Aside from the five minute high of claiming my 16th anniversary 1 million SP and blowing it on Salvaging V nothing much is going to get me moving today. I'm idly browsing the corp hangars and find a half completed project. It's a very noobish project, just the kind of thing for a slow Sunday. It means and achieves absolutely nothing of any consequence and yet involves planning, travel and a little danger.
It's the kind of thing I most like doing in games, apparently pointless tasks where all the fun is in the plan, the journey, and any emergent story. Any real material gain in money, skills, stats is irrelevant and likely incidental. Sandbox games encourage and thrive on similar behavior, though generally there is a material aim intended. Not with a Space Noob at the helm! Similar episodes have led me to climb mountains in Warcraft, build stupidly huge bridges in Subnautica, drag boats overland in Archeage, and all kinds of EVE journeys.
I jump into my trusty Prospect. By this I mean I find I have spare Prospect hulls for some reason, and so unpack one, throw a cloak, a couple of mining lasers and some other junk onto it and then undock. Not before naming it Scent of a Rock mind you. I resist the temptation to name it "B8" in order to throw off nosy Dscanners.
Fortunately, during some earlier adventure in Syndicate, on the other side of EVE from where I'm headed, I picked up the Mercoxit I need. That means I don't need a pair of Deep Core Miners and a Mobile Depot for refitting.
I zoom through hisec without a care in the world, just watching the scenery go by. I've a few intermediate low sec systems to traverse before hitting nullsec where I've sourced a -1.0 system that has pretty much all the remaining ore types I require. There's a group of wrecks on one gate, looks like I might have just missed trying to warp through a scrap. There are people in system, more than in the low sec systems I usually lurk in, but nothing worrying. Down into null and the population drops, even in those systems where sovereignty has been claimed. I pass an Eagle on a gate but I'm aligning and instantly cloaking so don't have a problem. It's handy living in London. A couple of systems have cynos lit and only one or two pilots around, I'm guessing it is a quiet time for everyone and these are logistics going on. I'm tempted to wait but how wrong could that go? So much for emergent story, the yellow stripe wins. In the final destination system I'm anticlimactically on my own.
A couple of hours or so later I am back in my home hisec station, fortunately still in the Prospect and not in a pod.
That's all I materially achieved. The mild levels of panic while journeying to A2V6-6 (thanks Dotlan), and while orbiting around the rocks there, are the real purpose here. In the end it was absurdly easy. I saw one player on gates and Angel rats are as half asleep as everyone else on Sundays.
It's nothing like the weeks I spent delving into the story and sights around the EVE Gate in terms of story. I need to think up some more plans. It was still an interesting diversion on a day when my brain simply wasn't up to the task of roaming low sec looking for trouble or even up to the task of my normal industry and trade activity.
Note that there are no rare 15% ores in the collection. I'm odd and tired, not insane. I'm not sure those ores really exist in the wild.... Now I'm going to have to look into it.
So, all in all, probably one of my dullest posts ever for you but an interesting, if short, trip for me and a useful revision of navigation skills in dodgy space. I'm thinking about some wormhole delving, fitting a Prospect for the gas equivalent of this run. I've got to use up this odd abundance of Prospect hulls and my scanning skills could use some work.
EVE Track of the Day
I spent the entire post laughing while listening to the podcast This Paranormal Life (available on iTunes, Soundcloud and Spotify at least). Maybe what I need is some kind of EVE conspiracy theory to investigate.
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