, inconvenience, player history, and all the strange social machinery that makes New Eden more than just another online game.

What follows is a further exploration of those rules — not an official rulebook, and not a manifesto anyone needs to agree with completely, but an attempt to name the principles that feel foundational to EVE Online. Read them as a returning pilot. Read them as someone who's been around long enough to remember when some of these things went without saying — and who's watched what happens when they get ignored.

Coming back to EVE after time away is strange. The launcher is familiar. The map is familiar. The old instincts are still there — but the game has shifted around you. Ships have changed. Groups have risen and collapsed. Systems you once understood now carry new assumptions.

So when Rixx laid out three foundational rules on The Safe Spot, they landed less like nostalgia and more like a diagnostic tool: if EVE feels right, it is usually because these rules are intact; if it feels wrong, one of them is probably being bent.

The first three come directly from Rixx. I agree with them completely — and I'd argue they're the load-bearing foundation the rest of the structure sits on.

Read them as a returning pilot. Read them as someone who's been around long enough to remember when these things went without saying — and who's watched what happens when they get ignored.

1. All rules apply to all players equally — no exceptions

The sandbox only works if the same universe pushes back on everyone. Veterans, newbros, solo pilots, bloc leaders, industrialists, pirates, and haulers all operate under the same underlying laws. No playstyle receives special immunity from consequence, and no player earns special protection from outcome.

Equal rules don't mean equal results. Better preparation, better intel, better friends, and better judgment should matter. Bad decisions need room to produce bad results. The sandbox should be fair in structure, not symmetrical in experience. Special treatment corrodes trust in the world faster than almost anything else.

2. EVE is about spaceships

Everything eventually connects back to ships undocking, travelling, fighting, scouting, hauling, building, dying, or being replaced. Industry matters because ships need to be built. Markets matter because ships and modules need to move. Diplomacy matters because it decides where ships go and why.

No single fantasy should become the official "right" version of EVE — the miner needs the pirate, the pirate needs the hauler, the hauler needs the industrialist, and the industrialist needs destruction. Lore, structures, events, and expansions should support the central fantasy of capsuleers in space. EVE works because playstyles collide. Removing one ecosystem weakens the others.

3. Nowhere is 100% safe — safety is a scale

High-sec should be safer, not safe. Low-sec should feel predatory and opportunistic. Null-sec should be dangerous, political, and player-policed. Wormholes should remain uncertain and intelligence-poor. Risk should vary by space, but it should never disappear.

The one genuine sanctuary is a docked ship — as long as you're in station, you're technically safe. But that safety comes at a cost: you're not flying, not earning, not contributing. The moment you undock, the scale applies again. Conflict does not need to be constant, but it must remain possible everywhere — in markets, in hauling lanes, in highsec mission pockets, and in diplomatic channels. Systems that fully remove player interference tend to become sterile. EVE should protect possibility, not comfort.

4. Loss must matter

This one is a direct corollary of Rule 3. If nowhere is truly safe, then loss is always possible — and if loss is always possible, it has to mean something. Destruction gives ships value. A killmail is not just an ending — it creates demand, memory, revenge, lessons, propaganda, and industry. Loss teaches what survival cannot. The player economy depends on things exploding.

When loss becomes painless, EVE becomes thinner.

5. The economy must remain player-shaped

Mining, production, hauling, markets, destruction, speculation, and war should remain connected. Player decisions should create shortages, gluts, opportunities, cartels, scams, and regional differences. Industry should matter because other players depend on it. War should affect markets, and markets should affect war.

The proof is in the data. The official EVE Online Monthly Economic Report reads like a macroeconomic briefing for a small nation — ISK supply, trade volumes, mining output, destruction sinks. Oz breaks it down every month on The Oz Report, a podcast that treats EVE's economy with the same seriousness you'd bring to real markets. That level of analysis is only possible because the economy is genuinely complex — because players are the ones moving the numbers.

The economy should never feel like a vendor system with extra steps.

6. Information is power — and preparation beats reaction

Intel is often more important than raw firepower. D-scan, local, probes, maps, market data, wormhole chains, spies, scouts, and memory all matter. zKillboard — EVE's public killmail database — is one of the most powerful intel tools available: a corp's kill history, their preferred ship doctrines, their activity patterns, and their losses are all readable before you ever share a grid with them. The caveat is context. A killboard shows what happened, not why — a string of losses can mean a corp is getting farmed, or that they're deliberately absorbing fights to learn. Read it as a data point, not a verdict.

The fight often starts long before grid. Fitting, staging, scouting, bookmarking, doctrine design, logistics, and enemy research are all part of combat. Good preparation lets smaller groups punch above their weight, and poor preparation should have consequences. EVE rewards the player who thought three jumps ahead.

7. Trust is a game mechanic

Reputation has value because betrayal is possible. Corporations and alliances are built on social risk, not just shared objectives. Recruitment, diplomacy, hauling contracts, director roles, spies, and shared infrastructure all depend on trust.

Friendship is powerful because the game allows betrayal. If trust has no consequence, EVE loses one of its strangest strengths.

8. Scale creates burdens as well as power

Bigger ships should be powerful but vulnerable to commitment and escalation. Bigger blocs gain reach but inherit bureaucracy, logistics strain, politics, and inertia. Bigger wallets create options, not immunity. Scale should solve some problems while creating new ones.

Every advantage should carry a tradeoff — safety reduces reward, mobility costs something, projection creates exposure, specialization creates weakness elsewhere. Power without tradeoff is design rot.

9. The universe should remain inconvenient

Distance matters. Logistics matter. Fuel, hauling, timers, regional markets, staging, and geography create strategic texture. Convenience should remove needless irritation, not erase meaningful friction.

New Eden feels large because movement and supply require effort. A universe that's too easy to traverse becomes too easy to dominate.

10. The unknown must remain dangerous

EVE needs uncertainty. A neutral in local should mean something. A wormhole connection should carry tension. A cyno, an empty system, an unfamiliar corporation, or a too-easy target should raise questions.

The game is strongest when players can misread the room — and be lethally wrong.

11. The social fabric is core gameplay

Corporations, alliances, fleets, Not Purple Shoot It (NPSI) groups — open-fleet roams where anyone can join regardless of corp or alliance, with the only rule being "if it's not in fleet, it's a target" — wormhole crews, mining operations, logistics chains, and market networks are not side systems.

The real game often happens in comms, Discord, jabber pings, spreadsheets, doctrines, and trust networks. Leadership is gameplay. Mentorship is gameplay. Community infrastructure is as important as ship balance.

12. Players create the history

The great stories of EVE are wars, betrayals, migrations, scams, rescues, market shocks, collapses, and impossible logistics projects. Developer-authored story should frame the sandbox, not replace it. The strongest EVE history is emergent, messy, political, and player-owned — carried forward by pilots, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, and old war stories told in corp chat at 2am.

That’s the distinction that matters: Fenris can light the fuse, but players decide whether it becomes a skirmish, a doctrine shift, a diplomatic crisis, or a war people still talk about ten years later.

13. New Eden must remember

EVE's power comes from accumulated history: wars, scams, grudges, monuments, killmails, doctrines, betrayals, coalitions, and ruined empires. Player history gives systems emotional weight — a fight in a famous system feels different because memory lives there. That memory takes physical form inside New Eden, and the monuments are worth knowing.

