The Winter Nexus will wrap up at down time next Monday, January 12th. But, as promised back when the event launched, CCP has added some extra items to the reward track in The Agency to get people to come back and do a few more runs at the whole thing.
Winter Nexus 2025
Squeezed into the end of the rewards track in The Agency are five more difficult to discern rewards.
Kind of cramped there
But if you mouse over them, you will find that the additional rewards are:
- 1090 points – Expert System for the Perseverance
- 1150 points – 100,00 skill points
- 1200 points – Aurora Universals SKIN for the Perseverance
- 1250 points – Frozen Obelisk SKINR Pattern
- 1350 points – 75 PLEX
If, like me, you finished the initial reward track, then this is just another 300 points to finish off.
Granted, all the event sites are going to now see a last minute rush, so expect competition.
One of the things CCP is suggesting is that you ought to get out there in a Perseverance, the mining destroyer for which we got a blueprint copy at the 1050 point mark. I have two of those now.
The problem is, the Perseverance is a study in compromise. I haven’t tried the other mining destroyers yet, but CCP was clearly in a bind. They wanted to make an ice mining ship that was better than the Endurance expedition frigate, but they also didn’t want it to compete with actual mining barges.
So, for example, the Perseverance can mount three ice mining laser II modules compared to the single mount for the Endurance.
Perseverance mining three rocks
However, the cycle time on the Perseverance is about 3x that of the Endurance so, all things being equal, you haul in ice at the same rate.
The problem is that all things are never equal. It is nice that the Perseverance has a better range bonus, so it can lock three different ice asteroids and mine them simultaneously. And you can hold three more in ice blocks in the mining bay… something that, again, feels like a compromise number.
But in a competitive environment where you have more people mining, that three minute cycle time can be a real setback as an Endurance slips up to one of your rocks and sucks up one or two blocks, finishing the thing off, while you’re still waiting on your miner to finish its cycle.
So I went out for a bit in the Perseverance… then swapped back to the Endurance.
Out in my old Endurance
If you can find an empty ice field you’re probably better off with the bigger ship. But darting around trying to grab a single asteroid on a grid with half a dozen other ships also working the field, it feels like it is better to get one or two blocks of ice and move on than the watch that rock disappear mid cycle.
Anyway, that is my gut feeling on it.
So I’ll be out there in my Endurance, semi-AFK in a quiet corner of high sec trying to get that last 300 points. I’ve done a lot more work for 100K skill points in the past. But I’ll get to skill points later in the week.
Related:
The Ancient Gaming Noob 