Venture Adventures!

Recently I've been quite taken with the idea of hopping in a Venture and doing some gas mining. I've always liked the expedition frigates since they were introduced, though I'd never really done much with them aside from one stint of low-sec gas harvesting. However, that was a good while ago (circa 2016, I think) and gas harvesting wasn't particularly profitable back then.

Since coming back I'd heard a little bit about ninja gas huffing in wormholes - basically this is hopping into a wormhole, scanning down a gas site and harvesting it for 15-20 minutes before the Sleepers arrive and crack open your pod to feed on the squishy goo inside. At least, I assume that's what they do.

I hopped into a nearby wormhole in my Buzzard and scanned down a couple of gas sites. The hole seemed quiet - nothing on d-scan, no structures etc. It was just a Class 1 wormhole, so I assumed it was probably unlikely to have someone living in it, as the sites tend to be less valuable and often not worth the risk of losing a ship to a cloaky T3 cruiser.

I jumped back to my home system to grab my Venture, and off we went. Once back in the hole I sat at a safe spot for a while and did some d-scanning - I also popped to a few different spots in the system and did some more d-scanning, but all seemed quiet.

The first site just had a small gas cloud - perhaps someone had been here before? Still, it didn't take long to get through it - I was probably out of there in 10 minutes - well before the Sleepers would arrive. The second site had two fairly large clouds so I was keeping an extra close eye on the timer, along with d-scanning every few seconds to look out for signs that someone else may be in the system - scanner probes, ships etc.

Unfortunately, even the most vigilant d-scanning isn't always enough. About halfway through the second site a Tengu uncloaked and made pretty short work of my poor Venture. I managed to get my pod out, thankfully, and quickly ran back to the security of high-sec space with my tail firmly between my legs.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/92453866/

I spotted the Tengu pilot on the other side of the wormhole and we had a bit of a chat. I always like to do this after someone has killed me - it's usually a good learning experience. Turns out that he'd been in the wormhole and scanned down all the signatures while I was out switching to my Venture. So he knew exactly where to find me when I was gas harvesting, and didn't need to give away his presence by dropping probes etc. I was probably only gone from the hole for about 30 minutes in total, but that was enough. This was quite comforting for me as there was little else I could have done, really - it's all just part of the risk of going into a wormhole in the first place - you never know who will be lying in wait, or how long they've been there.

Still, my assailant was very polite in our conversation, and I got my first WiNGSPAN delivery notification, so that was a new experience!

In terms of loss, a Venture isn't too pricey, and I've built up a bit of an ISK buffer over the years, so a ~30 million loss isn't the end of the world. I'm not sure I'll jump straight back into wormholes right away, but there's more I want to try with this plucky little mining frigate yet.

Back down the rabbit hole

A short while ago (okay, exactly two years and seven months ago) I made a post about my first ventures in wormhole space. It was quite the adventure for a pilot who'd only ever ventured out of high-sec once (with disastrous consequences, I might add). Sadly it was to be a short-lived trip into the unknown as my corp at the time went under not long afterwards, and eventually my time in EVE soon dwindled into nothing. But, fear not, for I have ventured back down the rabbit hole... and here's the story.

Now, at this point I'm going to point out that I'm not always the most pro-active player in a social sense. That's not to say that I don't enjoy talking to people - it's actually one of the things I enjoy most about the game - but sometimes I'm not paying attention or I'm not feeling very sociable or, if it's someone I don't know, I might even be downright shy. So when I decided to say hello to a fellow in alliance chat (which I never usually talk in), I hadn't expected it to consist of more than the following:

Alliance chat fellow > o/
Maurice McPhee > o/ alliance chat fellow

But, to my great surprise, we actually struck up a conversation, which went something like this:

Alliance chat fellow > Oh no, all the grav sites in our wormhole have been popped. Do you want to come and mine them before they disappear?
Maurice McPhee > Yes.

Okay, so I didn't transcribe the whole thing, but the above is essentially how it went. Except I wasn't really as cool about it. In fact I was positively uncool about it and spent much time fretting and panicking and asking 'but what if everything explodes?'. But eventually, I like totally said yes.