The Journey of Katia Sae Memorial stands in Saisio, near the gate she jumped through to begin her decade-long tour. From December 2009 to March 2019, Katia visited all 7,805 reachable systems in both known space and wormhole space without losing a single ship — a Guinness World Record, and the first time Fenris built a monument to honor a specific player's achievement.

In B-R5RB, the Titanomachy marks the Bloodbath of 2014 — a 21-hour battle involving over 7,500 players and the destruction of 75 Titans, at the time the most destructive engagement in gaming history. The wrecks are non-salvageable. They just drift.

In the quiet system of Molea, the Fallen Capsuleers Memorial marks what began in 2007 as a player-built cemetery — Azia Burgi collecting corpses left on battlefields and cataloguing them in anchored cans. Over time, pilots began using it to memorialize real-world friends and family who had passed. Fenris eventually made it permanent. The cans remain.

And in Reykjavik, Iceland, the physical EVE Monument — erected in 2014 — stands as a tribute to the EVE Universe and its community. Player names were engraved into the monument, and a digital time capsule was placed beneath it, set to be opened in 2039.

The game's culture depends on stories being carried forward. This is why Empires of EVE by Andrew Groen matters — it treats EVE not merely as a game, but as a political and cultural history shaped by real people inside a virtual universe.

EVE survives when it remembers what it is: a hostile, player-shaped universe where ships are tools, trust is currency, loss has weight, and history belongs to those reckless enough to undock.

The Safe Spot ep. 11 — covers several of these rules directly. Worth a listen before or after.

Fly safe. o7

The Safe Spot — Episode 11: Summer Rules

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:42:00 +0000

No guest this week — just Rixx and me catching up, comparing notes, and accidentally wandering into one of those bigger EVE conversations: what actually makes the game work after all these years. A little summer lull, a little corp movement, a little real-life desk tinkering, and then straight into the rules beneath the rules.

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Summer EVE and real-life catch-up — Rixx talks through a quiet roam, the weird slowdown that hits during summer, and the arrival of his award from Iceland, while I share a few updates of my own: a new gaming rig, another corp move, and my jump into UCN as I get ready to relearn PvP in a more active environment.
Getting back into the fight — We talk about why returning to PvP is easier when you’re surrounded by people who know what they’re doing: fitted ships, skill plans, corp support, small gang opportunities, and enough structure that losing ships becomes part of the learning curve instead of a reason to log off.
Why this episode is just us — After two guest episodes, we take a breather and go back to the loose Safe Spot format: no big agenda, no interview structure, just two players talking through where they are in EVE and what the game keeps teaching them.
The rules beneath EVE Online — The main thread becomes the foundational ideas that make EVE feel like EVE: one sandbox where the same rules apply to everyone, no pay-to-win shortcuts, spaceships at the centre of the experience, danger even in “safe” places, loss that actually matters, and an economy that only works because ships explode and players have to rebuild.
Information, risk, and reading the room — We dig into how much of EVE happens before the fight starts: checking zKillboard, reading local, using D-scan, spotting bait, understanding ship behaviour, and accepting that even with good intel, the human on the other side can still surprise you.
The real power of friendship in EVE — The conversation lands on the social fabric of the game: corps, alliances, mentorship, shared intel, wingmates, familiar names in chat, and the way other players turn EVE from a complicated spaceship simulator into a living universe worth coming back to.
Closing it out with the Logi Bro — We wrap with the usual links and sign-off, then hand the episode over to this week’s song: “Logi Bro,” a tribute to the logistics pilots quietly keeping everyone alive while the rest of us pretend we had it under control.

Where to find us!

And if you're watching on YouTube, do us a solid — like, subscribe, and drop a comment. It helps more than you think.

Brawl or kite: how a veteran pirate rebuilt my Hookbill for Faction Warfare

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 15:38:13 +0000

It's late. I've been dabbling with my Caldari Navy Hookbill fitting for the past hour. Trying to figure out what's the best setup for my first foray into Faction Warfare (or Factional Warfare?). I think I've got a good fit, but I'm not convinced.

Then comes the next question: what next?

I've joined the Caldari faction, read through all the WARNINGS, but I have not a clue where to go next. The Militia tab popped up, but the conversation doesn't seem too friendly (aren't we supposed to be in the same camp?), and I resist the urge to ask. I'd rather test the waters by myself first, though that might be a bad idea, since I'm now a flashing little blip on someone's overview.

Then I remember Rixx telling me about using Plexes to get into PvP.

So I message him. "I'm in a Hookbill, looking to find Plexes. How does one do that? Please don't laugh..."

He doesn't laugh. He gives me the two-line answer: be in an FW system, make sure plexes show on your overview. That's it.

I've been overthinking this.

Then I ask a fitting question.

"And are 2 Webs better than 1x Web with a Warp Scrambler?"

"Not for you. Start with one web and a scram. Work up to it."

This is going to be a recurring theme. Every time I try to skip ahead to the cool advanced thing, Rixx narrows the decision space. Dual web is a real fit. It is not my fit. Not yet.

I tell him I've got an MSE II, 6,132 EHP. He approves. He asks about rockets. Inferno Rage, I say.

Pause.

"Mostly use scourge, HBs get a bonus."

The Hookbill gets a kinetic damage bonus. Scourge is kinetic. I have been actively not using my hull's signature bonus. I have been flying a Hookbill like it's a generic rocket frigate. Filed under: things the show info screen tells you that I apparently have not been reading.

Then comes the question that reorganizes my entire understanding of the ship.

"Are you using a mwd? Or an AB?"

Afterburner, I tell him. The 1MN Y-S8 Compact.

"Ok so you need rockets my friend. Rapid lights are for distance. And you'll need a mwd, long point for that. Scram AB = rockets."

The fundamental fork in the Hookbill road, delivered as a single line of shorthand. There are two Hookbills. There is the brawler — AB, scram, web, rockets, fighting at 6-9km — and there is the kiter — MWD, long point, light missiles, fighting at 20km plus. They share a hull. They are not the same ship. You pick one.

I pick brawler. I had already picked brawler, I just hadn't known I was picking one.

Rixx starts unspooling the rest of the doctrine. Scourge primary. Carry Caldari Navy variants. Carry some Javelins for reach. AB inside scram range, because — and this is the bit that finally makes everything click —

"The other dude's scram will shut down your MWD. But it won't shut down your AB."

The reason every brawler runs AB isn't preference. It's that the MWD is a dead module the moment someone scrams you. Your propulsion has to survive being tackled, or you're a static target with delusions of mobility. Scram + AB go together because they're the modules that function while you're being held. MWD + long point go together because they're the modules for the fight that happens outside tackle range.

I'd been staring at fits for months without understanding the logic of why certain modules cluster.

I'm trying to keep up. I type back: "So I'm looking at Rockets - AB, scram, web - short range for now. 6 to 8 klicks range."

"Yep. Brawl versus kite."

I confirm the framework back to him like a student trying to prove he was listening. Brawler being close range. Kite being 20k+. He confirms. I'm not lost anymore. I have a map. Or I think I do.

Then he says I should consider a Caldari Navy Medium Shield Extender. It's expensive but worth it. I ask if it replaces the MSE II.

"Hang on ok?"

He's pausing his evening to teach me this. Gotta love the man. I tell him there's no rush, don't intrude on his time. He vanishes for four minutes.

He comes back with a killmail.

Not theory. Not a fitting tool screenshot. Three actual Hookbills he has personally killed, each demonstrating a different variation on the brawl-scram-kite theme. The first is the basic fit. The second has a Target Disruptor in the mids — same archetype, specialized against gun ships. The third runs the faction shield extender.

