One of the most challenging things in EVE online can sometimes be the logistics of merely existing in the game. If you play for long enough you’ll end up with a ton of modules, trade goods, ships, etc. all over the place in the universe.
Recently I took at look at my assets window and had to wince at how many stations held a great big pile of mission loot, or a shuttle, or a pile of ammo I’d bought and only hauled a portion of it to where I’d needed it.
So, what to do about this? Well, make a decision like I did: commit to traveling light.
Step 0: Pick a home base
Pick a place to be your home, some place with a reprocessing plant, medical bay, and repair facility at a minimum. If you’re a builder type, consider one with factory/research facilities to suit your needs. Pro tip: make sure your home is owned by a corp/faction who likes you a lot, that way you don’t get penalized a lot for reprocessing things.
Step 1: Get your crap together.
This entails the painful process of running around in a hauler, collecting all of the assets you might have all over New Eden. Pick a primary base and haul it all there.
Step 2: Sort through it
Take a look at what you have. Buy some station warehouse containers to help with organizing your gear. Tech II and Meta-class modules are usually things you ‘ll want to keep, most other stuff like Tech I gear is so cheap it’s not worth keeping around. But go through your items and compare with the way you play, and ask yourself “do I really need this?”
What to keep? Things of value, obviously. Even if you might not want it, someone else might. Meta-class modules can fetch a decent price on the market, so you might want to do the research here and see what you can get on the free market for them. Got extra skillbooks you don’t need? Put them on the market for an amount less than the NPC price and they’ll get bought in no time.
Step 3: Spring cleaning time
What I like to do is keep a station warehouse container and name it Junk, or Recycle Bin, or something of that kind. Drag all the junk you don’t want to keep around into there so you can easily identify it later. For basics, get a second container for things you want to keep. If you’ve got a nice clean Items window with a couple of containers, you’re ready to go.
Pull out those items in your Recycle Bin back to your Items window. Select everything, minus your containers, and right click. Hit Reprocess, and look in the report window at how much yummy minerals you didn’t know you had just sitting there. If you’re pleased with that number and are now ready to commit to living light, hit OK and watch all of that crap get mashed down to minerals.
Step 4: Everything else
Ask yourself “do I really need all of this?” Seriously, moving it around is a pain in the butt, right? You could be asked to relocate to another region as part of your corp, to better be able to participate on ops. It’s annoying to have to move things around so damn much (trust me, I’ve had to do this myself a few times, recently). If you don’t need it, sell it, donate it to the corp or a friend, or just store it somewhere where you won’t need to move it around.
Step 5: Ships and fittings
I’ve been looking at how much I really need all these extra ships I cart around, once that I’ve used to try a few things out and then never really went back to try again. It’s a lot easier to move around if you have only the ships that you need. I don’t often rig my ships so that makes it easier to do since I can repackage them up.
Fitting wise, I’m finding it handy to have a can with the fittings of my ships in there, separate from the other stuff. This way if I need to swap out combat fittings for some reason, I know where all that gear will definitely be.
Conclusion
In the end, I drastically reduced the amount of stuff I had all over EVE, as well as made it extremely easy to move around if it’s required. This process worked well — for me. Your milage may vary, because maybe you want to take the time and sell a lot of that gear on the market instead of melting it down for minerals and using/selling that. Personally I find the latter to be much more time efficient.
So, have you ever had to do anything like this? How did you go about it?
Winterblink 
hey man I wrote a great deal about a month ago in my blog about this. We moved form empire to Stain and what I found is that, either option a ) melting down all but the really good gear did help and b) keeping a small stock of ships (just in case crap hits the fan) was extremely beneficial. My spring cleaning took me about a week. ( i have refining level 5 so that option worked well. I am glad I’m not the only one that thinks this is a huge PITA. BTW is there a skill that lets you refine gear remotely? I know there is a selling one as long as your in a constellation…?
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I actually went through this about 2 weeks ago. It was hell. If I had to guess, I’d say I had random crap scattered across about 80 stations- many of them far removed from one another. I’m a procrastinator so I let it get to that point. Tried to consolidate it all like Winterblink did, but the time wasted for such a small return on the reprocessing… I ended up just trashing what was left. All T1 junk, no regrets. So I just rounded up the faction stuff basically.
