This ended up being quite a fun and lucrative event. While I was hoping it was a little better with more stuff to do with a small gang. I still had a fun time in the end. My outlook on it ended up being a lot more positive towards the end than at the start.

The best part of it all is I got to fall in love again with exploration and running those kinds of sites. As far as high sec exploration goes it tends to not be that rewarding and over-farmed. This event ended up making it quite rewarding.

In the end, I did max out possible points to earn. This netted me a bunch of ships and some Plex as well. For the time being I'm holding onto the ships since the market is a bit flooded with them currently.

Between the ships, plex, and some other items just from the reward points. I’m going to value that all at 1.4 billion. While that is nothing massive. That is on top of everything else I acquired.

The biggest value in running exploration sites for me ended up being boosters. There is just one massive catch to them. They have an expiration date on them. So, any I had left I decided to dump early before those not in the know realized they got to offload any stockpile they had.

I’ll admit there were mistakes made on my end that resulted in me not maxing out my possible returns. Early on I found highly valued boosters that were going for over 100 million ISK each to be quite rare.

On one day when I logged in to do about two or so hours of exploration sites. I looted 3 100 million ISK boosters. On top of a bunch of others. Before logging in I had to download a very small upgrade.

Shortly after that the next day I looted even more boosters. This all was coming off the heels of me hitting a dry spell when it came to finding any boosters at all. I can only guess they raised the drop rates or something was going down.

While I managed to sell off a few boosters at the high prices I wanted. There came a point where I should have adjusted my sell orders in Jita sooner. Knowing these things will expire at some point. I ended up selling off to buy orders for anything I had remaining. Some of them at quite a lot less than I was hoping.

Still between getting the higher prices I wanted. I would have been close to breaking even if I had just sold to buy orders instead of trying to get much higher prices. If I was a little more aggressive on this front I could have gotten a decent chunk more of ISK.

For a while, I was holding onto all the blueprints I did not know what to do when I got out of the exploration sites. The items they crafted were often valued less than the cost to craft them.

I however noticed something rather odd going on. Players were listing the blueprints for a lot more than the items they craft are worth. For a while, I thought there was no way those were selling.

Even more so since the mineral used to craft those items has an expiration date on it. You can kind of assume these events-only items will become quite worthless after the event is over. Even more so since you need to access special space and NPC vendors that I'd expect would be long gone after the event is over.

Out of pure insanity, I ended up just listing a few for sale. I took the blueprints people seemed to be offering a fair price for and worked out an average cost to just multiply each type by. As I did not want to sit around all day trying to work out a price.

To my shock, it sold hours later. This makes me think perhaps I am either assuming something incorrectly or I'm not getting something. I spoke with some other players and as far as I can tell others. A small group of players are trying to horde these things for some reason.

I have since sold many batches of blueprints like the screenshot above. Adding a nice little chunk of ISK into how much I was getting per site. While it was nothing massive. It was a few hundred more million ISK. All for stuff I was going to let rot anyway since I did not make sense crafting them at a loss.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment out of all of it was the event mineral. I still had a little chunk of it left. An amount that did not fit in my mineral haul up to Jita. I kept some just in case crafting ended up being more worthwhile than it was.

With this event coming to an end I am considering selling it off in Jita. It would have been quite a few long jumps and not worth my time. Then I got a little lucky. Someone closer to me put up a buy order almost at the price of Jita. I offloaded all the remaining minerals I had and never looked back.

I did end up losing only a single ship while doing this event. Rather I lost it running a non-event exploration site. I was quite tired one night and was not paying enough attention. I ended up warping into a ghost site without the proper fit.

For anyone who knows about ghost sites in Eve Online, it did not take long before my ship went boom. I kind of had a feeling something was not quite right when I looted a mid-grade blueprint.

Thankfully my highest value loot that I had been getting in exploration sites survived. Along with some of my more costly modules. I even lucked out and some of the high-valued items that dropped from the site survived including a blueprint to make a 165 million ISK implant. Sadly after adding in the cost of materials to craft it and tax it was only a 25 million or so profit off of that. Between that and other loot, I got into the ghost site. It just about made up for losing my ship.

Final Thoughts

Long after I had acquired enough points to claim all the event rewards. I still went on running sites. They were just so rewarding and frankly fun to run. I’d rather attempt to do a lot more exploration sites in the future in far more deadly places.

While I could have made a heck of a lot more ISK after learning how much the boosters were worth. It was kind of shocking how well I did for only running the sites as often as I did.

Also, as I expected. After the first week or two of the events running. Competition for the exploration sites went down by a lot in my area. Sure, I kept running into a few players in exploration ships. It was however nothing like that first week of the event once people realized this was the best way to farm points.

Funny enough I'd end up passing endless combat event sites. It seems like people stopped caring so much about them after a while. I’ll never know if they ended up having some big-ticket item drop that was different then exploration sites. At the very least I did not need to go out and spend a decent chunk of ISK getting a ship that was more suited for soloing them.

Other Content

• Part 2: Capsuleer Day XXII Event
• Part 1: Capsuleer Day High Sec Event
• Pre-event: Capsuleer Day

Information

New to Eve Online or a returning player? Use my recruit a friend referral link and get 1 million skill points on signing up or logging into your Eve Online account (can only be claimed once per account). Disclosure: I might receive in-game rewards.

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Eve Online.