Tag Archives: Dronelands

Leaving the Drone Regions

Our work in the Drone Regions is done for the most part. The Imperium did not burn down every single structure. I am sure there are still Athanors, Raitarus, Skyhooks, and other medium structures left over from PanFam’s time in the Drones. You stay some place for as long as they did and you start to collect stuff… and even more so when you’re renting space and every renter feels they need their own structures in the systems they’re living in.

That can be for the new owners of the space, something for them to work on, a bit of a distraction from the labors of moving in and setting up shop in a new system or three.

Structure shoots carried on through the weekend, but the pace was clearly tapering off from the almost manic run that we going on in the middle of last week. Thursday night USTZ was something of a crescendo with the Keepstar kills, and there were bursts of activity after, but the end was in sight.

As noted in a previous posts (linked below at the end) the Imperium plan has been to clear out PanFam’s structures and to make the Drone regions an open area for non-aligned alliances to jump into null sec and claim space. This will be enforced by the Imperium, and will include Freeport Keepstars in LXQ2-T, 9WVY-F, and F9-FUV in order to facilitate movement and supply operations as well as to give something akin to NPC space in the region so it won’t be as secure as it was under PanFam.

And people have been moving in. We’ve mostly not shot them as promised, and they have mostly not shot us, but mistakes have been made and everybody is always on their guard.

The early arrivals in the Drones include:

Some of those will hold on, at least for a while. Others will likely be swept away as the land grab continues on to its eventual conclusion, and at least its initial stable state.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the Daily Sovereignty Map to see who survives and who else shows up.

Meanwhile, the members for the former PanFam coalition are moving to their respective corners of the map, with most taking up positions along side Fraternity in Winter Coalition, with some grabbing space in the north. Slyce has the spot in space that TEST had way back in the CFC days before they moved to Fountain, including the five linked systems referred to at times as the “Pentagoon” or the “TESTagram.”

The Slyce-ahedron maybe?

Pandemic Horde, who precipitated this whole collapse, is still headed to Cloud Ring. Their agreement with The Initiative is temporary, so they can’t stay there forever. Meanwhile, as an alliance, it has lost more than half of its members at this point.

DOTLAN Alliance Movements – Nov 22, 2025

Pandemic Horde remains the fourth largest alliance in the game by member count. That means they have enough mass that could break back into null sec somewhere. Generally after such a mass exodus of players you’re left with the hardcore who will undock and go places and the AFK who probably don’t know anything has happened yet and will be surprised when and if they finally log back in.

The question is where they will go.

The Imperium’s policy on the Drone regions is that any non-bloc alliance can set up shop, with Pandemic Horde being the one specific, hard exception. They may no longer be in a bloc, but we won’t let them back in.

Which does not leave them with a lot of choices for null sec destinations. They won’t be allowed back into the Drone regions and they don’t have the might to threaten any of the remaining three large entities, Fraternity/Winter Co, The Initiative, or the Imperium. So there is no space for them there. Neither will any of those three groups ally with them. Those bridges have been burnt.

If you look at the map, the places where non-bloc alliances live are Providence, Querious, and Delve.

Sure, there is also some space in Esoteria and Omist held by neutrals, but they live next door to the Imperium and I don’t think we’d let PH move in next door… and I am pretty sure they wouldn’t want to. They just ran away because we were their neighbors. That makes the other choices a bit dicey as well. Delve would probably be about as far away as they could get… and it would be no easy job taking the place. The couldn’t finish the job the last time they invaded, even with 3 to 1 odds in their favor.

But the other option is to setup shop in low sec, where at least you have NPC stations everywhere, so assets will be safe. But low sec isn’t a pushover, and even at their size they would have some work to do.

And there is also NPC null sec, like Outer Ring or Syndicate. They could make a home in Poitot, the only named system in Syndicate.

We will have to wait and see what more they make next.

Meanwhile, at the fireside on Saturday, Asher was able to tell us one of the humorous side stories of the war. The one battle that Pandemic Horde put in the effort on and actually won was the Keepstar fight in K-IYNW in the Great Wildlands.

