04 | November | 2025 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Another Crimson Harvest event has come and gone in EVE Online, having wrapped up at downtime this morning. It is one of the two holiday events the company has kept up with over time. The rest have become little more than themed cash shop marketing events. So it goes when you’re publicly held and must meet the demand to make the line go up constantly… and when you’re pulling devs from your one successful title to build a blockchain cypto bullshit clone of it.

Crimson Harvest 2025

That said, it was a decent event this year. Last year I was feeling the whole thing was a pretty modest outing and complaining once again that the event seemed to have peaked back with the 2018 version.

The core of the event was the same as it has been for the last few years, which means picking one of two factions to support and then running the correct combat or hacking sites to gain points for the event. This double faction aspect of the event has always seemed dubious mostly because when you are out trying to do the event half the sites you find you cannot run.

Anyway, my main complaint last year was that the event was not very accessible for anybody but veteran players. The combat sites required an investment in ships, modules, and skill points a new player was unlikely to make, while the hacking sites were kind of steep in difficulty for anybody not an old hand. They were not impossible. I went and did a couple on an alpha account where I have a character with max’d out scanning skills for free to play and could do them, but they were not easy. And even that character was well beyond what some new player in a Magnate who just rolled out of Pasha having just done the career agent was likely to sit.

So I was glad to see that this year saw the introduction of a new set of sites, the Biocybernetic incident sites. These had two big benefits.

First, they were not divided into two factions, so no annoying complications or frustration at the last dozen systems you entered only have the sites for the other faction.

Second, they were restricted to frigates and destroyers, meaning that players didn’t need 50 million skill points and a billion ISK ship to have a shot.

The sites came in three sizes:

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

And while that meant you were still open to the exasperation of flying through systems that only had sites for the fit you left back in your hangar… though I am sure somebody managed to fit out a tech I frigate that could handle class 2 sites… the sites were still pretty viable and not as scarce as hacking sites. In fact, when I finally gave up on the hacking sites, which were always the wrong faction or had somebody running it already or had somebody come in and start running the other containers, I decided to give these a try.

So I fished around and found a fit for a Catalyst Navy Issue, which has a nice range boost so you can use the high damage, short range blasters and still hit stuff without having to be right on top of it, put on the police SKIN, and went out looking for sites.

Catalyst Navy Issue

I hadn’t actually run one of the sites, or even read up on them, but the fit came with the instructions “orbit the beacon at 1,000m and shoot everything that shows up, heat guns for the final target. Seemed easy enough. So I went and found a Class 2 site, warped in, went to the beacon, and things kicked off.

The beacon with a boundary marked out

It is a ten minute event… 600 seconds… during which waves of ventures show up with the occasional Garmur that you want to shoot first. A shuttle wandered past once in a while, a small loot pinata that you can loot later. (I actually blew my first attempt as I scooted over to loot a shuttle and went outside the boundary, at which point the hostiles all warped off and the whole thing ended. So don’t do that.)

You get a couple of big waves, including one with an Orthus cruiser, then things are quiet for a bit, so time to reload and get ready. Then there is a flash of light and a Squall will land in the site, the Upwell hauler that can pack missile launchers, and you need to pop that and you’re done except for the clean up looting.

Chasing the Squall at the end

For purposes of earning event points, the sites have two phases. The first is to kill 20 ventures, which is easy enough. That will get you ten points. Then, if you remember to claim that, you will be set up for the second part, which is to blow up the final ship, and that will get you 20 points towards the event.

After getting just 10 points per hacking site, getting 30 points per class 2 site seemed like a pretty good deal.

Unfortunately I discovered this the day before CCP decided to ramp up the event in the final week and suddenly everybody was back out trying to get event points to get that final prize which had to potential to deliver a Molok blueprint copy. If I had gone down that path a week earlier I might have finished the event.

Instead I had an evening where, five sites in a row, I had somebody come in and take the final ship from me, which means I did five sites and did not advance the event beyond ten points… because you have to kill the final ship to get back to blowing up the 20 ventures again… and that was enough for me. You can’t shoot them because of high sec… and they were clearly all out damaging me, so it wouldn’t have been a good idea… and there is no point in talking to them because they have already made the decision to be an asshole… so I docked up and cloned back to null sec where, oddly enough, we have rules. Sure, hostiles can come get you, but in the Imperium you can’t mess with somebody once they have started a site. Because of that, however, sites were being hunted to extinction. I was better off just doing standard exploration or Ishtar ratting while people were focused on the event.

As such, I ended up with just 470 points in the event.

My final point count

You can see that my incident task is stuck on the Nullprime suspect, which is the last ship. Never got another one. Again, I might have made it if I had started down that path earlier, because the hacking path got dull pretty quick so I spent a good 10 days not running the event.

I did, however, managed to collect all the login rewards. I can manage that level of effort.

Crimson Harvest Daily Gifts collected

And so it goes, another Crimson Harvest has come and gone.

Now to wait for the Winter Nexus, when I can cheese my way through by just mining ice. And I might even be able to do it in a new ORE mining destroyer, one of the promises of the coming Catalyst expansion.