Greetings!
Inspired by Bill Dingha Cynabal I set out to build a Vedmak, starting with an Impairor and 5.000 ISK, without trading with other players, redeeming any items, gaining or losing any agent, corporation or faction standings or losing a ship or a pod. After approximately infinity T0 abyssal sites the BPC finally dropped so the Vedmak is a go. This is my short report.
The whole project took me around six weeks while getting distracted by side quests such as trying to make T1 abyss with Meta 0 cruisers happen or farming an Astero nexus chip only to realise it can’t be built without SOE standings anymore. The activity tracker has been discontinued so I don’t know how many sites I ran exactly, here’s the loot from them as an estimate. Exotics are bugged I think.
I didn’t place any restrictions on system security due to this being more of an industry and trading kind of operation, mining Trit in low-sec is tedious and so is mining Nocx in high-sec so I just went where the things I needed were when I needed them. For the bootstrap I went with trade routes like our forefathers did, after the removal of the NPC buy order for Trit the only other neutral alternative is rogue drone bounties and I just didn’t want to. NPC corporations will quite literally double your ISK* for hauling. Finding trade routes is fun, especially if you enjoy building tools for this.
After going Vitoc Corleone all over Khanid and SOE stations (why do SOE need so much Vitoc anyway?) and mining Kernite and Jaspet in an Impairor in a dead low-sec system I bought a Venture BPO in Outer Ring, settled in a central* EDENCOM system for mining bonuses and proximity to Empire Border anomalies and took it from there. Here’s the final fleet.
I did buy a Procurer BPO in Outer Ring for ice mining, rigging some poor Arbitrator for 1.000m³ cargo is a terrible thing to do. The Atron aligns in under two seconds as pictured so it’s the perfect exploration ship. The Coercer and the Punisher will run any room and any weather in T0 abyss, which is kind of important for the filament economy and because Gammas and Darks only drop Crystalline Isogen-10 and Exotics and Firestorms only drop Zero-Point Condensate, and I needed both in roughly equal amounts. The Omen I built mostly to run the first T0 filament I found and to accumulate enough of them to be able to run them in a destroyer.
I can’t actually fly the Vedmak to Zarzakh because the Precursor ship skill books never dropped and can’t be injected so I’ll have to pass on that. Ishukone designed the Ikitursa but apparently we’re collectively unable to learn how to fly a Vedmak without looting the manual in the abyss? CCPlease.
It was a fun project and I recommend it if you want to learn more about the game and all of its bugs and inconsistencies.
PS: Shortly after building the Vedmak I took my Arbitrator out for a spin in a T1 Electrical and this happened. If you’re thinking about building Integrated or Augmented drones in a challenge like this, don’t.
