Not Building Anything At All

On Using Alts to Make Life Easier

Keeping up with everything has never been easy. Being 2 billion jumps [autopilot never lies!] from any particular known space system only serves to make it a bit harder. Several of the Wormhole Engineers have left behind not only friends and family, but also productive production lines, mission agents and research jobs to kill Sleepers, harvest gas and occasionally [rarely] mine some ore. Several people have suggested alts, but while they are good at putting up some market orders, I’m really not comfortable yet taking training time away from my pilot just to be able to do some missions, mine some ore or make some stuff to sell. I am jealous of my training time and the mistakes I make with it. It was hard enough to give up the time for some scanning skills.

I recently came across another spreadsheet someone had produced for EVE a long time ago, and it got all my creative number juices flowing again. I took it in and gave it a home and began rewriting some of the information both for formatting purposes and for modernity. It had not be updated in several revisions of EVE Online and needed some tender loving care. So I jumped in with aplomb and started throwing formulae around like there was no tomorrow. It was loads of fun and the results were nothing less than stupendous. It is approximately at this point in time when I realise, “This looks familar.”

I pull up my previous sheets and — baring some formatting and organisational categories — I have pretty much replicated my previous production spreadsheet. This triggered an almost compulsory desire to get out a recipe and stick something in an oven somewhere to cook. A few seconds later and I realised that would require not only killing the current wormhole, but also scanning for another and then tracking down where it went, who might want to kill me along the way and hoping it was somewhere at least relatively close to an oven I could use with ingredients I might need. For those who have actually seen my production output, this might be fairly humorous as they would know I have managed to produce exactly *squat* in the last year. Prior to that I produced a lot of ships and modules and I’m proud to say that I never sold a single thing for profit. For those that don’t know me, just understand I’m in love with the idea of production and spreadsheets, but prefer not to get bogged down with the messy details of actually being industrial on a large scale.

So catching the train back to relevancy, I briefly toyed with the idea of a functional alt to manufacture stuff with and decided to just get back in my pod and recalculate the woman hours involved in building a carrier complete with fittings from scratch.