I’m 85% through all my old Blog posts. I have not been reading them in strict order – instead I have tended to randomly pick a starting point and read a few months at a time. Today I was working through the second half of 2014, and my endeavours relating to the Cruis Industry Expansion.
Back then I had anchored a Medium POS, then swapped it for a Small, fitting and playing with a variety of different Industry Arrays. It has been a very sad reminder about how functional POS were for my Solo play, and the enjoyment and value I got out of them. To try and do the same thing with a Structure comes at a ridiculously higher cost, 500+% more to buy and fuel.
There have been a surprising number of areas of my solo game which have suffered, or I have had to abandon due to how CCP has changed their game.
Despite the odd aggravation, reading through all my old posts have been a cathartic process, and overall, I have enjoyed the trip down memory lane. It has highlighted types of blog posts I should do more of, and other styles I should focus less on. It has even prompted me to revisit areas of the game.
To that end I found myself in Jita the other day purchasing some Orca’s. Since I had time, I figured I would try buy orders to save myself a little ISK. I don’t often do that in Jita as I am never going to be able to reliably beat the fanatical Traders and Market Bots. After an hour of 5-minute price updates I managed to stay on top of the order heap just long enough to snag one purchase, saving me 35M ISK. I then got the remaining hulls off Sell Orders – which required much less time and aggravation.
One of my Alts on the move
My Industry Alt continues her collection of material ingredients for building a Raitaru. (Even though I can’t justify the silly expense to run one.) She has 93.8% (by volume) of the minerals, and 78.7% of the P1 material requirements.
I hit a roadblock with the last 25% PI ingredients. I couldn’t cover everything using just the 6 planets on my Industry Alt. I don’t want to have to dismantle setups from one planet and re-tool on another as it would become very expensive. To address this, as I mentioned, I upskilled my EveHermit Alt to fill in the gaps in the process. Today I had him visiting dozens of nearby systems finding sources for Complex Organisms (which turn into Proteins) and Planktic Colonies (turn into Biomass) which did not have unreasonable tax rates on them. With perseverance he found them.
I have been very busy in game for the last month. Not having to spend every night of the week transporting the kids to all their normal school term activities frees up a lot of time.
Evehermit 
Hello, just wanted to say that I recently discovered your blog and I am enjoying reading it. I think one of the cool things about eve is that there are so many different playstyles. I am an introvert so I too enjoy playing eve solo, as well as in a small group. I have characters dedicated to both playstyles so on any particular evening I can choose to play by myself or with a few friends. However I may be like CCP in that I don’t really understand indy players. When I leave my wh to visit hs I always wonder what keeps the players there interested. Would you agree that the challenge of defending your POCOs was the most engaging time you’ve had in eve recently? Anyways thank you for providing me a little insight into an Indy playstyle that I have had trouble understanding before.
A good idea having a solo Toon you can retreat too when you have had your fill of socialising for the day.
That’s an interesting question. The defence of my POCO kept me occupied, but not in an especially fulfilling way. It is part of the game and I found it intriguing, but it was a bit more stressful than rewarding.
The thing that has engaged me most recently has been working on building a Raitaru. Identifying the skills I need to train on my Alt. Sourcing a BPC set and developing a spreadsheet looking at the required Structure Components. Mapping out all the Minerals, P3, P2, P1 and P0 ingredients needed to build those components. Searching for the right mix of Planets to extract the PI ingredients from and trying to optimise the infrastructure and minimise the taxes I pay.
That is what I am finding is an enjoyable challenge at the moment, and just the sort of thing I play EVE for. I don’t play EVE for the rush of adrenaline and excitement.