EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

The Crucible expansion for EVE Online is mere hours away. Read these ten tips for surviving the transition, and maybe make yourself some ISK while you are at it.

10. Stop Mining In High-Sec Space, Damn It

Okay, so everybody knows that the goons (and friends) have been hitting the Gallente ice belts in high-sec with suicide ganks. The price of oxygen isotopes, a critical ingredient for running Gallente starbases, has at various points more than tripled. The cost is so high that by now most players are probably running on stockpiles, switching to other races of starbases, or mining their own ice.

Well, things are about to get worse. The yearly delight known as Hulkageddon is about to kick off, right after EVE's Crucible expansion is released. Last year the event netted over 1,200 kills. If it is running at the same time as goons are still killing ice miners, just fuhgeddaboudit. Go do something else for a couple weeks. On the other hand, mining ship BPCs can usually be had on the cheap, and the mineral market is sure to be whirlwinding in the weeks after patch, so it might be a good time to throw some ships into the oven.

9. Be Ready To Refuel Starbases

If you are one of those dedicated industrialists that owns a starbase, there is going to be some serious scrambling necessary. Once the patch goes live, the blueprint originals needed for the new fuel blocks will be available from NPC sellers in Thukker Mix stations. Fortunately for everybody, CCP is giving us two weeks to build the fuel blocks and switch over our fuel types. Until that two weeks is up, starbases will continue to use the old fuel types, but fuel blocks will be permitted in the fuel bay.

It is important that you begin phasing out the old fuel in favor of the blocks, but also give yourself a few days of wiggle room old-style fuel, on transition day, in case CCP does something wrong. In any case, starbase owners should procure blueprints as quickly as possible to keep things running, while industrialists should do the same in order to line their pockets with sweet, sweet ISK.

8. Hold Off On The New Battlecruisers

Everybody will want to be the first guy in his corporation to have one of the new battlecruisers. That doesn't mean it is cost-effective to buy one, right away. Though many industrialists (including this author) will be hurrying to churn out the new ships. The demand is so high that many of us will be building without waiting to research the blueprints!

Making ships without researching blueprints first puts a big cut into profit, but it won't matter one jot for the first week or two. The demand will be that high, for sure. Likewise, blueprint copies. So unless you have multiple billions of EVE ISK, you are probably better off exercising some patience. Then again, if you are looking for a sound investment, it might not be a bad idea to buy a blueprint and do the building yourself, then throw it into a lab slot for research.

7. Mind Your Gosh-Darn Fighter Bays

If you are fortunate enough to own a supercarrier, you will need to make some adjustments in the hours before the patch, or regret it afterwards. CCP sometimes has trouble with the transition from pre- to post-patch, and this is a good example of that. After the Crucible expansion goes live supercarriers will no longer be capable of fielding normal drones, only fighters and fighter-bombers. This is a change that CCP feels is for the good of the game, and I am inclined to agree (though I don't want to get into that here).

The important thing here is that if you have any normal drones in your bay, CCP will need to move everything in your drone bay into a station. It is apparently too technically arduous and difficult to apply more granularity than that. In order to avoid the sorry state of floating in space with an empty drone bay, just remove the non-fighter drones ahead of time. I feel sorry for the supercarrier pilots that aren't subscribed (but not too sorry).