With a plan in place, it was time to do a decent amount of grinding. I needed to build up a bit of ISK as I was getting close to the skill, I'd need for a better ship. There was only one thing to do now.
It was time for a lot of tier 0 Abyssal grinding. While Eve Online is not always the best-looking space game. I can’t help but a few times find myself stopping to look at things in the Abyssal. So many cool effects and backdrops to the different areas you find yourself fighting in.
I was feeling quite incinerable as well. While I had a tiny little shield repairer. It barely did anything. I also lacked enough room to swap it out for just another shield extender. As if I needed more of a buffer shield to feel like nothing could stop me.
I decided since I had some spare ISK to spend before I could make some ship upgrades. I’d invest in some lower-tier implants. They would end up shaving off like 10 days from my total plan. Well worth the cost.
The only issue is my ship gets blown up while in the Abyssal. My pod also goes boom. Meaning I'll lose my implants. Did I set up a jump clone to store them in while I was out and about running Abyssal? Of course not.
A lot of the time I'd just jump into the game for a run or two and then jump back off. Abyssal at these lower levels in a destroyer is quite fast. I also thought there was no way I'd be getting killed running them.
Really funny story. As luck would have it. There was a way to get killed. I ended up not paying enough attention one night. Ended up getting flung out of the Abyssal area. Once you go over the red line a little bit you start to take some damage.
What I was not expecting was full-on 330 damage hits per tick. By the time I realized I had made a mistake and turned off my MWD. It was too late. With how bad my turning skills are I did not even last long enough to fully turn around so I could tap my MWD back on and go speeding back into the Abyssal area.
After that, I decided it was worth training so I could have a jump clone. I then found a station that was close by and set one up. Each clone would cost about 900k ISK. I’d end up using two clones to swap out and back in each time. While that 2 million would add up the implant's worth at some point. In the short term, it was cheap enough of an insurance policy. That I'd rather just go this route.
Lucky for me I just had enough ISK to replace the implants, get a clone, the skill needed for it, and a new ship. It set me back to almost zero ISK. A hard but cheap lesson to learn this early on.
I was then back in full swing grinding out more Abyssal. Grinding a few of these out and then dropping off ~20 million ISK worth of loot is not a lot. However, for how new this character is that is a decent little payday.
I recall back in the day on my main. I ended up joining a corporation where they handled the selling and transportation of what you framed. The corporation took a cut. You have some skills. That ~20 million worth of loot I just had I swear there were weeks where I got paid out less than that back in the day.
After a couple of days of the indictment. I had enough skills to jump into the next ship I wanted to use. The Caldari Navy Hookbill. While it cost a bit more than the first, I was using.
It was a frigate over a destroy. Which is a bit of a downgrade in certain areas like a little DPS and defense. I also get a higher loot multiplier for running Abyssal in using the smaller ship. While it would not be a huge boost in loot since I'd be running Abyssal a little slower. It was well worth the tradeoff.
Being in a small ship also meant I could use my speed to my advantage to try and avoid taking damage. It’s hard to say if the change in ships was even worth it. Sometimes I'd just have bad loot runs where I knew the loot was slightly better, but I was running things at a slightly lower speed.
Either way, I kept this grind up for quite some time. The next ship I was looking to upgrade into would be a huge deal. Besides costing 128 million. It was also a drone ship. While it was going to be quite some time before I had some decent drone skills. I wanted to make sure I had the ISK for it when the time came.
I ended up losing count of how many Abyssal I ended up running. At one point I worked my way up to 120 million ISK. At that point, I knew it was time to start putting up some buy orders for the more costly stuff I'd need for my next ship. That way I could save a little ISK.
It was also going to be a while before I could fit into that ship. I needed a bunch of skills to reduce fitting requirements like CPU and power grid. I still had more missile skills I wanted to increase the current ship I was using. Then there would be the drone and skills needed to be trained for the ship I was going to upgrade into.
I felt at the cost of that next ship. It was well worth waiting it out. The last thing I wanted to do was jump into a 120 million ISK ship with every single ISK I had. Then get it blown up since I had just the bare minimum skills to fly it. Where if I had better skills there is a higher chance of survival.
Final Thoughts
The Abyssal can be quite an unforgiving place. It can also be a decently rewarding one once you get up into the higher tiers. For a solo activity, I've been having a blast running them.
It’s also rather nice to see this as a rather friendly alpha activity. Sure, there are a lot of other things I could be doing as well. This however is just one of those things if you only have 5-15 minutes you can jump on and get something accomplished. Making it quite an ideal activity at least for me. As I can get on a dozen or so times a day and get something done a little at a time.
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.
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