Category: EVE

Eve Online

[EVE Online] Quiet Work in Quiet Places

(I know the screenshot is a shuttle, not a helios, but it’s what I had taken recently, so that’s what I used!)

Filed by E, Helios pilot, full-time wanderer

Some wormholes feel like they wake up with you.

This one didn’t.
It was already watching.

I slipped into the system in my little Helios, cloak humming softly around me like a blanket someone knit out of shadows. Today wasn’t about adventure or dodging hostiles or stumbling into some dramatic rescue. Today was simple:
tend the rescue cache, make sure it’s stocked, make sure it’s safe, make sure some future lost soul has a lifeline.

The hole was quiet. Not the dangerous kind of quiet—just that soft, endless hush that only deep J-space seems to know. The kind that makes you feel like you’re the only heartbeat for ten light-years.

I drifted toward the cache’s bookmark, navigating around drifting ice and slow-spinning gas clouds. Every so often, a particle shimmered off my hull like it was trying to say hello. Cosmic dust is friendlier than half of nullsec, honestly.

The cache was right where it always is—tucked away, invisible to everyone except those who already know it’s there. A tiny container of hope in a place that normally eats hope for breakfast.

I checked the supplies:

  • probes
  • launcher
  • a few nanite pastes
  • little handwritten note from the last tender, telling whoever finds it that they’re not alone

Everything tidy. Everything ready.
It always amazes me how much meaning fits in something so small.

With the practical stuff handled, I let myself just… float.

The wormhole’s star was off in the distance, a pale blue thing flickering like it was thinking of blinking out but hadn’t quite decided yet. Clouds of energized particles spiraled lazily between shattered planetoids. The universe does this thing sometimes where it looks like art made for no one, shown to whoever happens to wander by.

And here I was, a tiny speck in a stealthy little frigate, witness to all of it.

I know it’s silly, but I swear the ship felt quieter too—like even the engine didn’t want to interrupt the view. These are the moments that remind me why I do what I do. Why I wander. Why I help. Why I keep coming back to wormhole space even when it’s moody and unpredictable and occasionally tries to set me on fire.

The universe is vast and wild and often cruel…
…but sometimes it’s peaceful, and gentle, and full of small kindnesses we leave for each other.

I gave the cache one last look, whispered a soft “stay safe, whoever you’ll help next,” and aligned out.

Just another quiet day in the dark.
Just another reminder that even in forgotten corners of space, someone cares.

Fly your way. o7

[EVE] The Great Odebeinn Yard Sale

Filed by E

I set off from [redacted] with a cup of lukewarm station coffee and absolutely no emotional readiness for what awaited me in Odebeinn. My destination?
My asset safety containers—those last little time capsules of my old life in Pandemic Horde.

And apparently I wasn’t the only one making the pilgrimage.

The system was buzzing when I arrived. You could practically smell the desperation and nostalgia in the air—like a garage sale hosted by people who hadn’t slept since the eviction. Former Horde pilots were lined up at the station like we were waiting for concert tickets:

  • folks in shuttles
  • folks in stabbed haulers
  • folks in ships that looked like they’d been duct-taped together after MTO2
  • and one guy who was clearly still drunk from the farewell fleet

I grabbed my containers and cracked them open, bracing for impact. Yep—there it was: the strange mix of junk, treasure, and “why did I even own this” that asset safety always dredges up.

A T1 salvager.
Four mismatched drones.
Two cyno generators I absolutely did not need.
A stack of ammo I don’t even use anymore.
And a single, lonely killmail token from… 2019?

Perfect yard sale material.

Around me, the station trade window was flickering nonstop as pilots fire-sold everything that wasn’t bolted down. Prices were dropping faster than my morale during the eviction. The market graph for the day probably looked like a cliff.

I listed my own pile of “please, someone, take this” items, wished them well on their journey to someone else’s hangar, and stepped back to take in the scene.

It was weirdly comforting—this unspoken reunion of evacuees, all of us pretending we were “just liquidating assets” instead of quietly grieving the end of an era. No big declarations, no speeches… just a bunch of ex-Horde nerds pawning off our past for a few ISK and the chance to finally move on.

Once my sell orders were up, I stretched, exhaled, and set course back to [redacted].

Another chapter closed.
Another station cleared.

o7

[EVE Online] Detroid Drifters & The Rattlesnake Rodeo

Filed by E

Every year Signal Cartel does something I can only describe as science-nerd Christmas: The Jove Observatory Survey.

We scatter across New Eden like hyperactive data analysts, poking our noses into every region to check whether a system has a Jove Observatory, and—if it does—how many unidentified wormholes it’s cooked up this year. It’s equal parts research, tradition, and “what if we poked the Drifters again for fun?”

This year, I volunteered to wander through Detroid. Detroid! Home of:

  • not much,
  • even less,
  • and Drifters who regard privacy as a myth.

I hopped system to system in my trusty Helios, scribbling notes like an excitable intern:

  • Jove tower present? ✔️ / ✖️
  • Unidentified wormholes? 0 / 1 / ★PANIC★
  • Any Drifters glaring at me? Always ✔️

Detroid was calm in that eerie “someone turned the danger knob to mute but forgot to tell the fauna” sort of way. Since I was already in the neighborhood, I figured I’d nip across the border into Insmother—because explorers make bad choices with confidence.

