ASTRA ARCANUM — Part II: Where the pressure actually lives

Artwork by Eren Arık (Metis Creative), originally shared via ASTRA ARCANUM Developer Logs.
All Rights Reserved.

After my first look at ASTRA ARCANUM, I went back and spent more time with the project’s Developer Logs. Not trailer but the actual dev logs from Kickstarter: the messy, in-progress stuff where systems are still being argued over, broken, rebuilt, and occasionally thrown out.

That context matters, because everything below is very much in the works. These aren’t promises etched in stone. 

They’re design intentions, openly shared while the game is still being shaped.

What follows is a breakdown of the key ideas emerging from the developer logs — all very much still in progress.

Making sense of PvP in EVE Online: Merlin ship fitting and skill training

I’ll be upfront: this is fairly new territory for me. Not EVE Online new of course, but more like spaceships new. More like small-ship PvP fundamentals, up close, personal, and a tad more complicated. That part is definitely new.

So I’ve been dabbling, searching, and reading lots. Asking questions about fitting ships. Undocking. Going for PvE missions. Then re-docking. Staring at my ship's fitting, trying to decipher it all like if they we’re ancient runes, and hoping to understand not just what works, but more importantly, why it works.

This post is me trying to make sense of it all — out loud. So bear with me.

If I’ve misunderstood something, I genuinely want to know. If I’m on the right track, I’d like that confirmed too. Either way, I’m hoping some veteran PvP pilots will help steer me in the right direction. Maybe after having had a good laugh at my expanse.

Housekeeping, and a clearer sense of where this blog stands

If you’ve only been reading this blog recently, you might not know how far back it goes, how long of a journey it was to get here.

It started in 2005, back when blogging felt like pulling up a chair at a truck stop, and seeing who stuck around for a conversation. And boy oh boy were there a lot of those way back when.

Since then, life happened. Got married. Kids suddenly became top priority (obviously!). Careers shifted. Priorities changed. The pace slowed, picked up, slowed again. And even crawled to a stop at some point. The blog never really went away though, but it did gather a bit of dust.

Over the past little while, though, I’ve been writing again in a more deliberate way. Not chasing volume, but following curiosity. Digging into things that stuck with me. That meant posts about coming back to EVE Online with older eyes, breaking down ship fittings and early PvE lessons, but also stepping back to look at why that universe still works the way it does. It meant long-form takes on city builders and strategy games — Foundation, Frostpunk, Surviving Mars — not as reviews, but as systems worth understanding. It meant writing about science fiction again, from Arcane to Avatar, Dune & Star Wars, from space travel concepts to the stories I keep returning to with the kids.

After taking the time to look back at the history of this blog, its numbers, and its long, uneven arc, I realized something: the writing had moved forward over the last few months, but parts of this site hadn’t quite caught up.

So over the last little while, I’ve been quietly cleaning things up.

Nothing dramatic. No rebrand. No “big comeback.” Just the kind of work that happens when you care about a place and want it to reflect what’s actually happening inside it.