"Now you can single web it, or double web it. You can faction your shield extender, etc. Some people even faction the AB. You can even use a Target Disruptor in one of the mids — but then you only fight gun ships. There are a thousand variations, but start with something like that and get used to the ship."

He drops another link. Another variation. And another.

"Slow down cowboy!!" — He's got more variations queued up than I have processing bandwidth.

"Those are just 3 variations on that theme."

Three killmails, and he's holding back.

Here's the thing I notice in retrospect: every single one of those killmails is a brawler. He's showing me the same ship in three outfits. None of them are kiters. He's not confusing me with options — he's showing me the range of one decision. Brawl variations.

Stay in your lane.

I ask, just to be sure: "Brawler still, right?"

"Trust me, there are more — but lets keep it simple. These are all brawl, scram kite, fits. You operate right at scram range. And inside web range."

Here comes the geometry lesson. Scram range: 7-10km. Disruptor range: 24km. Web range: roughly 10km. Overheat your scram and you get a little further. Fly a faction scram and you get a little further still. The space you fight in as a brawler is this narrow band — close enough that your scram holds them, close enough that your web slows them, far enough that you've got room to dance with transversal.

I think about Tzophiyah's video I saw earlier. The dual-prop nullsec Hookbill that confused itself between scram-kiting and point-kiting because it had too many mid slots. I think about my own fit, which I'd worked through earlier in the evening — the buffer tank, the three launchers, the AB. I'd accidentally built something close to what Rixx is describing. Not by design. By default. I'd avoided Tzophiyah's trap without knowing I was avoiding it.

I tell him it's slowly registering.

"Yeah, these are complicated things. So one at a time."

That's the line of the night. One at a time. These last 15 minutes, Rixx has been narrowing my decision space — not because the options don't exist, but because trying to learn them all at once is how you learn none of them. Brawl or kite. AB or MWD. One web or two. Scourge or other. Each fork is a real choice. You make it once, you live with it, you fly it until you understand why the choice is what it is.

Then you earn the right to ask about the next variation.

I sign off knowing more about Hookbill PvP than I did when I started, but more importantly, knowing what I don't need to learn yet. The dual-web is sitting there waiting for me. The Target Disruptor variant is sitting there waiting for me. The faction shield extender is sitting there waiting for me. None of them are mine yet. They become mine after I've lost a stack of basic brawl Hookbills in Black Rise and can articulate, in my own words, exactly which limitation of the basic fit is bugging me.

The trick Rixx pulled tonight wasn't teaching me a fit. It was teaching me how to learn a fit. One decision at a time. Master the boring version first. Earn your variations.

Now I just have to undock the thing.

My current fit

Here's where I landed. Four decisions, four groups, each one Rixx talked me into one at a time.

Tackle — scram, AB, web. Caldari Navy Warp Scrambler. 1MN Y-S8 Compact Afterburner. Fleeting Compact Stasis Webifier.

"Scram AB = rockets."

No MWD anywhere on this hull. No long point. I had the kiter sitting right there as an option and I didn't take it — because this whole time was Rixx steering me away from the version of this ship I wasn't ready to fly yet.

Tank — buffer and resists. Caldari Navy Medium Shield Extender, Multispectrum Shield Hardener II, two Small Core Defense Field Extender rigs, one Small Ancillary Current Router.

The faction extender was the expensive ask. I asked if it replaced the MSE II instead of stacking with it. It doesn't — it is the MSE, just the version that costs more and tanks better. Small distinction. Took me a question to get there.

Damage — three Rocket Launcher IIs, Ballistic Control System II, Co-Processor II. Caldari Navy Scourge Rocket and Scourge Rage Rocket in the hold. No Inferno Rage. I'd loaded it out of habit — generic rocket-frigate muscle memory — before Rixx pointed out the obvious thing the ship itself had been telling me the whole time.

"Mostly use scourge, HBs get a bonus."

Kinetic bonus. Scourge is kinetic. I'd been flying a Hookbill like it was any other rocket boat for months. It isn't. It just took someone saying it out loud.

Capacitor — Small Ancillary Current Router I, doing the unglamorous job of keeping the lights on for everything above.

Total cost, a tad over 72M ISK.

That's the fit. It's not the optimized version. I'm not claiming it's the perfect fit (if that even exists!), or that it's the fit a fifteen-year vet would settle on.

It's mine though. It's me figuring it out in real time, one module at a time — same as the chat log above. That's the whole point of starting here instead of three killmails deep.

Fly dangerous. Or die trying! o7

The complete guide to planetary industry in EVE Online

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 01:40:58 +0000

Last evening, my new corp's CEO (more on that later) ran a ninety-minute tutorial on Planetary Industry in lowsec. Genuinely interesting stuff, and exhilarating when you're being chased around a system — enough that it sent me down a rabbit hole earlier today.

I went looking for more, found a handful of YouTube guides, and figured the useful thing to do with that research was put together one guide that actually covers it end to end: what PI is, the two philosophies for running it, what to train and in what order, and how to build both an extraction setup and a full factory chain.

Get ready to dive down another long guide. You should come out the other end with a solid foundation on Planetary Industry — or Planetary Interaction, if you're working off the same ancient New Eden memory as I am.

Table of contents

What is planetary industry?
The tier system: P0 through P4
Two philosophies: extraction planets vs. factory planets
Skills you need
Choosing what to produce
Where to do PI: security space considerations
Setting up an extraction planet (step by step)
Setting up a factory planet (step by step)
Tips and tricks
The bottom line
Resources

Compiled from guides by AloneInFinland & TheMadRambo (factory planet setup) and Aceface (extraction-based PI philosophy and planet mechanics - top image is a screenshot from his video)

What is planetary industry?

Planetary Industry (PI) lets you build structures on planets that extract raw resources and process them into increasingly valuable commodities. You can sell at any tier — raw extracts, refined goods, or high-end manufactured products. The further up the processing chain you go, the more ISK each unit is worth, but the more complexity, logistics, and management you take on.

Think of it as EVE's version of passive income: tedious to set up, largely autonomous once running, and scalable across multiple planets and accounts.

Did I mention that it's passive income?

The tier system: P0 through P4

PI commodities are organized into five tiers. Each tier requires components from the tier below it, and each jump in tier multiplies both value and complexity.

P0 — Raw resources. Extracted directly from planets. Examples: aqueous liquids, felsic magma, non-CS crystals. Worth almost nothing on the market (around 2 ISK per unit for aqueous liquids).
P1 — Basic processed goods. One P0 input, processed in a Basic Industry Facility. Examples: water, silicon, chiral structures. A meaningful jump in value (water sells for roughly 600 ISK versus 2 ISK for aqueous liquids).
P2 — Refined commodities. Two P1 inputs, processed in an Advanced Industry Facility. Examples: coolant (water + electrolytes), miniature electronics (silicon + chiral structures), consumer electronics (toxic metals + chiral structures). Typically sell for around 9,000–12,000 ISK each.
P3 — Specialized commodities. Two or three P2 inputs, processed in an Advanced Industry Facility. Examples: biotech research reports, cryoprotectant solution, supercomputers. Higher value, but require multiple P2 inputs that may come from different planet types.
P4 — Advanced commodities. Three P3 inputs, processed in a High-Tech Industry Facility. Examples: wetware mainframes, integrity response drones. Worth roughly 2.4–2.5 million ISK each. Require a complex multi-tier factory chain.