Manasi, afaik there’s no way to refine what’s in your hangars remotely.If there is, then I’m a bigger noob than I thought. =/
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Welcome to Curse. I’m pleased to fly with the famous Winterblink – now get that WDA episode out already or, or… I’ll warp scramble you! =D
Oh, and just keep an eye out on the mess I guess, like my mom keeps telling me to clean up my room…
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This is something I try to do also on a regular basis, having been through the whole “sent to empire” process, I long ago learnt keep what you have to what can be sold, or hauled out in one to two trips.
With my new FW character, I am going to go to the nth degree, i.e. just the ship, some back up ships, and ammo/drones.
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Yeah, Curse has been fun so far. 🙂
Really, your mileage will vary on any kind of cleanup instructions, it’s all based on how much traveling and subsequent cleanup work you’re willing to do. The biggest thing is not getting yourself into the situation, and it’s a lot easier to do that once everything’s all nice and tidy.
At least that’s what I find. 🙂
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Yeah, I think all Eve gamers can relate to this! 0.0 stuff is the worst to gather for obvious reasons, so like the posters above, I have learned what I can and can’t take when getting the hell out of Dodge.
Of course, remote contracts are a lifesaver for getting rid of stuff in a galaxy far far away!
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Good instructions, WB. I went through a similar move recently and got exceedingly anal with everything filed neatly away in station containers. Then I changed corp and had to move!!
I’ve now decided to keep a few things (e.g. untrained Skill Books) unfiled… because as far as I can tell I can’t look within my containers via Assets remotely, so I couldn’t check whether i had a particular book or asset. Am I missing something? Or is that an issue others have faced?
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Vestik, that’s right — station containers are great for sorting your things but make it impossible to see what’s inside them when you’re not docked in that particular station. Kind of a shame, but I guess it’s another motivator to not packrat all that stuff and just travel light.
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As for looking inside of a station container in your hangar through your assets. There is a way.
Contract it..sort of. Start up the contract of the container to an alt or whatever, then STOP when you get to the screen listing EVERYTHING inside of the container.
It will cost nothing and theres no risk, but it lets you look inside station containers when you aint there.
As for consolidating stuff. Oye. Third jaunt into the drone regions just ended (ED, FREGE, T5R(MH Resident)) so i went ahead and got all my stuff together again, oh what fun. (Specially when your main cant travel through gall space….they hate me there)
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Give
http://wiki.heavyduck.com/EveAssetManager
a go. Uses the API to find all your assets, including in containers.
Keep up the good work.
Btek
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Apparently I’m the “most anal of ’em all”, since I do my cleanup after each mission/session/whatever or every two or third the lastest. I quickly learned to buy station containers, but also learned to reprocess them if it looks like I’m not coming right back.
Oh well, I can aswell admit it, I’ve got a skill schedule over 3 months long, which is followed to the letter most of the time.
Still, I’ve got all kinds of crap on around 10 stations, thankfully only about 20 some jumps from each other for the most part.
See. On top of all that meticulous organizing, I’m really greedy (or stingy, whichever works) too, so I’ve got those crappy T1 things there too, waiting to be sold.
I’m getting better tho, I now only save named T1 items. *sigh*
PS. No, I’m not _that_ Shrike. Character naming is a bitch.
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Ah, the joys of consolidation. My assets used to be very out of control, but I bit the bullet a while back and consolidated down to the few stations that I use. Station containers are a wonderful thing, but they do (for me) end up holding a lot of junk that i do not really need. Out of sight, out of mind. I am about to launch a huge “melt the Crap” campaign on my remaining assets though, so I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
For those of you with an industrial side, download EveMEEP. You can look inside containers and ships with it from outside the game.
Anyway, happy spring (summer) cleaning, all.
P.S. Where is the flippin’ podcast?
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I’ve moved alot of stuff around. My usual is to take everything less than Meta 4 and melt it down. Put up reasonable sell orders for the rest and keep the really good stuff for later. Ships, however, are alot bigger. User discretion at that point.
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I just cleaned out my assets from a lot of stations last weekend and earned 80 million haha.
Anyways, this is a very nice blog, would you like to do a blog link exchange? My e-mail is tonglil@hotmail.com.
Please send me an email! My website is at http://www.evewarrior.com
Thanks!
Tony
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The main reason i created my own corporation: more random crazy loot hangars to stuff things in, without dealing with that stupid “lock by default” station cans.
this was before freight containers came out, so maybe it’s different…all i know i love have the ability to have 7 insta-named item bays at any station i have an office at.
course, trying to work rights and roles so that fellow corpies can enjoy the same “assets window from hell!” free lifestyle as i, well, that’s a bit harder to arrange.
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