That could mean traveling through five or six different regions of Wormhole Space in order to break out. The only way back out into Known Space is to discover more hidden connections and jump through once again. Passing through a connection, players could be in any one of 2,604 systems.
Making things more complicated, the connections dissolve every 24 hours. That’s because every connection from Known Space to Wormhole Space is random. Except you never quite know where you’re going.Ī portrait of Katia Sae, by Eve Online player Mynxee, a former member of the player-elected Council of Stellar Management. Each system on the map has a few at any given time, and once you’ve discovered one, you can use it like any other stargate.
This massive, hidden region is known as Wormhole Space.Īs Sae explains it, the only way to reach Wormhole Space is by sending out probes to scan for hidden connections from Known Space. They float around in the background of the galaxy, unmoored to any physical location or even to each other. Just warp to the nearest stargate, click on it with your mouse, and jump out into a neighboring star system.īut in addition to Known Space, Eve has 2,604 star systems that don’t have fixed locations on any map. Putting aside any military or political complications in Eve, navigation between all the systems in Known Space is easy enough. It’s the region that tends to make headlines with its massive battles and weird real-world intrigues. The exterior, referred to as “nullsec,” is a no-man’s-land controlled by warring factions of players. The interior, referred to as “highsec space,” is patrolled by AI factions that tend to keep the peace. Sae explains that it’s a collection of 5,201 individual star systems, each one with an average of four to eight planetary bodies inside. What you’re seeing on those star charts is referred to as Known Space. Looking at a map of Eve Online, someplace like Daily Sov Maps, you would think that the game is just a bunch of points on a map - thousands of dots connected by stargates. “Of course, I gotta be different,” Sae said, with the barest hint of a Southern drawl in their voice. But Sae had something even more ambitious in mind. Most of them were speedrunners of a sort, trying to move as quickly as possible from point to point. In the six years after the game launched, Sae had heard of other players completing circumnavigations of Known Space. The XQ-PXU gate, in orbit around the fourth planet in the M-YCDA star system. Sae said they had been toying with the idea of exploring the universe for a while, and the Dominion expansion helped push them over the edge. Star systems were suddenly bursting with colorful nebulae, and planets had more definition than ever before. That changed with the Dominion expansion in 2009, which transformed the entire look and feel of New Eden practically overnight. Back then, Eve wasn’t all that beautiful. Sae tells me that they’ve been playing the game since it first came out, in 2003. In Eve, that translates into being a cloaky explorer, pretty much.” In other games I’d be a rogue or a ranger, the ones that like to hide in the shadows and sneak about. “I like to be where I’m not supposed to be. In-game, they’re known as Katia Sae and, given the high-stakes nature of Eve gameplay, they asked me to leave it at that. “At heart I consider myself an explorer,” the player told me by telephone. But only one has visited all of them without losing a single starship. Fewer still have visited the thousands more that are hidden from view. Some are easy to find, while others are hidden.įew players have actually visited all of New Eden’s known star systems. The galaxy of New Eden is composed of nearly 8,000 star systems, each one placed into the virtual firmament by the hand of its creators at CCP Games. Eve Online is unique among spacefaring games - not just for its complexity, but for its structure.
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