The core tradeoff: Higher tiers yield more ISK per cycle but demand more planets, more logistics, more hauling, and potentially more accounts. Lower tiers are simpler and more autonomous but generate less income per planet. Whatever tier you you're generating income.

Two philosophies: extraction planets vs. factory planets

These two approaches represent fundamentally different ways to use PI, and understanding the distinction is the single most important decision you'll make.

Extraction planets (Aceface's approach)

You extract raw P0 resources from a planet and process them into P1 or P2 goods on the same planet. Everything happens in one place — no hauling materials between planets.

Best for: Players who want minimal management, are comfortable with moderate income, and don't want to move materials between planets. Ideal for solo players or those with limited play time.

How it works: You place extractors on the planet surface, route the raw materials through Basic Industry Facilities (to make P1s), and optionally through Advanced Industry Facilities (to make P2s). The finished product routes to a launchpad, from which you transfer it to the customs office for pickup.

Key constraint: You're limited by what a single planet produces. You need a planet type that has both P0 resources required for your chosen P2 product. For example, coolant requires water and electrolytes — both found on gas planets. Miniature electronics requires silicon and chiral structures — the P0 precursors (felsic magma and non-CS crystals) are both found on lava planets.

Advantages:

Fully autonomous once set up — extractors run on a cycle (typically 7 days), factories process continuously
No inter-planet hauling
Simple to replicate across all six planets
Very low ongoing effort — just collect finished goods periodically

Disadvantages:

Income per planet is lower than factory setups
You're constrained by what resources exist on the planet
Extraction rates vary by security space (nullsec > lowsec > highsec)
Resource hotspots deplete over time and need repositioning

Factory planets (AloneInFinland & TheMadRambo's approach)

You buy P1 materials on the market, import them onto a barren planet, and process them through a multi-tier factory chain up to P4. The planet is purely a manufacturing facility — no extraction at all.

Best for: Players willing to invest upfront capital and do a resupply run every 4 days in exchange for significantly higher returns. Works well in highsec where extraction yields are poor anyway.

How it works: You deposit purchased P1 materials into the customs office, transfer them to launchpads on the planet surface, and the factory chain processes them through P2 → P3 → P4 automatically. You collect the P4 output every 4 days and resupply with fresh materials.

Key constraint: Requires upfront ISK to buy input materials and a one-time painful setup of factory routing. Only works on barren (preferred, due to smaller radius) or temperate planets.

Advantages:

Highest ISK output per planet (potentially ~2.4 billion ISK every 4 days per planet at current prices for wetware mainframes)
No dependency on extraction rates or security status
Once set up, the resupply cycle is mechanical and fast
Scalable to six planets with maxed Interplanetary Consolidation

Disadvantages:

Requires capital investment for P1 materials every cycle
One-time setup is genuinely tedious (routing every factory)
Profit depends on market spreads between input costs and output prices
Prices fluctuate — your margin can shrink

Skills you need

The short version, if you just want the floor and ceiling: you can start PI with almost nothing trained — Remote Sensing I is the actual hard requirement to touch planets at all. But "can start" and "should run efficiently" are different bars. If you're committing to PI as an income stream rather than a one-off experiment, three skills are worth pushing to V regardless of which philosophy you run: Command Center Upgrades (it's mandatory at V for any P4 factory chain, no exceptions), Interplanetary Consolidation (each level is a whole additional planet — this is the single highest-leverage skill in the list), and Customs Code Expertise (every cycle, forever, so the V is worth it even though it's "just" a tax reduction). Everything else below is real and helps your margins, but those three are the ones that change what you're capable of running, not just how efficiently you run it.

Mandatory for any PI

Command Center Upgrades — Determines how much you can build on a planet. Each level increases the power grid and CPU available. For factory planets producing P4, you need this at level V (no exceptions — the infrastructure simply doesn't fit otherwise). For extraction planets, level IV is workable but V is strongly recommended.
Remote Sensing — Minimum level I to interact with planets at all. Higher levels let you scan planets from further away, which is a convenience, not a necessity.
Interplanetary Consolidation — Each level grants one additional planet (base is one planet, level V gives you six total). More planets = more parallel setups = more income. Train this as high as you can.

Important for profitability

Customs Code Expertise — Reduces NPC tax on imports and exports through customs offices by 10% per level. At level V, you reduce the NPC tax component to its minimum. This directly affects your profit margin on every cycle.
Planetology / Advanced Planetology — Only relevant for extraction setups. Improves the accuracy of resource scans so you can place extractors more effectively. Not needed at all for factory planets.

Market skills that affect PI income

Accounting — Reduces sales tax when you sell your output.
Broker Relations — Reduces broker fees on market orders.

Caldari Navy standings (or the relevant faction) — Higher standings with the faction that controls the station where you sell can add additional percentage reductions.

Every one of these shaves a percentage off your costs or taxes. They compound.

Choosing what to produce

Use a resource like the Adam4EVE PI tool or similar community resources to map out what each planet type produces and what the market prices look like.

The decision framework

If you want minimum effort: Produce P2 items on single-planet extraction setups. Pick a P2 whose two P1 inputs both come from one planet type. Good examples:

Coolant (water + electrolytes) → gas planets
Miniature electronics (silicon + chiral structures) → lava planets
Consumer electronics (toxic metals + chiral structures) → lava planets

If you want maximum ISK: Set up factory planets producing P4 items. Buy P1 materials on the market, import them, and run the full P2 → P3 → P4 chain. Good examples:

Wetware mainframes → barren planets
Integrity response drones → barren planets (same factory layout, different materials)

Adapting to what the planet gives you: Not every planet of the same type has equal resource distribution. Aceface's example is instructive — two of his three lava planets had very low felsic magma, which would bottleneck miniature electronics production. So he switched those two planets to consumer electronics (which uses heavy metals and non-CS crystals instead), because those resources were more abundant. Check your specific planet's resource scan before committing to a product.

Where to do PI: security space considerations

Highsec — Safest, but extraction yields are the lowest. Factory planets work just as well here since they don't extract. Tax rates on NPC customs offices can be high — look for player-owned customs offices (POCOs) with 15% tax or lower.
Lowsec — Better extraction yields than highsec. More risk during customs office interactions. Less traffic means fewer POCOs to choose from.
Nullsec — Best extraction yields. If your corporation has infrastructure and a buyback program, this is where extraction setups shine. Risk depends on how well-defended your space is.
Wormhole space — Comparable to nullsec yields. Logistics are more complex due to wormhole connections changing. Some wormhole corporations run PI as a core income stream.

The takeaway: For extraction setups, nullsec or wormhole space gives you meaningfully more resources per cycle. For factory planets, security status doesn't matter — you're buying inputs on the market anyway, so set up wherever you find low-tax POCOs.

One more lever, if you're serious about the income: tax rate isn't just something you check, it's something you can own. If your corp or alliance controls customs offices on the planets you're using — or you're willing to put one up yourself — you set the rate instead of paying whatever NPC or a rival corp charges. This is most relevant in nullsec, where your alliance likely already has infrastructure, but it applies anywhere.

The gap between "I found a POCO at 15%" and "I or my corp owns the POCO" is the difference between PI as a hobby and PI as real income.

Setting up an extraction planet (step by step)

This follows Aceface's approach for producing P2 items on a single planet.

1. Place and upgrade your command center

You must be in the same solar system and undocked to place a command center. Tether to a player-owned structure for safety. Select the planet, open Planetary Industry view, go to the Build tab (not Scan), place the command center anywhere on the surface, and submit. Then click the command center, upgrade it to maximum level, and submit again.

