Ecliptic Rift

CCP Ginger. Or at least how we see him.

Eifyr in particular has always fascinated me, largely due to their connection to cybernetic implants and booster manufacturing. The connection to the Krusual tribe caught me off-guard, though, as they only have stations in Eram, the Sebiestor tribal headquarters, and Elgoi, a neighboring system.

I understand some of the Caldari players have simultaneous reservations and excitement about some of the updates there, but I haven’t yet delved into everything there.

I finally put some of my, erm, more esoteric skills to use. I’d spent some time doing delivery work and such for Core Complexion out of Eram, when the agent contacted me with this:

The government says we’re prepared for war. You wouldn’t know it by looking at our wounded. Space makes everything worse. Just look through the medical bay. Second-degree burns and frostbite are both alarmingly common, and are usually in conjunction with other serious injuries.

I need pain medications badly. I can’t just wait for the next delivery. I need to produce my own drugs. For that I’m going to need Gamboge Cytoserocin. I heard a smuggler say there was a pocket at Eram. Go there, and bring back everything you can. I’ll try to make it worth your while.

My Neocom gave me some additional background info:

Medicinal Drugs

Although the compounds that are popularly called “boosters” are illegal in empire space, other legal derivatives of gas cloud materials are used in the medical community. These medicinal drugs are highly controlled, but are often the difference between life and death for many citizens.

So what did I do? What could I do? I had my engineering crew warm up my gas harvesting ship Whirlwind, a properly-fitted Cyclone battlecruiser.

When I got there, I found an old abandoned station of Caldari design.

The smuggler’s data proved correct: a nice-sized cloud of Gamboge Cytoserocin hung gingerly in space, right at the site of a ship which had wrecked into a medium-sized asteroid.

The agent paid decently well and I feel like maybe I did some good after all. Dad would have been proud, if he were still around.

The first banter of 2010 comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: As we begin another year in New Eden, ask yourselves, “What Now?” What will I attempt next? What haven’t I done so far in EVE? Was it out of fear, funds, or knowledge? What steps and objectives will I set myself to accomplish in order to reach my ultimate goal for this year? EVE is what you make of it. So, what is it going to be for you?

Destination : Future by gilderic

I’ve had a rough idea of how I would like 2010 to go (EVE-wise) for a while, at least in some senses though not necessarily others. So let’s take a look…

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Overview

Everything starts with biochemical gas clouds. Mykoserocin clouds get used for the weakest (and only legal) variety, synth boosters, while cytoserocin clouds get used for standard, strong, and improved boosters. These clouds reside in ladar sites, particularly in null sec but also in some limited high/low sec regions. Harvesting this gas requires you to train one level of Gas Harvesting for each harvesting module you want to equip. Note that specialized mining ships like barges and exhumers cannot use these modules. Generally, you should use a tanked cruiser or battlecruiser for this activity. Mining bonuses don’t generally apply, though those from mining command links (e.g. on the Orca and Rorqual) do.

The Syndicate produces a faction version that has lower fitting requirements but does not mine any faster. It only requires 26 tf of CPU (reduced from 60 tf for the stock tech I version or 70 tf for the tech II). The Gas Cloud Harvester II, however, pulls 20 m³ every 40 seconds instead of 10 m³ every 30 seconds, giving 50% better yield. It also requires 5 MW of powergrid (instead of 2 MW) and the rank 1 skill Gas Gloud Harvesting trained to V (instead of I). No other factions have specialized gas harvesters available.

The Syndicate harvester arose out of a joint research project undertaken by dozens of Station owners across the region. The residents and industrialists of Syndicate appreciated, more than most, the latent potential of the underground booster industry. Although their modified harvesters offered no improvements in yield, they were easier for newer pilots to fit. Their investment in more accessible harvesting technology paid off, when eventually the empires quietly backpedalled and legalized the production and sale of Synth boosters.

Note that some ladar sites actually contain facilities and NPCs rather than gas clouds. These sites provide the blueprints, reactions, and sometimes skillbooks needed for the production post.

Once you’ve acquired gas, you’ll need a reaction and a blueprint to actually produce the booster. Using a biochemical silo and reactor array, you react the gas with water (or other materials, depending on the quality of booster to produce) to produce a pure version of the booster. Producing the final booster requires cutting the pure booster with megacyte in a drug lab at a low-security starbase.

While customs officials will not like standard boosters or better in high-security space, the market administrators don’t mind. So you can either sell the boosters at a market hub (assuming you can smuggle it successfully there) or via alternate methods, including direct trades or in low-security space.

References

• EVE Evolved: Combat boosters – description of each booster’s effect
• Combat booster manufacturing – excellent overview from EVE Wiki (eve-wiki.net)
• Boosters Part 2: The Secrets of the Drug Cartels – older overview by Kirith Kodachi
• Getting high on your own supply – dev blog detailing changes in Apocrypha
• Meanwhile, back in the exploration bunker – slightly older dev blog about synth boosters
• Booster production – support page explanation

Image credit nick_russill

EVE Online has a reputation as “Spreadsheets in Space”, and for good reason: complexity, tremendous amounts of data, and endless ways to get it out and analyze it. For some of us, this holds a lot of appeal. Whether that means market analysis or EFT theorycrafting, EVE players like to play with numbers.

So if you belong to that former group, who likes to work with trade and manufacturing and research, then you really should love EVE Metrics. The site has tremendous amounts of market data, fed by a nice automatic uploader that scrapes your cache as you play (though the lack of a Linux version limits that particular utility for me). They then present all sorts of interesting visualizations of the data, including sparklines and punchcard graphs. I really love that last one, by the way.

While this next feature may not get a lot of public attention, EVE Metrics also turns this back around by providing its own API for this market data. I don’t doubt that some folks have written their own apps specifically to slice and dice this data, but if you don’t have that particular skillset, don’t worry: Google Docs has already done the heavy lifting for you with a function called ImportXML.

Essentially, in a cell where you want a particular value for a particular item, you call ImportXML and pass it the URL you want it to grab and the specific value you want it to pull out.

As an example: say you want to look at Standard Drop Boosters. If you go to the market page for that item, you can see in the URL that the item ID is 15466. You’ll need to decide which data to get: buy or sell, and minimum, maximum, median, or average. So if you wanted to get the minimum sell price in the entire cluster, you’ll enter:


=ImportXML("http://www.eve-metrics.com/api/item.xml?type_ids=15466", "/evemetrics/type/global/sell/minimum")


You can also specify region IDs by appending “&region_ids=10000011″ (or whatever ID is appropriate) after the type_ids parameter.

Pilots with a lot of manufacturing activity can easily see how this can allow you to build a cost model and keep it up to date easily, and even check your expected margins, all without knowing how to code.

Image credit Thomas Hawk