Millions of assets later, I'm finely done. For now...

Last night Arya, Mantis's CEO, and I finished collecting the last of Lonetrek's assets. It was by far the biggest region I had to cover this time around, with an almost ridiculous amount of stuff spread across far too many stations.

That brings this latest run to four completed regions: The Bleak Lands, Devoid, Molden Heath and Lonetrek. Altogether, that meant collecting assets from 153 systems and 501 stations. More than four million items, spread across those regions. Most were small individual items, while others took more than half of my Hecate's 1,700+ cargo hold.

For the last three and a half weeks, whenever real life gave me a little time to play EVE, this was ALL I DID. Fly out. Dock. Load whatever fit. Fly back to a central location in highsec. Unload. Repeat.

Again, and again, and again.

On the surface, it probably sounds like one of the most boring things someone could choose to do in EVE. And yes, parts of it were tedious, I won't lie. But it also became one of the best ways I could have learned more about New Eden as I caught up on my skills as a player (not my character's skills).

Moving slowly through each region gave me time to understand its geography. I started recognizing the routes, the quiet systems, the busy ones and the places where trouble was more likely. The first rule was, obviously, always checking Local—because whether I was alone in a lowsec system or carrying expensive loot through a populated corridor, that one habit determined everything else. I could decide if bookmarked safe spots were needed, change my approach to gates, watch other pilots, and stop treating an uneventful trip through a losec system as a mundane one.

I even lost a Hecate halfway through covering those regions.

None of these lessons arrived all at once. They came one jump, one warp to a station and occasionally one fatal mistake at a time.

Slow and steady isn't the most exciting way to learn EVE, but in my case it worked out fairly well.

Early next year, we get to do it all over again.

Fly safe. o7