Katia Sae quietly made history and earned a Guinness World Record when they became the first player to visit every single one of EVE Online's 7, solar systems. It's a monumental quest that took over nine years to complete with the help of hundreds of other explorers, a proprietary AI database tool named Allison, and unfathomable persistence.
And Sae did it all without losing a single ship. Though, as Sae told me during EVE Vegas last month, the journey around the galaxy was anything but smooth sailing. Ethan Richards, the actual person behind the Katia Sae character, is far from the first player to have the wild idea to visit every solar system in EVE.
Others had toured "known space" before—the static systems that make up the virtual galaxy of New Eden—but those pilots typically raced from one to the next and lost plenty of ships along the way. But he was going to do it his way. I'd visit every planet and take a picture of each one in every system. Unlike other space sims, like Elite: Dangerous, New Eden is almost entirely colonized by players, so Sae was rarely ever alone—especially in the beginning.
The journey started in the civilized sector known as high-sec, where unlawful player conduct like shooting one another without due cause is swiftly punished by an omnipotent police force called CONCORD.
Almost every system in EVE is connected by stargates, and while some solar systems might have a dozen stargates, others might have only one or two. Each is a small part in a vast and intricate web of the 5, systems that comprise known space.
Most solar systems are indistinguishable from one another, Sae tells me. After a while, you can only see so many volcanic or oceanic planets before they start to blend together. But EVE does have its tourist destinations. During his journey, Sae visited unique locations like the Molea Cemetery, where a small group of gravekeepers protect and maintain tributes to people both real and fictional. To keep track of where he'd been and maximize efficiency, Sae created—you guessed it—a spreadsheet.
You're going to backtrack because of the dead ends and stuff like that. But I always tried to work it to my advantage.
In those early days, Sae was averaging about six systems a night over the course of an hour or so. It was a meticulous process to not only map the best route but also stop at every planet in each system and catalogue it. Sae also kept a blog that chronicled his adventures with frequent updates and short stories written entirely in-character.
Low-sec space, for example, lies on the fringes of high-sec and is home to tribes of ruthless pirates who prowl about, killing other players and stealing their cargo.
Beyond low-sec things get even more dangerous. There lies a vast periphery where EVE Online's player-built empires battle for sovereignty and resources. Most of these 3, systems are divided up between just over different alliances, many of which are, in turn, vassals of bigger, scarier alliances.
And Katia Sae was going to have to sneak into every single one of their fortified systems to complete his mission. One of the guys who put a bounty on me would message me every once in a while saying 'I'm going to know when you die.
Sae explains that by the time he began venturing into null-sec, word began to spread of his mission and amazing streak of not having lost a ship. It was these encounters that Sae frequently omitted from his blog. I didn't want it to look like I was bragging about it. And so my whole strategy was to keep it low key and vague. But that didn't stop Sae from drawing the wrong kind of attention.
Dozens of players had put bounties on his head just so they would be notified if someone happened to kill him. Others were even creepier. I'm going to know when you die.
But that's a little weird. Running these blockades takes a combination of the right type of ship, precise game knowledge, and patience, making them formidable enemies for Katia. After a wormhole is found, you can navigate your ship through it into a hidden pocket of space, often considered one of the most dangerous types of space in EVE Online , in part because the wormholes decay over time and then randomly spawn a connection to different systems.
There are wormhole systems in EVE Online , and there is no guaranteed path to any of them. Players can spend hours, or even days looking for a wormhole to a particular system. The monument will be based on a 3D rendering of her character model and will be anchored in space in the Saisio system. That could mean traveling through five or six different regions of Wormhole Space in order to break out. Once they do, players commonly find themselves somewhere completely on the other side of New Eden.
For Sae, it was the beginning of a wonderful period in their gaming life. Every day they would visit new and beautiful places, take amazing photographs, and then find their way home again before moving on to the next. Their gallery contains more than 50, in-game screenshots. So I had to sacrifice that in order to have time to scan. With few exceptions, the trip was fairly uneventful, Sae says.
For about eight years or so, everything was going fine. Given the random nature of the connections, Sae worried that they might never actually complete their journey. Sae is part of a group of peaceful explorers called Signal Cartel. In a game populated by cutthroats and villains, Signal Cartel is in the business of saving lives.
Members perform search and rescue operations for players stuck in Wormhole Space. One of the tasks they perform when not on an emergency call is seeding regions of Wormhole Space with the materials that stranded players need to get out again on their own. So, Sae hatched a plan to use these explorers to help discover the last systems in Wormhole Space that they needed to complete their journey. Eve is a hardcore player-versus-player game.
Even if Signal Cartel supported the journey, a spy inside the organization could leak it and set up an ambush for fun and profit. So Sae had to make sure everything happened in secret. Most solar systems in the known universe have more then one star, i was wondering why does every solar system in EVE only have one? I play elite: dangerous from time to time.
The binary and triple star systems that actually move are pretty sweet. Ships orient themselves to fly like planes.
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