Eve Online Diary part 2

So last time, I ran through the tutorial and got to grips with Lurking Pirates.

After you finish the introductory tutorial, you get a bunch of Isk and some skill books, all handy stuff that gets you a bit of a leg up. Not that I really knew what I was doing or anything, but I had 77,000 Isk and a skill queue full of stuff I thought I ought to train.

You also get a list of career choices. Now, the hard thing to get to grips with early on is that you aren't locked into classes or anything, being able to change whatever you're doing at the drop of a hat, so long as you're skilled and equipped appropriately. Ultimately, these 'career' choices are a series of alternative tutorials that reward you with what seems like an absurd amount of money (although as it turns out, not so much), skill books helpful to that profession and also a couple of ships that reflect that path. You also get some early ship equipment which you don't need the relevant skills in, but can only be used in the starting area.

So you have the option of picking either; Military, Advanced Military (I guess combat is harder when you fight more than one Lurking Pirate?), Industry (mining), Business (trade and market fiddling), Exploration and something else. I felt like Exploration was a good fit, because Mining seemed relentlessly dull, military seemed relentlessly dull and brutal, and business is very much not my forté. I also wanted to see as much of the game as I could within my 14 day free trial.

My first task was to scan for a 'Cosmic Anomaly'. Apparently the one I was looking for would only be in the training system and near planets or something. It wasn't very clear. So I hopped around the starting area for about half an hour, scanning for this anomaly. I didn't find it, but I did find something listed as an 'abandoned research station'. I warped in to see if that was the right place, just to run straight into 5 or 6 npc ships who proceeded to wreck my ship.

Now, death in this game seems a bit strange and harsh at first, but it kind of makes sense. When your ship's destroyed, you haven't really died, you've just lost your ship and anything on board (including my turrets and that Refining skill book I couldn't learn yet). What happens is you pop out of the ship in a capsule, as above, and then get the hell out of there back to a safe station asap. If you're killed in this state you lose x amount of skill points, which at this early stage of the game would be practically tragic.

Back at the station, the game took pity on me and handed me a new ship sans refining book, and warped back over to the station trying to get a sneaky scan in, hoping it was the right place.It wasn't.

So the game handed me another ship and I aimlessly searched around for another hour for this 'Cosmological Anomaly'. I hopped to the next system over, hoping to find it there, but despite hunting for an hour, I was unsuccessful.

I logged off here in the middle of nowhere for a bit, thinking that I was just unlucky enough to have not found a spawn for this hidden location yet.

I was beginning to wonder what was the point when I came across some guy mining in some asteroid belt. In order to get more mining done at a time, he had filled his cargo hold and then emptied it all into a container so he could just sit here and mine and then haul it all in a handful of trips, or get a buddy to do it.

This is a risky strategy, because just anyone could come along and steal from your container.

I was that anyone.And then somehow I refined it and sold it.