• 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.

Today, I’m doing the third category. It’s packing time.

I’ve spent about nine months in EVE, on and off, and I’m joining up with a corporation that lives in a different part of space, and I have seven days to move all my assets I want to bring with me to a rallying point at the edge of Empire space.

It’s kind of astonishing how much junk I have strewn around the galaxy. A quick skim of my asset list shows stuff in probably 40 different stations. There are thousands of these stations in EVE, and each one has, effectively, a storage hangar with my name on it.

Looking through these asset lists reveals a lot about what I was doing at these stations. At Rens VI, there’s about a million credits worth of miniature electronics, remnants of a side career in trading commodities. I made money looking for items that I could get cheaply in one part of the galaxy and sell for more in another part. I must have bought these and forgotten to move them to a place where I could sell them. There’s lots of this stuff around the galaxy – ideas I had to make money that didn’t pan out fast enough and I was left holding the bag.

Another station has what amounts to space dust – left-over bits of ore from a mining operation. Most systems in EVE have asteroid belts that contain a bunch of different kinds of asteroids. With the right ship and the right equipment, you can extract ore from these asteroids. Take the ore to the right kind of station and you can get the ore refined into minerals. Those minerals, in turn, can be sold or used for manufacturing items that can in turn be sold or saved. It was good money for a while (and I could do it pretty much with my eyes closed), but it was going to be quite a while for my character to learn the skills to be effective at it. The bits left over from this processes were the remainders from refining – small amounts of ore that were too small to be refined into something else.

My most recent way to make money was running missions. I would go ask a character in the world for a job to do, and she would tell me to go somewhere, kill some enemy ships, and come back for a reward. After I blew up a ship, I could go look and see what was inside – often there would be an item of some sort that I could take with me. I’ve accumulated these items in my hangar. Some of them are worth a lot of money, most of them are worth nothing. Figuring out which is which is trickier than it sounds, and the subject of a whole other post.

If I really cared about squeezing every drop out of these items I could spend a week running around collecting this stuff and selling it off to someone who can make good use of it. But most of this stuff is from my inefficient youth as an EVE player. When you start out, you don’t have any good ways to earn lots of money quickly. I might make 200k ISK on a good day in the first month of playing. Now, I can easily make 10-15M ISK/hour running missions, so the opportunity costs of picking up a few hundred thousand credits worth of items here and there just aren’t worth it. I’ve moved into a different league, financially, so I’m going to leave almost all of these items to collect virtual dust forever.

I can’t ignore my fleet of ships, though. I have lots of different ships to do lots of different kinds of things in EVE, and I want to bring most of them with me. Moving ships around the galaxy is much harder than moving items. Ships are really big. It’s like trying to put a car inside your moving van – it takes a much bigger kind of ship than I own to move anything but the smallest kind of ships: frigates. All my larger sized ships–cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships–I’m going to have to fly myself, one jump at a time. It’s tedious work, but it becomes a kind of lifestyle. You can set a destination and your ship will auto-pilot its way there. It’s slow way to travel, but you’ll get there eventually, and you can do other things while you wait. This is how EVE starts to pervade your life; you start viewing chores around the house as things that will be easy to do while you’re waiting for something to happen in EVE.

I know it seems kind of stupid to play a game where you have to spend hours moving your virtual space ships around the galaxy. Like a lot of the type 2 and type 3 tasks in EVE I’m always a little embarrassed to tell people what I spent my evening doing. Why do this kind of tedious work when I could be doing something that’s straight-up fun? It’s not a question I can answer now, but it’s something I’ll touch on in future articles. EVE is satisfying in a bunch of hard to explain ways, and part of writing all this out is my own quest to better understand what it is that makes it so compelling, even when I’m staring at the engines of a freighter for hours.