The Imperium had put down a Keepstar there and PH blew it up before it could come online. This was a win for them. They apparently thought they were stopping a staging system for an invasion of their space.

Instead, Asher told us that one of PH’s corporations wanted to defect to us and bring their supers and titans with them, but there was no safe jump route for the. So that Keepstar wasn’t an invasion jump off point, it was a way station for the corp to help them escape.

However, PH did not know this and, in an attempt to secure the system, they put up a Fortizar. The defecting corp simply used that to jump to when getting their big ships out… so mission accomplished in the end.

As for me, I got in on a few more fleets over the weekend. The final fleets were all structure kills, payment for all the past timer setting. There were no more Keepstars on the menu, but there were still Fortizars, Azbels, and Tataras to be found.

Another Azbel to shoot

One of the twists was a character named Odyssey 2049, a member of Snuffed Out, who appears to have scouted out almost all of the big timers and managed to slip in and tag the structure, so as to end up on the kill mail. We were not the only ones racing between two Keepstar kills the other night. Odyessey was along for the ride as well, getting on both, plus a third one earlier in the day that I missed out on. That is how you get a total lifetime ISK destroyed count over 120 trillion ISK. (My own lifetime total is about 14.5 trillion ISK after all of this, a number reached largely by having just been around for a long time.)

A Tatara brewing up, viewed from above

Eventually though we were done. I was on the last fleet on Saturday night with Reagalan. Then, on Sunday morning my time the move ops home began. Capitals jumped first, but I was in on the initial subcap move op.

Undocking on the Keepstar

We were clearing stuff up behind us. The Keepstar itself was in the midst of its unanchoring cycle, soon to be taken down and hauled off.

No timer for unanchoring

We got a titan bridge that covered most of the space home, and just had to gate a last half dozen or so. Then it was into Insmother and through one last Ansiblex to home in C-JMT6.

The home Keepstar in Insmother

Among other things, Sunday saw the peak daily concurrency hit 41,322. That is the highest number since the peak during Covid, back in May of 2020, when the game hit 41,562. To see more than that you have to go back to 2017 and 2016 and the great surge that happened with Alpha clones and free to play. (Data from EVE Offline.)

I am not saying our operations were solely responsible for this five year peak. There was a lot going on this week, including the Catalyst expansion, which came with the usual 7 days of free Omega time. In the last couple of years the peak concurrent has coincided with the launch of the Q4 expansion, hitting in 37,488 in 2024 and 40,165 in 2023, that last being the Havoc expansion, which seemed to finally break us free of CCP’s bad economic moves in New Eden that had been depressing user logins.

But surely some of the turnout yesterday was because of the Drone regions and people moving in and us heading out.

We shall see what happens next. Meanwhile I am back home from the wars, such that they were.

TAGN – The Wild Ride of the Kikimoras and More Keepstars Down in the Drone Regions
TAGN – The Downfall of the R-AG7W Keepstar and Future Plans for the Drone Regions
TAGN – Postcards from the Camp in R-AG7W
TAGN – Pandemic Horde Breaks, Seeks to Flee the Drones, Allies, and Goons
zKillboard – The Drone Regions Campaign Totals

The Wild Ride of the Kikimoras and More Keepstars Down in the Drone Regions

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It was a long week in the Drone Regions burning down the remaining PanFam structures, and I was a good soldier over most of the time, getting in fleets when I could and setting timers without getting on very many kill mails. You do the work first and worry about kill mails later.

That said, I was determined to get on one particular kill mail. I wanted to get on the kill for the Keepstar in MTO2-2.

I was particularly jazzed for that particular structure because I had been there to first shoot the shields to set the armor timer and then was sent back again to shoot the armor to set the hull timer. Having done that I was feeling a bit entitled to get on the kill. This was the same Keepstar I mentioned the other day, where we got a ride back from a B0SS titan. (We tipped the driver generously.)

The B0SS titan waiting to give us a ride

But the scheduling crew in skirmish command doesn’t do things for my sole benefit, nor should they. So I had a feeling I might need to make this happen on my own.