So I hopped into an Ibis and made my way the 12 or so jumps to pick up some bookmarks from friendly alliance chat fellow, which led me to the wormhole entrance. They're quite pretty really, aren't they? Anyway, I jumped in thoroughly expecting a barrage of death and mean things on the other side, but it was actually quite serene. I had a couple of systems to hop through and ended up in friendly alliance chat fellow's 'home' system - a C4 with a static C4, if that means anything to anyone.

An important point I somehow missed from the conversation above is that I was here totally alone. Friendly alliance chat fellow had to go away so I was to be mining by myself. However, this was okay as nobody really goes to C4s and wormholes are actually quite safe when compared to stepping out of your front door or driving a car, right?

So, safely at the POS, I stopped to get my bearings and found an empty mining ship. I hopped in a Retriever - I figured as it's likely to explode anyway then it's better to explode something cheap, even if it does mean a little less reward in terms of isk. Everything seemed to be going fine as I prepare to warp to the field to chew some tasty high-end rocks, although something seems to be missing...

Uh oh. Friendly alliance chat fellow has forgotten to give me the bookmarks to the grav sites. And poor Maurice doesn't have any scanning skills. This could be somewhat awkward. I assume at this point that I'm clearly being stupid and the bookmarks will be stored conveniently in one of the hangars or arrays or whatever the hell else they have at this POS. After systematically checking each and every structure or floating-in-space-thingy that might be able to store anything, I'm stumped. I'm in a wormhole with no scanning skills and the only bookmark I have is the one that leads back out the way I just came in. This trip down the rabbit hole is looking slightly uneventful.

BUT WAIT. Seriously, just wait a minute, it's about to get slightly less uneventful.

An alliance mate arrives! I haven't talked to this one in alliance chat so I can't say whether he's friendly or not, but I already talked to one stranger today so why not try two? I strike up a conversation, which goes something like this:

Maurice McPhee > o/
Second stranger I've spoken to today > o/
Maurice McPhee > Do you have bookmarks for the grav sites?
Second stranger I've spoken to today > Yes.
Maurice McPhee > Can I have them?
Second stranger I've spoken to today > Yes.

Sorry, I know that whittled on for six lines of dialogue, but I didn't want to miss anything vital out like I did earlier on. Essentially I followed him to the grav site and we mined and mined and hit the d-scan about eight million times and then mined a bit more. It was all quite uneventful actually. But like, the good kind of uneventful where I don't die.

During this period of blissful uneventfulness I decided to read a few guides about how not to die in wormholes and all of that sort of thing (especially this page over at K162space, which is a very good blog, might I add. It also links to Islands Among The Stars by ArcDragon, which is pretty much all you might need to know about wormholes, probably). I realised I was actually quite enjoying my time in the wormhole and started to believe that my doom might not be quite so impending after all.

I took a little break to eat food and then decided to get back to the mining. The wormhole was filling up (with other friendly alliance people, thankfully) and everything was just dandy. Though apparently a Buzzard - which I later discovered is a type of ship in EVE - had been here earlier poking his nose around. We decided to continue our little mining expedition, but d-scan was being pinged more fiercely than ever. We had eyes on the entrance to the wormhole as well, so there was no possible chance of exploding, right?

Well, at approximately 7, 154 units of Hedbergite a lot of things happened all at once. It went something like this:

7,154 units of Hedbergite + 0.5 seconds > 'wormhole activation!'
7,154 units of Hedbergite + 0.76 seconds > d-scan shows ships that sound mean like Killathron and Damnation and Buzzard... okay, Buzzard isn't as scary, but whatever.
7,154 units of Hedbergite + 0.94 seconds > Warp to POS.
7,154 units of Hedbergite + 0.95 seconds > No, seriously, warp to POS.
7,154 units of Hedbergite + 0.955 seconds > OMG SERIOUSLY WARP TO POS WARP TO POS WARP TO - oh, okay I'm warping to the POS.
7,154 units of Hedbergite + 0.9555 seconds > Killathron, Damnation and SCARY BUZZARD arrive at the grav site, just in time to catch the exhaust fumes (yeah, do they exist in space?) from our Retrievers.