The moment I landed in system, d-scan lit up with exactly two things:
A Rattlesnake.
And someone clearly very bored.

They saw me. I saw the gate. We all saw the general vibe, which was: “E is about to get chased like a cartoon coyote.”

Sure enough, the pilot landed on grid with that “howdy stranger” energy. I’m in a Helios—fast, slippery, about as dangerous as a paper airplane. They were in a Rattlesnake—chunky, expensive, bristling with enough drone damage to turn me into abstract art.

I hit the afterburner. They hit everything else. And suddenly I was threading celestial pings and safe spots like some discount space-ninja.

Another hunter appeared—because apparently Insmother was running a two-for-one explorer special today. I decided, very rationally:
Nope.

I made one last safe, bounced cleanly, de-cloaked, and did the single bravest thing an explorer can do in nullsec:

I logged off.

Gracefully.
Peacefully.
Like a possum playing dead.

I’ll return when the local wildlife has wandered off or gotten distracted by a wormhole.

Jove Observatories: catalogued.
Unidentified wormholes: noted.
Insmother: rude.
E: alive, somehow.

Fly clever, fly curious, and when in doubt… just turn the ship off and hope for the best.

o7

[EVE Online] Just Another Day in the Wormhole Commute

Filed by E

Some people wake up, stretch, make coffee, and start their day.

I wake up, stretch, make coffee, and immediately inhale a cloud of compressed fullerite because I’ve been huffing gas in a wormhole since dawn.

The C50 cloud I found wasn’t the richest thing in Anoikis, but it was quiet, unoccupied, and no one tried to decloak me with a polarized Loki, so by wormhole standards it was practically a spa day. After my Venture’s hold was full and my nerves were only medium-jangled, I scanned down a highsec connection and slipped through.

And surprise — I landed just nine jumps from Amarr.
A miracle. A blessing. A trap?
Hard to say.

I docked in the first NPC station I could find and dumped my haul into a neat little bin, then contracted it to my close friend — let’s call her IR, professional space-trucker and part-time sanity-preserver. IR was on the other side of the universe doing whatever haulers do (which as far as I can tell involves 90% boredom, 5% paperwork, and 5% screaming while burning an MWD through bubbles).

IR responded to my contract with:
“On it.”

No hesitation.
No questions.
Just the resigned energy of someone who has accepted that their explorer-friend lives in the abyss and occasionally needs extraction.

She sprinted across nullsec and lowsec like a madperson, dodged the usual array of local lunatics, and made it to Amarr — only to discover that her previous Occator had… mysteriously vanished. (Her words. Not mine.)

So she bought a new Occator, on the spot.
As one does, apparently.

While she fitted it, I poked around the trade hub and watched the ever-present swarm of gankers circling like vultures with blasters. The usual crowd: Tornado pilots pretending they’re subtle, Catalyst pilots pretending they can count to 15, and one guy who kept broadcasting “GIANT MINING FLEET IN KAMIO, GO GO GO” for no reason I could discern.

Just Amarr things.

Eventually IR undocked in her shiny new hauler, threaded the gauntlet of suicide Catalysts, managed not to explode, picked up my gas, and whisked it off to be sold for a tidy sum. I, meanwhile, dove back into the wormhole where the local Sleeper population was still mad at me for existing.

Just a typical day when you live in j-space:

  • Huff gas ✔️
  • Find exit ✔️
  • Dump loot on hauler ✔️
  • Watch hauler perform heroics ✔️
  • Avoid the Amarr gank circus ✔️
  • Return to the void ✔️

Sometimes I wonder why people live anywhere else.

Fly sneaky, fly safe-ish, and tip your haulers.
o7

[EVE Online] Awkward Coffee in Wormhole-Scented Air

Filed by E

Signal Cartel’s Sunday Coffee Time is normally one of my favorite rituals — a cozy little gathering where everyone sips something warm (real or metaphorical), parks their ships somewhere safe-ish, and discusses whatever corners of New Eden have been particularly strange that week.

This past Sunday’s topic? Nullsec happenings.
More specifically: Pandemic Horde leaving PanFam and abandoning the Dronelands.

Perfectly fine. Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly neutral.

Or… it should have been.

Instead, our host for the day was a very enthusiastic, very unapologetic Goonsquad member, and the conversation took on the kind of tone you’d expect when someone wearing full faction colors swears they’re being “objective.”

There was no subtlety.
There was no diplomacy.
There was only:

  • “No love lost!”
  • “Good riddance!”
  • …and several cheerful reminders that he was, in fact, Imperial, as if anyone in the channel had missed it.

Meanwhile there I sat — a freshly relocated explorer, recently evicted from the Dronelands, my old home still metaphorically smoldering behind me. I had my mug, my microphone muted, and my camera off, nodding along politely like a diplomat trapped at the world’s most uncomfortable brunch.

I considered speaking up.
I considered clarifying.
I even considered saying “o7 but please stop stepping on my feelings.”

But… I’m still new to Signal Cartel. I don’t want to disrupt the peace, especially when everyone else was sipping coffee like it was the most normal thing in the universe to listen to a victory lap disguised as a fireside chat.

So I just sat there.

Smiling through my capsule.
Quietly absorbing the most awkward caffeine-infused hour I’ve had since joining the corp.

At least the coffee was good.
And at least next week’s topic is “favorite wormhole weather,” which has statistically fewer emotional landmines.

Fly your way o7