Thursday afternoon and into the evening I rode along in a Reagalan fleet, a mix of Kikimoras and bombers and assorted other small stuff as we went through a few systems, killing three Fortizars and an Azbel. Not a bad haul for an outing, especially after a week of mostly setting timers.

And Azbel beginning to brew up

We even knocked off a Pharolux Cyno Beacon because it was there and unfueled and we could kill it in one sitting.

Shooting the cyno beacon

And, honestly, there was another one of those… and an Ansiblex… sitting one system over that we could have taken. Targets were everywhere.

I had joined that fleet in hopes that we would end up at one particular target, the MTO2-2 Keepstar. But Reagalan announced that we were going back to R-AG7W… and we were just seven gates from MTO2-2. So when the fleet went through the first gate home I stayed on the near side, dropped fleet, and set my destination for MTO2-2.

This was not without risk. I had already lost a Kikimora to some pipe bombing battleships on a gate when an FC sent a small group of Kikis off to shoot a secondary structure. The Drones had been easy on us at first, loaded with people eager to leave. They were happy enough to leave us alone if we left them alone. But new groups had been patrolling or even moving into the region, some chill, like B0SS, and some… well, happy to camp a gate with a gang of smart bombing Praxis battleships. (And why has the Praxis become the pipe bomb battleship of choice? I do not know enough of the art to know what it is no longer Abaddons.)

This time I lucked out. I made it to the system, check in on the Keepstar, saw I had time to spare, so safed up and did the dishes. (My wife had nicely brought me some stir fry and rice while I sat at my computer.)

The Keepstar of my kill mail desires

I figured a fleet would be heading out for that kill and I would just join up with them when they arrived. And, sure enough, there was a ping for a fleet under Andreas Ayers which said that there was a Keepstar kill mail to collect. Right on the money. I joined that fleet, got on coms, and listened as they undocked from our deployment staging Keepstar in R-AG7W and took a titan bridge.

Good thing too, it was a long run out to MTO. And then the FC put the destination in fleet and it was UDVW-O. I was at the wrong location, the wrong Keepstar kill. Well, for them anyway. I still wasn’t going to miss out on this one. It just looked like I would be on my own. I dropped fleet… I wasn’t with them and might never be… and waited a bit, as I had lost track of when the MTO Keepstar would be ready. But it takes a good 25 minutes to kill a Keepstar with no tidi, so I had a buffer. And I had seen blues in system.

I set the desto to UDVW-O, just to see how far away it was, and I was a good 24 jumps away. Maybe I could make it to the second kill? Probably not. So I warped to the Keepstar in MTO at range and found that we had sent out some supercarriers to take care of business.

Supercarriers on the Keepstar grid

They were way off, having the advantage of being able to send their fighters long distances. Closer to the structure itself there were a variety of neutrals shooting the structure. I steered clear of them and none of them came for me. We all shot the Keepstar in peace. I had actually been later on grid than I thought I might be so I didn’t end up hanging around too long. We were going to be done fast. Sure enough, boom, and the Keep was gone.

Another structure on the list in the Drones

Then it was decision time. Do I go for the other Keepstar? I mean, the obvious answer is “yes!” But it wasn’t that simple. The route wasn’t just 23 gates through the Drones. MTO is the system with the region gate to Venal and UDV is the system with the region gate to Vale of the Silent. The fastest route was to jump from Perrigen falls into Venal, loop around, enter Tribute, pass through that then Vale of the Silent, before taking the regional gate that would bring me to The Kalevala Expanse and the Keepstar in UDV. Here is the path displayed via DOTLAN EVE Maps.

The shortest route goes through hostile space

That is an unfriendly route for an Imperium pilot. Tribute and Vale of the Silent are governed by Fraternity and its Winter Co allies, while Venal is nominally NPC null sec, it is viewed by Fraternity as its space and they have plenty of structures there as well.