2. Place your structures

You need:

2 extractor control units (one for each P0 resource)
6 basic industry facilities (3 per resource, converting P0 → P1)
3 advanced industry facilities (combining two P1s into your P2 product)
1 launchpad (storage and customs office interface)

Place everything as close together as possible — shorter links use less power grid, which might let you squeeze in an extra extractor head.

3. Create links

Links are just communication pathways — they don't determine what goes where, only that structures can talk to each other. Chain your structures together with the shortest possible links. You don't need to link every structure to every other structure; an indirect connection through the chain is sufficient.

Think of links as roads. Routes (set up next) are the delivery instructions.

4. Set up extractors

Click each extractor and select the P0 resource it should extract. The scan overlay shows you where that resource is most concentrated — position your extractor heads (the circles you drag around) over the hotspots. Set your cycle length:

Shorter cycles (1–3 days): Higher average yield, but you need to restart extraction more often
Longer cycles (7+ days): Lower average yield, but runs unattended for longer. Extraction rate is highest at the start and tapers off

Choose based on how often you want to log in and interact with PI.

5. Set up routes

This is where you tell each structure where to send its output.

Extractors route P0 resources → launchpad
Launchpad routes P0 resources → basic industry facilities
Install the correct schematic on each basic facility (e.g., felsic magma → silicon)
Basic facilities route P1 output → launchpad
Launchpad routes P1 resources → advanced industry facilities
Install the correct schematic on each advanced facility (e.g., silicon + chiral structures → miniature electronics)
Advanced facilities route P2 output → launchpad

6. Start production and collect

Submit everything. The extractors begin pulling resources, the factories begin processing. When you want to collect, open the launchpad, select your finished P2 goods, and transfer them to the customs office. Then fly to the customs office and pick them up.

Setting up a factory planet (step by step)

This follows AloneInFinland & TheMadRambo's approach for producing P4 items (wetware mainframes).

1. Find your planets

Look for a system with 3+ barren planets (6 is ideal if you have Interplanetary Consolidation V). Barren planets are preferred over temperate because their smaller radius means shorter links, which saves power grid. Check the POCO tax rates — aim for 15% or lower.

2. Place and upgrade your command center

Same process as extraction: be in system, be undocked (tether for safety), place the command center on the planet surface, submit, then upgrade to maximum and submit again.

3. Build the factory infrastructure

The layout for a P4 factory planet (working from center outward):

Center: 1 high-tech industry facility (produces your P4 item)
Inner ring: 3 advanced industry facilities arranged in a triangle around the high-tech facility (these produce the 3 P3 inputs)
Middle ring: 3 launchpads, one attached to each advanced facility (these serve as storage and import/export points)
Outer ring: 18 basic industry facilities — 3 pairs of 2 coming off each launchpad (6 per launchpad). Each pair produces one of the three P2 inputs needed by its corresponding P3 factory. You need pairs (two factories per P2 type) because the P2 production rate needs to be double to keep up with the P3 factory's consumption rate.

Place structures as close together as possible (push until the highlight goes red, then pull back just enough to place).

4. Create all links

Connect each pair of outer factories to each other, connect each pair to its launchpad, connect launchpads to each other, connect launchpads to the inner-ring advanced factories, and connect those to the central high-tech facility. Everything needs a path to everything else.

5. Set recipes (one-time)

Working from center outward:

High-tech facility: Select your P4 product (e.g., wetware mainframes). Create a route sending the output to any launchpad.
Three advanced facilities: Each one gets one of the three P3 inputs required by the P4 recipe. For wetware mainframes, these are biotech research reports, cryoprotectant solution, and supercomputers. Route each output to the corresponding launchpad.
Eighteen basic factories: Mouse over each P3 recipe's info to see its three P2 inputs. Each pair of basic factories produces one P2 input. Set the recipe and route the output to the corresponding launchpad.

6. Route materials between tiers (one-time)

From each launchpad, route the P2 materials inward to the advanced factory that needs them. Then route the P3 output from each advanced factory's launchpad to the central high-tech facility. When everything is correctly routed, the red warning rings on all factories will disappear.

7. Deposit materials and create final routes

Go to the customs office for the planet. There's no trick to landing here safely — warping in-system now takes you straight to the customs office gantry (it's directly warpable and visible on the overview), and you're exactly as exposed on arrival as you would be at a gate. Check local before you commit, fly something you can afford to lose, and align out before you start the transfer if the system's hot.

From the customs office, transfer materials to the correct launchpads. You need to know which launchpad handles which P3 chain — write down each launchpad's ID code and which recipe chain it feeds.

Materials needed per planet for a 4-day cycle (wetware mainframes):

Material	Quantity
Oxygen	7,680
Biofuels	7,680
Chiral structures	7,680
Toxic metals	15,360
Proteins	15,360
Electrolytes	15,360
Reactive metals	23,040
Bacteria	23,040
Water	23,040

On first setup only: once materials are on the planet, go to each outer-ring factory and create routes from the launchpad to that factory for each of its two P1 inputs. Red boxes turn orange as inputs are routed; red rings disappear when both inputs are connected. This step is never repeated — on subsequent cycles, you just deposit materials and they flow automatically.

8. Submit, collect in 4 days, repeat

Hit submit. The factories kick into gear. In 4 days, collect 48 wetware mainframes from the customs office. Deposit the next batch of P1 materials. The routes are permanent.

The hauling reality nobody mentions

Look at that materials table again: roughly 138,000 m³ of P1 inputs per planet, every 4 days (P1 commodities run 1 m³ per unit). Scale that to six planets and you're moving close to 830,000 m³ of cargo on a recurring basis — that's a freighter-scale problem, not a "throw it in an Iteron" problem, and it's a different fit and a different risk profile than the finished P4 output (50 m³ a unit, trivial to move).

Figure out your hauling ship and your route before you commit to six factory planets, not after. A freighter alone in a system isn't safe just because it's highsec — it's slow, it's a known gank target, and most freighter pilots fly it without a webbing escort or a scout. If you're running this at scale, budget for the hauling logistics as part of the setup cost, the same way you'd budget for the P1 materials themselves.

Tips and tricks

There is no warp-drag trick anymore — and treating the customs office as exposed is the safer mindset. Older PI guides (pre–Into the Abyss, 2018-era) taught a timing trick where you'd drag materials into the customs office window the instant your warp decel bar started dropping, beating attackers to the punch before they could lock you. That assumed an approach window that doesn't work that way anymore — in-system warp now takes you directly to the customs office gantry, full stop, the same way it takes you to a gate. You arrive exposed, same as anywhere else in space. There's no special defense baked into the mechanic.

If you're hauling something that matters, the actual safety habits are: check local before committing, fly a hauler you can afford to lose, don't bling it out, and align toward your next destination before you start the transfer if the system feels hot.

Highsec ganking has picked back up through 2026 — Caldari space and common hauling routes have seen a real uptick in gatecamps and suicide-gank activity — so don't assume highsec PI runs are automatically safe just because the security status says so.

