My EVE

February 9th, 2014

So my map just updated with today's downtime, and the last few dots are now colored, meaning I have officially visited every accessible k-system in the New Eden galaxy.

Video

Large composite of starmap.

Album showing progress, newest to oldest.

Some thoughts about the project:

I started doing this, of course, the minute I created my character, in August 2007. But I didn't actually discover the "visited systems" map option until a few months later, whereupon I consciously started trying to visit every system, as a little side project to everything else I might have been up to at the time.

Back then, the quickest and safest way to get around was by covert ops frigate (not the stealth bomber type, they could not use covert ops cloaks yet).

Traveling around nullsec this way was a nail-biting process of cloakwarping to a gate, getting stuck in a drag bubble, and slowboating cloaked the rest of the way to the gate. Then, jumping through the gate, you would encounter a gatecamp on the other side, usually with one bubble or one interdictor on the gate, and you would have to perform the infamous maneuver of breaking gatecloak by moving in the direction of the nearest edge of the bubble, hitting your microwarpdrive, and quickly hitting your cloak. At the time, cloaking up would turn off your MWD, but let it finish its cycle, so you got a fairly decent few seconds of speed boost. This was still an extremely dangerous activity, and I've lost a few Anathemas this way to expert gatecampers with nano hacs, containers, swirling balls of drones, and so on.

That said, much of nullsec, beyond the high-traffic pipes and dead-end station systems, was very very empty back then, and I spent a lot of time just living in empty systems out of my covert ops frigate, just floating around in space.

I visited a fair number of nullsec systems around 2008 - 2010. After that I spent a lot of time visiting high sec systems. This wasn't particularly difficult, it was just a question of visiting them all, and there are quite a few of them. The high warp speed of the covert ops came in handy, none-the-less.

In 2012 and 2013 I started branching out, incorporating low sec into my routes, and trying to cover more logical chunks of space.

There are a lot of systems which overlap on the flattened starmap, and sometimes one constellation from one region will overlap another constellation from a different region. The systems will be near each other, but the route between them might go very far out of the way. That means I've had to come back on different days to finish certain orthographic parts of the map by visiting one of the two (or more) sets of connected systems, then waiting for them to light up and visiting the others. Or simply doing a very long route to cover all of the interconnected and separate systems in one section of the map.

Other times I've had to go through certain regions where I've visited some systems but not others. For example, when I have visited a pipe of systems somewhere, but not certain dead-end systems connected to that pipe, or where there are non-dead-end systems which don't get caught in the direct, shortest route I have traveled in the past while not trying to systematically visit every system in a region.

After a break and some real-world travel in late 2013 I discovered the latest interceptor changes, which makes traveling in nullsec not only less dangerous, but positively trivial. I also discovered that with an autopilot route set, the autopilot will select your next destination on the overview whenever you jump. This, combined with the "jump to" button and the new interceptors has really sped up the project, and in two months I feel I have done more jumps (I'm guessing around 5 000) than I had made in my entire playtime previously.

In 2014 I've lost a total of three interceptors. One in a straight up fight during a low sec frigate roam. One while trying to check out the HED-GP battlefield, where dozens of people were camping and looting. I was asking for these to explode, and they had no connection to the project. Finally, I lost one while visiting systems and not paying attention as I happened to jump into B-R5RB.

Jumping there, in itself, isn't the problem. The problem was that I hit "jump to" again, thinking I would warp somewhere, not realising that I was in a dead-end system, and the ships camping the gate had more than enough time to pop me while I slowboated back to the gate. If only I had been paying attention, I could have warped to a celestial instead of approaching the gate, and this interceptor loss would have been entirely prevented, making the 2014 leg of the project entirely loss...less.

So in conclusion, interceptors are completely ridiculous now. I hesitate to use the O or the I word, but they are much better for traveling than any other ship.

I would even go so far as to argue that they are better probe ships than covert ops, since you save so much time on travel, cloakingwarping being obsolete with bubble immunity, and the 10% probing and hacking bonus isn't going to be missed when you can cover that much more ground.

I might include a little video later, just to show the map unflattened, and if anyone has any screenshots requests, such as specific line / color configurations, I'll take those as well.

What's next?

I think the next step might be to try to visit every accessible w-system, but I'm already considering several major issues and many minor ones.

Specifically:

How to make the game acknowledge which systems I've visited, since I can't "color map by visited systems" for w-space.

How to get to each system, since wormhole connections are random.

But that's a topic for another day.