A hot run through hostile space on a route between two Keepstar kills that the locals are no doubt aware of… that has about a 30% chance of success in my experience. The most likely outcome is an interdictor or drag bubble on a gate along the route to hold passers by in place while a small fleet chews them up.

But what else was I going to do with the evening? So as soon as my aggression timer was almost up I warped to the regional gate to Venal and jumped through.

I was not alone. I saw a number of Imperium pilots in that first system, Merkelchen, the KarmaFleet CEO among them. There were maybe ten of us. That was good. There is safety in numbers and… to be blunt… you don’t have to be faster than the tiger, you just have to be faster than everybody else running from the tiger.

So off we went, gate after gate. Some of the pilots had planned this out and were in interceptors, which aligned and warped faster. They pulled away from the pack after a few jumps. But that was fine. They could go get caught or break camps or whatever and maybe help get us through.

Remaining behind were half a dozen Kikimoras, jumping, warping, and jumping again. I was near the same three other ships for most of the journey. If time were not of the essence, I might have taken care, bounced off a celestial rather than warping straight between gates, a behavior that plays into any camp’s plans.

The systems did not lack for hostiles. I thought for sure I was done when I came through a gate and a Fraternity Sabre was sitting there, 13km off the gate. All he had to do was put up a bubble and call his friends in system… and there were a dozen in local… and I would have been toast.

And that is the job of a Sabre pilot, to put up a bubble and catch hostiles… and to get blown up. No true interdictor pilot has just one ship handy. Multifit was created to help Sabre pilots to extra hulls in a hurry.

I hit warp and hoped for the best… but he didn’t bother. Maybe he wasn’t in position yet, maybe the continued appearance of Imperium ships coming through the gate made him think twice. Maybe he was just moving his ship around I don’t know. But off I went, no bubble there to impede me.

As we got into the Vale of the Silent, things got a little more quiet. On one warp I put “Ride of the Kikimoras!” in local and got a response from one of my fellow runners as we warped across the system.

On a wild run through hostile space

It wasn’t until the final system that I took a bit of care. The most obvious gate to camp would be the one into UDV as it would catch and gawkers or those interested in getting on a Keepstar kill mail. I bounced off the sov hub and then headed to the gate, hoping that my altered angle of attack would thwart and camp.

But I need not have bothered. Nobody was at the gate. Me and the rest of the hasty flotilla on a ride between Keepstars went through the gate and found our target awaiting. I joined back up with Andreas Ayers’ fleet, warped to the FC, and got myself setup to shoot the Keepstar. It was past half way. I had made it with plenty of time left on the clock. The gamble had paid off.

The Keepstar was there for us

The shoot was mostly uneventful. A few hostiles lurked at a distance. The gunner on the Keepstar would launch fighters to try and grab a target of opportunity, but would recall them almost immediately once they were targeted. The gunner was going to lose the Keepstar, but wasn’t going to give us free fighter kills.

That all ended as expected with the Keepstar dead. Then GSOL dropped in, as they always do, to salvage the structure, pick up the Quantum Core (a 30 billion ISK prize) and pick up any loose loot the structure might have dropped. They are going to have a pile of such cores and loot with all the structures they have cleaned up.

After GSOL was headed out, the FC sent all the Kikimoras and other small stuff to go guard the gate on the route home while he, the battleships, and the supporting boosters and logi went to the Vale of the Silent gate, and odd move.

Keeping watch on our out gate

As it turned out, somebody had a stray Zirnitra dreadnought stuck in Geminate, so they jumped to the other side of the gate and came through, where we then shepherded the capital ship far enough along so that they could jump back to our staging. A worthwhile effort while we were there.

Then it was back to the staging Keepstar. After a few jumps together, we were let loose to free burn back. I made it back and docked up, happy at achieving my goal and getting on a bonus kill mail along the way. A couple of the pilots who went on the ride through Venal were in the fleet with us, so we exchanged a few “well, that was a ride” comments.

There were still more structures to go in the Drone regions. But the end is in sight. Soon we will be headed home, and the total for all of this destruction, already estimated to be past 20 trillion ISK lost, will be added up and assessed.

