Tag: EVE

I wasn’t expecting anything sentimental from the Winter Nexus loot tables.

SKINs, boosters, the occasional questionable fashion choice—sure. But halfway through clearing another icy site, my cargo scanner chirped and flagged something… odd. I cracked open the container and just stared at the manifest for a long second.

Industrial-sized container of bubble bath.
Concentrated. Viscous. Enough to drown a station in foam.

The shipping label caught my eye next.

Destination: R-AG7W
Sender: A.E.

I laughed out loud in my Endurance.

Of course.

I could picture it instantly—the Keepstar, smothered in bubbles, space turned into a bath toy nightmare while fleets clashed and history happened. Asher’s bubbles. The kind that didn’t pop easily, didn’t wash away, and definitely didn’t get forgotten by anyone who’d lived there when the shields went up.

I drifted there for a moment, letting the memory settle. R-AG had been loud. Chaotic. Home, once. And here I was now, mining festive ice in highsec, holding a joke-in-a-box addressed to a place that no longer felt like it existed in quite the same way.

I secured the container back into my hold, still smiling.

Winter Nexus had a strange sense of humor—digging up old wars, old wounds, and wrapping them in tinsel. Somewhere out there, someone had labeled this thing with intention. Maybe nostalgia. Maybe spite. Maybe just a very specific sense of comedy.

Either way, I carried on. Harvesters cycling. Snow drifting. Bubbles in a box.

New Eden never forgets. It just learns how to laugh about it later.

Filed by E

I told myself it was just a break.

Not a retreat. Not giving anything up. Just… stepping sideways for a bit. There’s no Winter Nexus out in j-space this year—apparently shattered wormholes don’t get festive snowstorms, which feels like a personal slight—so I let myself drift back to highsec for a while.

I’m flying my Endurance, quietly mining faded volatile ice in a system that barely remembers what danger looks like (Until Safety is in the system, at least). The ice glitters as the harvesters bite into it, soft and fractured, like the universe decided to be gentle for once. It’s a far cry from collapsing connections and living out of bookmarks and instincts.

I should feel relaxed.

Instead, I feel exposed.

There’s no cloak-and-wait here. No safes that only I know. Local chat scrolls by in plain sight, and CONCORD feels like a very strange substitute for situational awareness. I keep flicking d-scan out of muscle memory, even though nothing ever changes. Old habits cling hard.

Still… the Endurance feels right. Built for cold. Built to endure. The rhythm settles in—harvesters cycling, hold slowly filling, the quiet hum of winter NPCs minding their own business. For once, the universe isn’t asking me to be sharp or fast. Just present.

I catch myself smiling at that.

This is good. A pause. A chance to let the constant edge bleed off before I throw myself back into j-space, back into scanning chains and rescue pings and beautiful, dangerous emptiness. Highsec doesn’t feel like home anymore, but it makes a decent place to rest your boots and watch the snow fall.

I’ll go back soon. I always do.

But for now, I stay right where I am—mining ice, feeling a little exposed, a little safe, and quietly grateful for a softer stretch of stars.

Even explorers need winter holidays.

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

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