Tether everything you can: Any interaction with the planetary industry interface (except the initial command center placement and customs office visits) can be done while tethered to a player-owned structure. Use this.
Links are roads, routes are delivery instructions. This distinction trips up every new PI player. Links establish that two structures can communicate. Routes tell materials where to go. You set up links once and mostly forget them. Routes are where the actual logistics logic lives.
Shorter links save power grid. Place structures as close as possible. The power grid you save might let you add another extractor head or factory.
Check resource distribution before committing. Not every planet of the same type is equal. One lava planet might have abundant felsic magma while another has almost none. Adapt your product choice to what the specific planet actually offers.
Launchpads double as storage. You don't need separate storage facilities — launchpads have substantial storage capacity and also serve as your import/export interface. Using them for both roles saves power grid.
Factory planet routes are permanent. The painful routing step is genuinely a one-time operation. Every subsequent 4-day cycle is just: deposit materials → separate into launchpads → submit. That's it.
Write down your launchpad codes. Each launchpad has a unique alphanumeric ID. Map which launchpad feeds which production chain and keep that reference somewhere — if you put the wrong materials in the wrong launchpad, nothing gets produced.
Adapt to market conditions. The factory planet layout for wetware mainframes works identically for integrity response drones or other P4 products — same structure count, same topology, just different recipes and materials. If one P4's margin shrinks, you can switch.

The bottom line

PI is not glamorous. The setup is tedious, the interface is clunky, and the optimization is fiddly. But it's one of the few truly passive income streams in EVE — once configured, it generates ISK whether you're online running missions, PvPing, or not logged in at all.

The real decision isn't "should I do PI" but "how much management am I willing to tolerate." If the answer is "almost none," run single-planet extraction setups producing P2 goods. If the answer is "I'll spend one painful afternoon and then 15 minutes every 4 days," build factory planets and produce P4 commodities worth billions. Either way, the planets don't care if you're asleep.

For the record, I'm nowhere near actually running any of this.

But it got its hooks in me writing it out, enough that I'm queuing up the skills now — just enough to get P0 (maybe even P1) going on a single planet, nothing fancier than that to start.

I'll loop back once I've got something running and let you know how it actually goes versus how it reads on paper.

Resources

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The Safe Spot — Episode 10: "Black Rise Regional News"

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:57:49 +0000

Ten episodes! 10!!

I honestly can't believe we've hit double digits. Most podcast series — EVE or otherwise — never make it past the first handful before fading out, so the fact that Rixx and I are still here, still recording, and still having an absolute blast feels like a milestone worth celebrating.

And we're not slowing down. No siree, Bob!

We've got so much more in store.

So, in this episode we welcome Black Rise Regional News — let's call him "Burn" short for BRRN — to The Safe Spot. Burn is a Caldari faction warfare pilot, UCN director, and the creator behind one of EVE's most unique written content projects: a regional newspaper covering the wars, politics, and shenanigans of Black Rise and surrounding space.

Rixx and I dig into how Burn went from flu-ridden backlog gamer to militia diplomat and propagandist-in-chief, and I listen in while the two of them swap faction warfare war stories along the way.

I mostly listened and took notes on this one — these two had a lot to talk about!

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Meet our guest, Black Rise Regional News — Burn is a Caldari militia pilot flying with UCN who got nominated for a Creator Award in the written category. We introduce him and settle on his nickname for the show — Burn, it'll be!
Burn's EVE origin story — Started in February of last year after getting the flu, loaded up the backlog, remembered reading about massive space battles and heists, and gave EVE a shot. Spent two weeks gas huffing solo in wormhole space, got recruited into a bad corp that stuck him on moon mining, then found UCN through the EVE Discord and joined Caldari faction warfare.
The speedrun to leadership — Burn went from recruit to recruiter to trainer to director within six months of joining UCN, not because of fitting theory or FC skills, but because he's the morale guy — the Neelix of the corporation, as I put it. Finding the right corp and your people is job number one in EVE.
Suspect mechanics and expensive cynos — Burn shares a story about blowing up a suspect miner who didn't even know what suspect status meant, then reimbursing the hull. Rixx and Burn swap tales about a Rapier used to light a cyno and mention that eternal lesson of never flying what you can't replace.
Gate camps and the Tama shortcut — The Onnamon-Kinakka gate camp, fat haulers dying on the regular, and a top-five kill list featuring a 7 billion ISK Mastodon. People still take the shortcut through Tama from Jita, and we still appreciate them for it.
The Griffin Navy leaderboard challenge — Burn took on a personal challenge to climb the Griffin Navy Issue leaderboard using ECM and two blasters, punching up into Algoses and Coraxes. ECM is divisive, but the stories are great.
How Black Rise Regional News got started — After UCN lost 80% of its active FCs and roster to a corp departure, Burn needed something to boost morale. The militia took a surprise command op system, and that victory became the first edition of BRRN. It started circulating in Caldari militia Discord servers before eventually hitting Reddit.
The Caldari militia's insular comms problem — Unlike the Minmatar with Minmatar Fleet Alliance, the Caldari don't have a single unified militia Discord. There are four or five to choose from. The guys from Sheriff built caldarifw.com to help centralize guides, after-action reports, and a large-print version of BRRN.
Burn's editorial process — He runs a private Discord server as his newsroom, uses Dotlan's faction warfare filter to track system flips, and collects funny comms moments and militia chat snippets to turn into headlines. The "news in short" section comes from copy-pasting those little notes and distilling them. No strict schedule — sometimes one edition every three or four days, sometimes longer gaps depending on how busy work is.
Shouting out the small corps — Burn makes a point of crediting smaller groups that show up to bashes and system captures, like Hisera Kab Delivery, Stone Warriors, and Private Security Squad with Eve Dest. Those shoutouts mean a lot to small corps trying to make their mark in faction warfare.
Advice for aspiring EVE regional journalists — Don't take yourself too seriously, keep your eyes and ears open, and don't cut off communication with the other side. Burn is also a diplo for UCSC and keeps open lines with Gallente and Guristas groups — you'd be surprised how much people tell you if you just ask and don't start drama.
Notoras News nostalgia — Rixx brings up the old YouTube series Notoras News, set in a dead-end system near Kedama where nothing ever happened. Burn had seen it too. We briefly mourn its passing and celebrate the tradition of weird EVE content.
Burn's move into video content — His first video edition of BRRN took two weeks to edit, but now he has a framework to reuse. He also speed-edited a video about clearing the Historic Wanderer achievement in two days after the Cradle of War expansion dropped.
Rixx's early take on Cradle of War — Rixx is cautiously optimistic but wants to give it another week before forming a real opinion. New plex types — moderate, interceptor, elite chaos plexes — and environmental effects inside them are creating a lot of unpredictability.
The Caldari campaign goals and the Syndicate gate — The Caldari are the only faction to have completed three campaign objectives. Their reward: a stargate from Ienakkamon to Syndicate, with the Intaki Syndicate dissolving and its corps folding into the Caldari State, plus some Syndicate LP store modules moving to State Protectorate.
I confess to being the sponge in the room — I admit I spent most of this episode absorbing everything like a junior leaguer sitting between two vets. I'm flying with Jaeger Inc, dabbling with faction warfare, some corp mates are coming through Jaeger Academy in Exordium, and looking forward to eventually holding my own in conversations like this one.
The Oz got podded — Burn reveals that the Oz, yes yes, our previous guest who said he'd go Gallente, got podded in Piak in Black Rise. Burn arranged to procure his frozen corpse and added it to his favorites on Frozen Crypt, a tool that scans your assets and displays your corpse collection. New Safe Spot tradition: every guest must eliminate the previous one. Station containers have a 2,000 item limit, which one of Burn's corpmates discovered by filling one with corpses. One of the new Cradle of War achievements requires losing 500 ships to earn the title "Meat Popsicle.
Wrap-up and the Black Rise song — We close out the episode and the outro song is, impossibly, actually called "Black Rise." Sometimes the universe just lines up.