The Glassing of the Drones and the Future of those Regions

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“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

-Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

One of the crazy aspects of the collapse of Pandemic Horde as an alliance has been how suddenly everything fell to pieces for them.

As with the Hemingway quote, they seemed to be failing slowly for quite a while… pulling back as we moved forward, giving up whole regions without a fight… and then everything fell apart.

I have a post in mind to trace that path, to put a timeline and some structure around it. But that is something for another day. This past week saw the Imperium wrapped up in taking apart the Drone regions, one structure at a time.

That started with the Keepstar in R-AG7W, which feels like it blew up ages ago, but it was just last week.

The Keepstar finally boiling over into a wreck

Then there was a brief respite or maybe a day or two when people moved back to Insmother after the big event when we were deploying back again to the Keepstar we dropped in the system, or to the Keepstar that Solyaris Chtonium sold us, to start setting timers on structures.

I got out there on my main and my alt, each in a Kikimora, each loaded up with Occult, the high damage, short range ammo preferred for structure bashing, and then started going on structure shoot fleets.

My Kikimora on its way

For a few days it was almost bizarre out in the Drone regions it was so quiet. We had fleets moving all over, but there were almost no hostiles to be seen. We had temp blued Solyaris Chtonium as part of the Keepstar deal so they could move north to setup shop with Fraternity as WinterCo without us shooting them. Likewise, Northern Coalition, NCDot, also betrayed by Pandemic Horde, was focused on move ops out of the Drones and into the north.

There were regular camps at a couple of the regional gates getting into the Drone regions, but within the regions itself it was often safe to simply move around on your own.

That changed as the weekend arrived and other groups saw some opportunities to camp gates within the Drones and drop on unwary Imperium pilots lulled into a false sense of security after a few days of quiet. That led to a titan out shooting structures getting dropped on and destroyed. Pings went out to remind people not to randomly drive caps around in space where hostiles were hunting.

I was in a fleet of Kikis shooting a Tatara that got hot dropped by Hard Knocks Citizens just as we were almost done. They blew up a couple of our ships as we warped off, then proceeded to finish off the structure for us, so we all got on that kill mail. Our job done, we moved on to the next target assigned. They didn’t follow, but they had a fax in tow, so they weren’t going to chase a bunch of destroyers around.

Kikis moving on to the next target

Target assignments were often a study in chaos management. There were a couplel hundred timers reports to be on the tracking board that our operational coordination group was using, and as new timers came up we often had to split our fleets or get a timer deep enough in so that we could run off to the next timer and let somebody else follow up and hopefully pick up where we left off before the structure self repair finished. This meme was posted during one of our fleets on Saturday morning my time.

We were certainly in demand

I have been in more system in the Drone regions in the last few days than I have probably been in the last decade. And we kept on rolling, gating to the next location and shooting to set the next structure timer.

Kikis orbiting the FC in a Monitor

Even in the chaos, a lot of structures went down. The Imperium killed five Keepstars on Friday the 14th..

The Keepstar Count for November 14

That is the most Keepstars killed in a single day that I can recall, something that seems confirmed by looking down the list of Keepstar losses over on zKillboard.

I wrote about us blowing up three in a single day back in 2023. Now the benchmark is five, so it wasn’t as big of a deal when we blew up four more on the 15th I suppose. We did manage five more within a 24 hour period starting Sunday and ending today.

I did not get on any of those kills. In fact, I spent so much time on Saturday setting timers that I was starting to think that “No killmails for Kikis” might be on the coord guidelines. But there was so much to be done that there was no way to keep up with all the timers and get everybody on the big kills. And I did end up getting on a few. All I need is a few explosions to be happy.

Another fiery structure death

Overall, a crazy amount of stuff has been destroyed. More than once we found ourselves shooting the wrong structure because there were so many possible timers. I burned through at least 15K rounds of Occult, the close range, high damage small Trig ammo. I saw somebody out in our fleets with a laser fit Gnosis and was jealous. Lasers are the way to go. We need a laser doctrine for bashing.

