True to form, after bitching a bit about the event when it landed, I jumped in and gave it a run. I think you can find a post where I complained about the Gallente Presidential Election event and then a later post recounting how I completed the event on four different characters. But we’re on about the Crimson Harvest event this time around.
Crimson Harvest 2026 – Open the Bloodgates
I am not a huge fan of the event, mostly due to the high standards set by the 2018 version of the event. (Which also just looked better! Oh banana of death, we miss you!) Another case of “Hey, I enjoyed that. Why did you take it away?” Welcome to video games. So I start off with a bit of a bias against the event. Last year I made it about of a third of the way through the whole thing.
This year, back for another try, I will admit that I was a little daunted by the initial goals of the event. On top of half of the sites being for the other faction choice, seeing that the first step for the hacking task was to open 100 cans, I was feeling like that might once again be a hill higher than I was willing to climb.
The Crimson Harvest goals – St. Tetrimon side
I have some memories of past events where there was one can per site and the idea of scanning down 100 sites gave me a moment’s pause. I was also wondering exactly how much progress 100 cans would get me. Previous events this year have generally ramped up slowly, with goals increasing in something like a Fibonacci sequence. (i.e. 3 cans, then 5, then 8, then 13 and so on.) So 100 seemed like a pretty big opening target.
However, digging into the progress track, hacking those 100 cans gets you half way to the initial 1,000 point goal. Five points a can! For whatever reason the team has eschewed the gradual build up and has jumped in for one big task.
And I guess that is fine.
It does make track progression a little weird. You have nothing unlocked for quite a stretch, then suddenly half of the track is unlocked. Maybe incremental unlocks are overrated? What do I know?
What hacking 100 cans gets you
Also, I clearly made it that far. I was encouraged by the fact that the sites all had three cans, so finding 34 sites seemed a more achievable goal than hitting 100.
Running up on a Blood Raider hacking site
And some site have an additional fourth can.
That extra can in a Blood Raiders site
The sites are competitive… so you can have other people drop in and snipe a can or two. But at least you aren’t left doing a whole event cycle only to have somebody snipe the one ship that counts… though, given that the totals for combat sites have also changed, that might not be as big of a deal now either.
My in main irritation in these events is always around investing time only to make zero progress. If they have fixed that, then good. I can live with some progress over no progress.
I started out finding a lot of Tetrimon sites and, as I suggested in a comment on the last post, I considered cherry picking those. My handy Swiss Army Helios has a cargo scanner on it that lets me see into locked cans.
Eyeing the cans of St. Tetrimon
However, most of what is in the cans is… well, it isn’t junk because it has some value… it just isn’t worth the effort. So I gave that up pretty quickly.
As is my usual plan, I did my hacking later in the evening west coast time when the online population tends to ebb, at least on weekdays. It is a fairly chill thing I can do while listening to a podcast or some music and I was clearly able find the sites.
However, I decided to layer another task on top of the event. I decided to try for one of the new achievements that were introduced with the Cradle of War expansion.
The new achievements, not the old ones they put in, let break, then yanked from the game. The ones that discard anything I’ve done in the last 20 years. I find it irksome that the in-game map knows every system I have visited in the game and the date of my last visit, but the achievements know nothing of my activities before the expansion dropped. Data is hard for some people I guess.
Anyway, while I was going to be roaming high sec, avoiding war decs and scanning for event sites, I figured I could work on those achievements, starting with the Blessed Pilgrim achievement, which requires you to visit all 689 systems in Amarr space. I had visited just 20 systems when I started out, but figured I could expand that pretty quickly with my evening roams.
I knew up front, from complaints on Reddit, that the achievement does no helpful tracking for you, save for giving you a raw count of the systems you have visited. But the achievement panel itself shows you the regions you need to visit, so I went over to DOTLAN and took a screen shot of the Tash-Murkon region map, pasted it into Paint.net, and went off exploring and scanning for event sites.