Where to find us!

And if you're watching on YouTube, do us a solid — like, subscribe, and drop a comment. It helps more than you think.

Speedlinking New Eden — June 7th, 2026

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:38:13 +0000

The week New Eden held its breath.

That's the only way I can describe it. Seven days, almost no major announcements, no lore bombs, no surprise developer streams — and yet the whole EVE ecosystem felt coiled, tense, pointed at one fixed date: Tuesday, June 9th, 11:00 UTC.

The Cradle of War expansion drops in less than 48 hours and the pre-launch machinery ran full-tilt this past week: expansion notes published early, a developer roundtable posted to YouTube, and the Mastery Pack sale running down to its last hours.

Oh, and NoizyGamer quietly dropped some of the most interesting player-retention data of the year. We'll get to that in a minute.

Let's jump right in.

Fenris Creations / EVE Online — official

Warpath ends as CONCORD protocols re-established | EVE Universe (Published June 2nd | YC128-06-02) The in-universe news dispatch closing out the Capsuleer Day XXIII: Warpath event. CONCORD has finally purged the Warpath cyberattack from its security protocols, allowing its rapid response fleets to resume operating in highsec and forcing empire navy fleets back to designated warzones. The lore details are worth paying attention to: military spending during Warpath is estimated to have spiked to 300% of normal levels, prototype navy destroyers logged over 700 capsuleer kills during the conflict period, and the four empire leaders have agreed to convene at the Inner Circle — hosted by AIR in the newly opened Manifest system inside Exordium.

The diplomatic summit opening Cradle of War's narrative arc is literally being held in the new player starter region. Fenris is doing real worldbuilding work here, threading the seasonal event directly into the expansion that follows it. If you skipped the Warpath event, this dispatch is the cleanest way to catch up on where New Eden's story stands when the servers come back up Tuesday.

Mastery Pack sale now in the NES! | EVE Online (Published June 4th) 23% off Omega time, skill points, MCT bundles and boosters in the New Eden Store. Runs until June 8th — that's TOMORROW!!One purchase per pack per account. Pure commerce, but worth flagging: this is the pre-expansion push, and NoizyGamer's data (more below) suggests the PLEX market has already cooled from Fanfest-era spikes. The timing makes sense — get pilots topped up before launch day.

Cradle of War: expansion notes | EVE Online (Published June 5th) Fenris dropped the full expansion notes four days ahead of launch, something they've been doing more consistently lately.

The notes cover everything: Exordium going fully live, Military Campaigns (PvE and PvP objectives, individual reward tracking, ISK and LP payouts, standings gains without derived standings loss), command carriers for all four empires (Simurgh, Salvation, Gaia, Ymir), four navy destroyers, the Heraldry and Achievements systems, ship balance changes, and the economic adjustments baked into Exordium itself.

The forum thread is already lighting up with questions about campaign objectives, which is exactly the kind of pre-launch engagement Fenris wants to see.

Community Beat for 5 June | EVE Online (Published June 5th) This community spotlight covered a 2.6 trillion ISK dreadbrawl in Querious (WOMP side footage linked, OnlyFleets POV also noted), a newly launched Amarr faction warfare website with fleet timers, auctions, and fitting suggestions. The Querious battle footage is ABSOLUTELY worth watching if you missed it — the editing is genuinely cinematic. Goosebump material.

The meetup calendar is worth bookmarking: EVE Glasgow was on June 6th, EVE North (Toronto) on June 20th, EVE Manchester on June 20th, EVE Down Under in August. Which reminds me, I need to set up a group for Montreal! Or find if one exists.

Cradle of War developer roundtable | YouTube (Published June 5th) The EVE Online lead devs (FC Swift, FC Rattati, FC Okami & FC Burger) sat down for a roundtable discussion ahead of launch. Flagging it here because it's the definitive hear-it-from-the-source summary of what Cradle of War is and what Fenris is hoping it accomplishes. Worth watching if you want to hear the team's framing of Military Campaigns, the Exordium philosophy, and how they're thinking about the Theatres of War saga as a three-expansion arc.

Community signals

The Safe Spot — episode 9, featuring Oz | EVEOGANDA (Published June 2nd) Rixx posted the episode to EVEOGANDA. Episode 9 was a milestone for us: our first-ever guest, Oz, an EVE market analyst and CSM member. We were both really happy with how this one came together.

The timing — right between Fanfest and expansion launch — gave us a lot to dig into, and Oz's perspective on the economic implications of Military Campaigns and the Exordium regional adjustments (reduced payouts, added market fees) is the kind of analysis you won't find in the official dev blogs. If you play the market side of EVE, this episode is worth your time.

I've put together my show notes over on here, on CrazyKinux's Musings.

The Capsuleer Day XXIII: Warpath event wrap-up | The Ancient Gaming Noob (Published June 3rd) Wilhelm closes the book on Warpath with his usual measured take: the event was fine, the competitive nature brought out some predictable behaviour, the mining tasks were a grind, and he ended up running it on four characters anyway despite swearing he wouldn't.

The near-death Mastodon run in Amarr is worth reading for the comedy alone. But the line that sticks with me is his observation that EVE Online has a way of revealing who we are. He's not wrong. Worth reading alongside the in-universe Warpath closure dispatch above; the two pieces bracket the event neatly from both sides.

Flying solo in EVE: going into a brief lull | The Nosy Gamer (Published June 4th) NoizyGamer's regular Tuesday column is doing something most pre-launch coverage ignores: looking at what actually happened to player activity in the run-up to Cradle of War. The numbers are interesting. May averaged 25,629 concurrent accounts on Tranquility — the highest monthly average so far in 2026 and ahead of pace for his bold prediction that this year will hit the highest ACU since 2014. EVE seems to be in a great shape, which Oz had mention on The Safe Spot also.

Noizy remarked that the PLEX market did cooled noticeably this past week: ISK traded for PLEX dropped 25.1% week-over-week, volume down, price stabilized. His read is that the big promotional push is being held for launch day rather than the pre-expansion window, and that the Mastery Pack sale alone isn't moving the needle the way the Fanfest PLEX sales did. That's a useful calibration. The hype is there, but it's not converting to commercial activity yet. Tuesday will tell.

Universal Geographic B-R5RB | EVEOGANDA (Published June 4th) Rixx continues his Universal Geographic video series with a piece on B-R5RB, EVE Online's most famous battle which occured back in January 2014. Rixx has been building this series as a kind of travelogue and memorial project — flying to significant locations in New Eden and documenting them.

Dropping it the week before a major expansion about war is perfect timing on his part. B-R5RB is what Cradle of War aspires to generate. Worth a watch, if only for the visuals, or the track. Hell, just head over to EVEOGANDA and have a watch!

The shape of the week

This week wasn't about new content. It was about positioning for what's about to go LIVE. Fenris spent the week making sure every piece was in place before Tuesday: patch notes early, store sale running, community content surfaced in the Community Beat, dev roundtable live for the curious.

The machine is well-oiled. The expansion is ready.

What's less certain is whether the community is ready — not for the content, but for what it means.

Cradle of War is Fenris's first real test of the post-Fanfest. The Theatres of War saga is a three-expansion commitment. Military Campaigns are only as good as player participation rates — and those will depend on whether new pilots arriving in Exordium actually stick around long enough to graduate into the conflict, and move into the deeper end of the pool — where the rest of us are having fun.

