So, I’m still in a process of figuring out two year’s worth of changes to the game, and consolidating my assets. One tricky part of that has been jump clones.
See, I still only have three of them. The thing is, I never missioned enough to have high standings at NPC stations with clone vats, and I was never willing to do corp-jumping shenanigans to get them. I got my first one from my old faction warfare fleet commander Steelcastles (may he rest in peace) back when Rorquals with clone vats were fairly new, and he undocked it one night (down in Syndicate) to hold a clone party for anybody who could make it. The other two I got when Jim Bridger was flying with a sov-holding alliance, and he got me some personal blue standings so I could run them some logistical errands that took me into a couple of their outposts with clone vats.
But in the here and now, when I woke up from my two year nap, one of my clones was safe in high sec, one of them was in some lowsec system I’ve never heard of (presumably moved there after being evicted from an outpost by a hostile new owner) and one of them was in an Intaki Commerce station deep in Syndicate NPC nullsec.
That one I wanted back in one piece, it has some nice implants.
So last night late when I thought things would be quiet, I got out of my ship in Reblier and hit the button to jump down to DP34-U. Things were quiet in Syndicate, and I hit two or three different stations for the parts I needed to build a Heron with a probe launcher and a prototype cloak. Paid too much, but that’s nullsec for you. In the second system I checked, I found a wormhole to deadly unknown space, and I took it. After poking around in there for quite awhile (and refreshing my faded memories of how to probe scan) I found another hole to merely “dangerous” unknown space, and took that. Then I parked for the night.
Resuming this evening, I quickly found a wormhole into “unknown” space, and from there, got a hole to high sec on my first try. Popped out in my trusty little Heron and where do you suppose I was? Of all places, Chesiette! Just one jump from where I left my ship. Is that an amazing and convenient coincidence, or what?
Jim’s in the same situation as me, only he had five jump clones and three of them were in now-hostile 0.0 outposts. He’s been jumping into them, selling or contracting all his local assets, and then just Leroy-Jenkinsing his way to the nearest dockable stations. (His clones don’t typically have many implants.) The first time he did this he took seven jumps to the nearest pirate nullsec station. He claims he saw six different Sabres along that route and none of them caught him. Either it was large gates all the way and he got really lucky, or those were the world’s worst Sabre pirates. Then today he jumped into a locked-down Executive Outcomes outpost down in 00TY-J and undocked in his newbie ship. He leroyed it all the way into Black Rise without ever seeing another soul in local, which is not the EVE either of us remember.