Now, all of that probably happened in a bit more than 0.4555 seconds, but it felt pretty snappy at the time. I hadn't actually realised how close we'd come to total annihilation until strangers two, three and four told me the full extent of what happened, but yeah, turns out these angry-sounding ships had wanted us dead. Us? Peaceful miners just trying to make a living? But WHY?

Anyway, we waited a little while and then finished off our little mining expedition. It was all rather exciting. And now that I've finished rocking back and forth in my chair and clutching pictures of my loved ones, I think I might do it all over again.

Fly safe, and STOP TRYING TO EXPLODE ME.

Down the rabbit hole...

It may not be exactly the same type of hole, but I believe the title is quite fitting for the situation that Marek currently finds himself in. But before I begin, let me share a little information about the mysterious Amarrian known as Ebon, Marek Ebon.

(Author’s note: as much as I would often love to drift into ‘in character’ commentary, and may do so in future, the majority of my posts will be strictly ‘out of character’ unless stated otherwise. I’ll most likely mark these with an ‘IC’ tag or something similar. If my writing style does drift between the two into a somewhat ‘grey’ area then I apologise, and hope it isn’t too off-putting. I’m always open to constructive criticism in the comments section, so please feel free!)

As a new player to EVE (prior to all that ‘New Player Experience’ jazz), I found the character selection a little confounding (heh, can you guess it’s my favourite word?). So Marek was a mish-mash of things that I thought were cool in EVE, things that I thought were cool from a bit of RP that I used to do in WoW and things that I felt would be cool if I got into the RP side of EVE, which I haven’t done as of yet. Also, at the time I was particularly drawn to the look of the Amarr ships.

Marek was created with that jumble of ideas in mind and flitted hither and thither between training for different things as I found my way in New Eden. He underwent many periods of inactivity whilst other characters took centre stage, but was also my go-to guy for a lot of my pondering moments when I thought ‘hmm, that’d be good to try… I’ll go get Marek’.

So, when the opportunity to enter the corp wormhole surfaced (finally a high-sec entrance that isn’t 20 jumps away!), Marek was naturally my first choice. So without wishing to rip-off a popular story that later became a popular film too much, there is a certain sense that I’ve been flung down the rabbit hole and now everything is… different.

For a start, our wormhole POS is actually the first one I’ve ever seen, let alone the first one that I’ve had to live out of on a semi-permanent basis. I’ve already started to miss the little things about station life, but the feeling of having that high-sec exit despawn was both peculiar and rather exciting. I’m making the most of Marek’s trip to Wonderland though and have been familiarising myself with wormhole life - scanning sites and exits, hitting the directional scan rather excessively, and finding a new-found appreciation for the Covert Ops Cloaking Device II.

Last night I fitted up a sturdy Harbinger and took on some Sleepers with a corp mate. It was certainly an experience, I can tell you. The Harbinger’s tank was impressive in the first instance, but soon became wholly inadequate, and my fellow pilot and I engaged in a tag-team sort of system to take the heat off. Eventually after a couple of hours I hopped back to the POS and fitted for some remote repair – this allowed my corp mate’s tank to hold out long enough for him (my DPS was severely lacking) to finish off the rats. Once they’d been dispatched, it was simply a question of the salvaging and the hacking, which I bravely stood by and watched…

It’s been a good first couple of days in the wormhole – I know exactly what skills I need to train now, so I’ll be looking at getting those within the next week, and then it’ll be a trip out to Empire space with a shopping list as long as this blog post to make sure that I’m fully prepared.

I just hope we don’t have any odd visitors wishing to involve me in an oddly skewed, sci-fi version of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Although it does raise the question of what the EVE answer to ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ would be – anyone know if the Caldari Navy are keen authors?

Fly safe, and I'll see you on the d-scan.