I started out doing it my constellation, but then started marking individual systems, just in case.
And I knocked out Tash-Murkon fairly quickly, but when I went back to the achievement expecting that at least it ought to show me the region was complete… no such luck The company’s cartography problems continue and their answer would likely be HTFU.
Blessed Pilgrim – No Help for You!
Still, I was determined not to be one of those people on Reddit who ended up one system shy and had to then figure out which of the ~300-700 systems associated with the four achievements they might have missed.
On the whole my plan actually helped. People tend to congregate around systems they feel are their home. I, on the other hand, was wandering across entire regions, often traversing constellations where nobody was around… and thus, where data sites would linger, sometimes piling up as RNG sent more there… so in addition to making progress on the achievement I would also get in a few sites in a single system.
Which is how I managed to get my first 100 cans in, putting me halfway through the reward track in one shot.
After you do that, if you want to continue hacking, then you need to get 40 more cans for 100 more reward track points, which means another 200 cans to get the additional 500 reward track point to finish off the first phase of the event.
So 300 cans total. I guess that isn’t so bad.
And then there is the loot. Most of it is pretty modest. But what would you expect for high sec data sites? (Or even low sec ones, since I did end up spending time in quite a few low sec systems when I was alone.) Still, how many Positron Cords does one need?
I did end up with a few new SKINs, and a bunch more to stow away and sell at a later date. The market for all of the stuff in cans will be flooded until the new year, so best to just save it for later.
There were also some event related items. There was plenty of Mutated Blood Samples, the currency for the event. I also ended up with quite a stack of keys for the Crimson Gauntlet sites. Those unlock a short cut to the final room in those sites. They do not, as somebody suggested, keep the site from being contested. In fact, somebody with keys can totally screw you over by jumping ahead of you in a site you’re working on. Welcome to New Eden.
I did run a few of the Hollow Outbreak sites. (Should that be “Hallow,” like “Halloween?”) There were just so many of them around that I felt compelled to not leave them unmolested. They come in three flavors:
- Class 1: Highsec – balanced for new players in basic Tech I frigates
- Class 2: All areas – for experienced players in Tech I destroyers, Tech II frigates, and lower.
- Class 3: Lowsec, nullsec, wormholes, and Pochven – for veterans flying up to Tech III destroyers
These are absolutely open and contested and you only get credit for the site if you kill the final NPC, so awful people are out there sniping those. However, there are a lot of them about, so I got out the ships I had used for a bit last year. (Also, not everybody is awful. A good portion of people who warp in will just warp off. That is what I do. But you still get the awful people now and then.)
My Catalyst finishing a class 2 site with some fireworks
You can go active with guns, missiles, or lasers and be constantly targeting things, most of which will blow up in one hit. (And deal with how the UI seems to miss about 1 in 8 inputs. Is this a side effect of the the Python update? Has that started?) Or you can go with drones and just occasionally target the loot shuttle.
Both represent the primary problem of PvE in EVE Online (and video games in general), of being a problem that, once solved, becomes repetitive and a bit dull. But you do only need 10 final ship kills to finish the task. Seems viable.
As for being tedious, you could say that about the hacking game as well, which is just a variation on Minesweeper. As it turns out, I kind of like Minesweeper. Who knew? Especially with some wandering through space I guess.
Anyway, we’ll see if I end up getting the BPC… or exploring all of Amarr space. I am about a third of the way through on the latter at this point. Domain is going to be the most annoying region.
Related:
- CCP/Fenris – Crimson Harvest: Open the Bloodgates
- CCP/Fenris – Crimson Harvest: The Bloodgates Are Open
- CCP/Fenris – Blood Raiders Invade Unstable Pochven
- CCP/Fenris – Don’t Miss the Biggest Rewards!
- CCP/Fenris – Patch Notes for Crimson Harvest
- TAGN – Crimson Harvest 2026 Lands in EVE Online Today
- EVE University – Crimson Harvest 2026