Every six months, CCP releases a free expansion to the game, introducing a major new mechanic. The last expansion, Dominion, refreshed the 0.0 sovereignty mechanics. Apocrypha, the expansion before that, added wormholes and Tech 3 cruisers. The next expansion, Tyrannis, is adding something called (dryly) “Planetary Interaction.”

Thus far, planets in EVE have had pretty much no role. In the fiction, they house billions of people and drive the interstellar economies and politics. In practice, though, players never interact with them. They’re beautiful (as of the latest expansion, which refreshed their graphics), but almost entirely useless. This expansion changes that. Players will be able to extract, refine, combine, and ship all kinds of new resources around the surface of planets. Players will design and manage networks of these new buildings based on planets’ surfaces. Eventually, this will all plug in with DUST 514, CCP’s upcoming team FPS game. Eventually, players of the console-based game will be able to serve as ground troops for corporations in EVE, attacking enemy ground installations.

We’re still three months out from Tyrannis’ launch, but CCP has been releasing a stream of details about it. They started off with a Dev Blog post – the primary channel for EVE’s designers and developers to interact with the EVE community. At that point, we got a very high level view of the goals of the project, plus an awesome MS Paint diagram of what the UI looks like.

Relatively soon after that, CCP’s current development version of this feature was released to Singularity – the EVE test server. This means anyone can log into this alternate reality version of EVE and play with upcoming features. This includes the first drafts of planetary interaction. A pilot in EVE University (my alma mater!) put together a wonderful video demonstrating the UI (embedded below).

This kicked off a process as old as MMOs – deconstructing new game mechanics. For some people, this is the game. Being the first person to figure out how to build effective planetary mining and manufacturing systems is really satisfying for some kinds of players. For these people, EVE is giving them the experience of doing what amounts to original research. Early adopters will figure out the optimal ways to do this process and then write guides and make videos explaining it to the rest of us. After a few months, I’m sure these groups of early adopters will have worked it all out, collaborating across forums and in-game chat channels and the whole system will be as well understood as wormholes are now. We’re seeing the beginnings of that now, on blog posts like this excellent one. (If you want to read more posts like that, this post by CrazyKinux has links to all the major posts on the subject.)

But those heady first days of confusion and frustration are an experience that you won’t find in other genres in quite the same way. Plus, if you figure this stuff out quickly you can be making a mint while the rest of the galaxy catches up. I’m sorely tempted to make an industrial character to give this a shot…

• Ships
• Stuff you equip on a ship to change its abilities (“fittings” or “equipment”)
• Stuff you use to build ships + equipment that goes on ships
• Ammo

Within each of these categories there is quite a bit of structure. There are items for making your ship go faster (afterburners or microwarpdrives), recharge your shields (shield boosters), increase the amount of energy your ship has for using its abilities (capacitor batteries and boosters), and so on. Within each of those categories there are variants on each item type. For each item type (in order of increasing power / effectiveness), there is a Tech 1 version, a bunch of “named” versions, a Tech 2 version, and “faction” versions. (Faction items contain the name of one of the in-game factions in the item name, eg Caldari Navy Cruise Missile Launcher is a faction version of the Cruise Missile Launcher item.)

These items come from different places. Named items and faction items come from the wrecks of computer-controlled ships. Items acquired in this way are called “drops”, and have an associated “drop rate”. For instance, a particular afterburner item might drop .005% of the time you kill a particular ship. This is a vanishingly small number, but there are hundreds of items – the chances you get something valuable aren’t that terrible. These items can also be rewards for missions, or paid for with loyalty-points – think airline frequently flyer miles, except for completing missions for a particular in-game corporation.

Unlike the real world, virtual world economies are pretty much all what are known now as source-sink economies. Economic value is injected into the world at a rate controlled by the game designers, and sucked out of the world at what should be a pretty similar rate. Think of it like a bathtub – if there’s more water flowing in than out, then the amount of money in the world increases. As in the real world, an increasing money supply leads to inflation. Because of this, EVE’s economic overlords have to be careful about how often these valuable items drop.

Vanilla Tech 1 and Tech 2 items come from players. This manufacturing process is detailed (and I’m not that well versed in high-end manufacturing), but it basically works like this. First, you get a blueprint for the item you want to make. The blueprint will specify the materials you need to make the item. To actually make the item, you need to find a production line at a space station that’s not being used. Serious manufacturing oriented players will build their own mini stations dedicated for production. Plug in the blueprint, provide the necessary raw materials, and hit go. Fresh new items will pop out the other side. Building Tech 2 items is more complicated, and I haven’t actually done it yet, so I’m not super fluent on that process, but it’s substantially more skill, capital, and material intensive.

This process sets EVE apart from other MMOs you might have read about or played. Often, items in the world come only from the bodies of computer-controlled enemies. Making the most important and common items (Tech 2 equipment) completely player-generated adds a layer of complexity to the world. Changes in value of the materials to make those items ripple through the supply chain, making substantial amounts of money for people savvy enough to see them coming. It also has big implications for the logistics of players who live in 0.0. It’s essentially impossible to survive off items you find in the world, so major corporations need to either set up their own manufacturing or fly in supplies from high sec space. Either of these choices have their own implications and impact for how wars are fought.