Laser Gnosis shooting a fort

As for the destruction, I haven’t seen a total count yet. There was a battle report put together for late Thursday to early Friday last week that showed 2.9 trillion ISK destroyed… and less than a billion of it was ours.

Battle Report Header

If you go to that link and scroll down the list, you will see a lot of dead structures. And that sort of thing carried on all through the weekend. Somebody will calculate a total at some point I am sure.

Meanwhile, Pandemic Horde has been slimming down to become that smaller, elite PvP organization that was promised in past announcements from their leadership.

Top Ten Alliances – October 15 vs. November 15

Fraternity, Insidious, and The Initiative seem to be the biggest recipients of PH refugees.

I suspect that the outflow isn’t higher because the corps that could negotiate a move because they had a reputation or record to recommend them did. That left behind smaller and more casual corps, plus all the characters in the PH run corps like Pandemic Horde Inc, A Blessed Bean, and Horde Vanguard have to move on their own, and other alliances are busy with corporation moves and probably ignoring single players.

Then there are the AFK players who are going to come back to a surprise.

And then there is the future of the Drone regions. Asher posted an update to Reddit last night that said the following:

Here is the path going forward:

Sov: We intend to hold the ihub in G-QTSD and nowhere else. Please start attempting to take sov on Wednesday, we kindly ask if you are taking sov ignore the Imperium glassing fleets, they will do the same to you. The slower it goes for us the longer we’ll be in your future space.

Structures: We have glassed many trillions of isk in structures, at one point our timerboard had 635 timers on it. The majority are dead but many still remain which we will be destroying over the next week. If you want to move in – any structure that begins anchoring Saturday the 22nd eve time 00:01 will be considered safe from glassing. We will not destroy any structure that begins anchoring after this time. We may still finish up previous timers after this date expires but we plan to undeploy from the dronelands by the end of this coming weekend.

Freeports: Freeport keepstars are in LXQ2-T, 9WVY-F, and F9-FUV. These will contains markets but not jump clones. They will be freeports open to all alliances except Pandemic Horde. You may use them for logistics security, to stage out of, whatever you desire. We are intentionally not putting cloning in to make them less desirable than setting up your own citadel. We will not be holding sov in these freeport systems, you are free to take the sov, moons, etc but not cyno jam the system. We will defend the keepstars from refs – we will reset sov/destroy cyno jammers as needed, so that general logistics security is assured in the dronelands.

Overall our hope is that you can find a space where you can grow and flourish. We have burnt down the old monoculture renting forest and we hope a thriving ecosystem will grow. We will not be enforcing byzantine agreements or trying to force people into a fake nullsec with rules meant to keep you from playing the game. Good luck in the dronelands!

So we will continue burning things down until we’re done. Some groups have already started moving into the region. We actually hit Keepstar in a system that Brotherhood of Spacers, who used to live in Venal until WinterCo pushed them out in the B2 war, and they pulled out a titan and gave us a ride to our next destination. We were clearing out their future home after all.

A B0SS titan waiting to give us a ride

We did get a little frisky when Asher warped us over to one of their structures and some people started shooting it… I mean, it is what we had been doing for days, right? No harm no foul though, it was just the shield that took a few hits.

Overall it has been a busy few days… week… however long it has been since we jumped into the region feet first. My participation count is up considerably from past months.

What have I been up to?

That number isn’t a brag… I’d get laughed out of any contest with just that number given how many ops some people are running. I went on fleets with Reageaan at opposite ends of the clock where I slept in between and I am pretty sure he did not. And we get credit for every account that goes along, so I dual-boxed some fleets. But that means that guy with 6 Catalysts in every op I went on was getting 3x to 6x the credit. The number is just an indicator of how much time I’ve spent playing relative to the past couple of months. (That number went up to 50 as I went on ops while writing this, but didn’t want to take a new screen shot. Also, coord gives us bonus credit occasionally for long or annoying ops, so that Woosi fleet where we were sent all over space got us triple credit.)

Soon enough we’ll be done, the Drone regions will be clear and we’ll head home and see what develops in this new open section of null sec.