NoizyGamer's ACU numbers suggest the player base is genuinely healthy. The PLEX market cooling is noise, not signal. Tuesday will tell us whether the momentum is real.

Tomorrow, everything changes. Or it doesn't.

New Eden has a way of making you feel both can happen.

Fly safe friends. o7

Got a link I missed? Drop it in the comments. o7

The Safe Spot — Episode 9: "Featuring Oz"

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:43:00 +0000

Hey everyone, we're back after what felt like forever. I got pulled into the Habs' Stanley Cup run (no shame, that was a hell of a series for our Montreal Canadiens), and we finally sat down for episode 9 with our very first official guest: Oz.

Both Rixx and I were genuinely stoked about opening the format up to guests, and even more so that Oz agreed to be the first one through the door. I came in with way too many questions lined up like a checklist, and Rixx, true to form, just rolled with the conversation in full Buccaneer bravado.

Very different styles, yet somehow it worked.

Who is Oz?

Oz is one of EVE Online's go-to voices on the in-game economy. He's been around since 2004, took a long break, and came back during the pandemic to start streaming on Twitch — where he now runs The Oz Report, a weekly market analysis show that's become required viewing for traders and industrialists in New Eden.

Outside Twitch, he's on YouTube, runs an active trading Discord, and maintains theoz.space, a Bloomberg-style dashboard for the EVE market. He's just wrapped his third (and final) term on the CSM as the resident economic specialist, hosted FanFest 2026 on the official Twitch stream, and took home the creator award for best podcast this year.

Real-life day job: data aggregation at a German company — which, once you've met him, makes a lot of sense.

We talked FanFest from the host side, the slow professionalization of the creator program, his actual day-one origin story, the two ways people fall into market gameplay (and why most of them burn out), and a pretty generous tool list for anyone wanting to try trading without rage-quitting in a week.

No theme per se, no agenda really. It simply went where it went, which is how Rixx and I like it.

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Cold open, reunion, and meeting our first guest — back on the mic after a long gap, finally cracking open the "just us two" format, and admitting I may have already taken some of Oz's advice before we even hit record.
FanFest 2026 from the inside — Oz on what hosting actually looks like behind the cameras, a few moments that made this year's FanFest hit different, and the bar-stream experiment that worked better than anyone expected.
Oz's origin and the long way back — how a stockbroker fresh out of college turned EVE into a spreadsheet, what made him walk away for a decade, and the very 2020 reason he came back.
Why EVE's economy hits different — twenty-three years in, and we get into why nothing else really comes close, plus a confession about my own economic blind spot.
Tools, then and now — Oz's actual go-to list for anyone serious about markets, and how AI has quietly reshaped what's possible.
The two doors into market gameplay — one of them burns you out fast, the other one keeps you. Plus some sharp words about the ISK-per-hour mindset.
Three terms on the CSM and what comes next — Oz wraps his run, looks ahead to what he actually wants to do with his free time, and reads CCP/Fenris' financials with a clear eye.
Wrap, future guests, and the music tease — we open the door to listener guest suggestions, and Rixx warns you about this week's track.

Where to find us!

If you enjoyed this episode, you can catch The Safe Spot wherever you get your podcasts — find us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Past episodes and full show notes are up on the blog at CrazyKinux's Musings. And if you're watching on YouTube, do us a solid — like, subscribe, and drop a comment. It helps more than you think.

Coriolis: The Great Dark session zero - The exploration begins

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:23:00 +0000

Last Thursday evening, while the Habs plowed through the Carolina Hurricanes, my roleplaying buddies and I were rolling up our characters for a first run within Coriolis: The Great Dark.

I picked a Roughneck, with Machine Tender as her specialty and Mechanics as her innate talent.

Your archetype already tells you what kind of story you came to play. A Roughneck says: "I want to be the one with grease under my nails when the lights flicker, the one who notices the hum in the bulkhead before anyone else does."

Not the diplomat or scholar. Not the mystic or poet. The hands.

What is Coriolis: The Great Dark?

Coriolis: The Great Dark is Free League Publishing's sci-fi roleplaying game, built on the Year Zero Engine. It picks up the Third Horizon setting and pushes deeper — into uncharted space, dead civilizations, and the strange things still waiting in the dark between stars.

Players take the role of Explorers: salvagers, scholars, mystics, and roughnecks crewing fragile ships on the edge of known space. The play loop leans toward investigation, exploration, and atmosphere — closer to Alien, Dune, and The Expanse than to a tactical shooter.

Combat is fast and lethal. Faith and technology share the same table. And the universe, more often than not, is watching you back.

A quick bit of context before I go further.

Our group spent a few months playing Fallout, and though I loved the atmosphere, the wasteland and the group of characters we had, we seemed to be fighting the system to play the game, or were often times bogged down by the game mechanics.
Combat sometimes slowed to a crawl, we were managing systems more than surviving the wasteland. More rolls, than roleplay. For me, that's the moment a game starts losing me.
So we simply pulled the plug. No drama. Just time to move on.
And I'd already been waiting a few years for the alternative.

Coriolis: The Great Dark

Though I didn't back Free League Publishing's Kickstarter for The Great Dark, the theme and lore definitely caught my attention. Explorers, not soldiers. Ancient ruins, not simply rooms to clean out. A universe that quietly stares back, and sometimes bites back hard.

If I had to pitch it in one sentence: Alien meets Dune meets The Expanse, with a salvage job that might wake something older than civilization.

Combat exists. Combat is also fast, dangerous, and costly. Treat every problem like a gunfight and the setting answers with disaster.

That's the game I wanted to be in. Tension over tactics. Investigation over inventory. Mystery over churn butchery.

Meet Safiya al-Khatib

Roughneck. Machine Tender. Mechanics.

Her stare is ice.

One side of her face carries a tribal tattoo that reads lived-in rather than decorative.

Her armor is scratched industrial plate, utility straps, grease-stained tubing, retro-futurist edges worn smooth by use. Resilience. Exhaustion. Competence. And something quietly violent underneath.

She joined the Explorers Guild for one reason: Greatships. The mile-long behemoths that crawl between the stars. She wants to be inside one — to hear how something that big actually holds together.

That's her hook.

The rest of her arc, we'll find out soon enough.

The crew

Around the table: Shadi, Vynx, Alex, with Alamo running the show. The same crew I've been playing D&D with these past few for years, and recently Fallout. We have a Scholar. We have an Esoteric. Shadi hasn't rolled yet as I write this post. The pleasant surprise wasn't a single "aha" moment — it was the texture of the character creation process itself.

The professions feel genuinely distinct from each other, or from anything we've played before. The background system gives you story hooks you didn't know you wanted. And once you've rolled, you can still bend the arc. Nothing is locked. The character grows as the campaign progresses.

Running it on Foundry

This was my first time on Foundry (as well as Coriolis). The first thirty minutes were the usual scramble — where's the sheet, how do I roll this, why is that window floating there. But Alamo was there to guide us through.

The themed look matches the tone. Drag-and-drop just works. Rolling is two clicks and a result.

Next session is this Thursday evening. Then June 6th, in person — dice on the table, snacks in arm's reach, the way RPGs were truly intended to be played.

What comes next

Picking the Roughneck wasn't an accident.

I'm here for the ancient machines, the fragile crews, and the things that hum in the dark before the lights go out.

I'm looking forward to sharing how this story unfolds!