A Guide For Returning Brave Pilots

7o, and welcome back to Eve Online!

Depending on when you last logged in a lot may have changed in that time period. This page is designed to act as a guide to get you caught up to speed and back in the action.

If you need to rejoin the alliance, simply follow the instructions here.

Things in bold are considered especially important.

Brave has changed significantly over the past few years. You can check out this page for a full history of Brave from start to finish.

Below you can find a list of all our previous nullsec staging structures, along with a rough description of their current statuses. For hostile, destroyed, or unanchored structures you can hover over the status label to find out where the automatic stage of asset safety would've deposited your assets.

K7D-II - Mothership Bellicose
2023 - Present
Friendly

K7D-II - Broadcast4Reps
2023 - 2023
Friendly

DO6H-Q - Dunk's Bee Hive
2023 - 2023
Destroyed

C4C-Z4 - The Sanctuary Institute of Paleo
2022 - 2023
Destroyed

F-NMX6 - Mothership Bellicose
2022 - 2023
Destroyed

Q-5211 - Broadcast4Reps
2021 - 2022
Unanchored

5ZXX-K - Novum Fortes
2021 - 2021
Destroyed

NBPH-N - The Gem of Nullsec
2021 - 2021
Sold

P-ZMZV - The Leakstar
2021 - 2021
Friendly

GE-8JV - Mothership Bellicose
2019 - 2021
Destroyed

PZMA-E - Fortress Impass
2019 - 2021
Destroyed

68FT-6 - Mothership Bellicose
2017 - 2019
Unanchored

GE-8JV - SOTA Factory
2017 - 2019
Destroyed

9-4RP2 Station
2017 - 2017
Destroyed

DO6H-Q Station
2016 - 2017
Destroyed

I1Y-IU Station
2016 - 2016
Destroyed

HED-GP Station
2015 - 2015
Unanchored

GE-8JV Station
2014 - 2015
Destroyed

These changes are those most significant to returning players. They will likely impact where your items are and how you can go about moving them.

Alpha Clones are Eve Online accounts that do not have a monthly subscription fee like Omega Accounts do. They're effectively a Free-to-Play option. These types of accounts were first added in 2016, and later modified in 2017 to remove a lot of the original restrictions. Today Alpha Clones are a legitimate free-to-play option for many people, from casual players to newbies and even to returning players wanting to ease their way back into the game.

You can read more about Alpha Clones on our dedicated page here.

Citadels are the replacements for POS Towers and Player Owned Stations. Added during the Citadel Update back in the 2016, these new citadels take aspects from both aforementioned structures and combine them into one. Compared to the aforementioned structures they're also fairly cheap, and an infinite amount of them can be placed any system (Highsec, Lowsec, Nullsec, and WH space).

Like stations, all (current) variations of citadels have docking access and item hangars. Docking access is controlled by a new permissions system called Access Control Lists (ACLs). Corporation and Alliance Standings are completely de-coupled from this system. If you 'Show Info' on a citadel, you can check the 'Services' tab for the 'Docking' service to see if you have it.

Capitals and Supercapitals can only dock at certain sizes of citadels. You can reference this chart to determine what structures your ships can dock at.

Be warned: Throughout the game there are tons of bait citadels targeting people trying to move their assets. Because of this we only recommend using citadels belonging to Brave or another allied alliance when moving.

Tether

Citadel Tethering is the mechanic designed to replace POS Tower Forcefields. While tethered a ship is immune to all damage and cannot be locked. It can however be bumped and bubbled to prevent warping and jumping. The radius that this tether is applied in is denoted by a ring of lights around the structure. Every citadel has this functionality, and access to it is automatically granted to everyone who has docking access to the structure.

Services

On the user end, Structure Services function identically to how they used to in stations. Things which used to be unique to POSes such as supercapital production and reactions have also been rolled into these interfaces. Citadel services include Clone Bays, Markets, Reprocessing, Manufacturing, Research, and Reactions.

On the management end, these services can be added and removed from citadels similar to fitting modules to a ship. Each service has a fuel cost, and different kinds of citadels are bonused for different services.

Tethering Status Icon

Citadels do have weapons, however unlike on POSes these weapons are fitted similar to how ships are fitted, and not visible from the outside of the structure. Citadels do not automatically attack hostiles like POSes used to, rather they need to be manually gunned and controlled.

Citadels use missiles and guided bombs as their primary weapon system, however they also have fighters, point defense (think Huge Fucking Smartbomb), targeted EWAR, burst projectors, and (in the case of the largest citadels) a chain doomsday weapon that can wipe out a small dreadbomb and hit subcapitals.

Citadels can be destroyed, however they're somewhat more difficult to destroy than POSes. Like POSes they have shields, armor, and structure health; but unlike POSes they have a comparatively low amount of health with a damage limit to prevent them from being killed too quickly. This damage limit works out so that each bash takes about 20 minutes to complete at max damage. They also have 2 reinforcement timers (after the loss of shields and armor), and only during the final reinforcement timer are structure services deactivated.

When a structure is destroyed in normal space, all assets that were contained within it go into 'Asset Safety,' which you can read more about below. In wormhole space, and in the case of Abandoned structures, all contained assets are dropped in containers named for their owners, and can looted by anyone.

Back in 2018, every nullsec outpost and conquerable station was replaced with a Faction Citadel. These citadels have extremely good bonuses, and were fitted with rigs with even better bonuses on their creation. There is no new source of these citadels, and the rigs are removed when the citadel is destroyed or unanchored.

The result of this change is that many assets that used to be considered safe (even if not accessible) in nullsec stations have now been spread throughout New Eden, as most of these structures have since been unanchored or destroyed.

Asset Safety is a mechanic meant to prevent a massive loss of items when citadels are destroyed. It is triggered either manually (you can trigger it for any of your hangars, or a citadel owner can trigger it for everyone), or automatically when a citadel is destroyed. Once triggered, all affected items are placed into a state of limbo for 5 days.

Asset Safety has 2 stages; 5 days after its initial triggering a person can choose to deposit their assets to an NPC Station or Upwell Structure in the same system the assets were originally located. If the assets aren't moved in an additional 15 days, they're automatically deposited in the closest lowsec station, by True Distance.

Asset Safety is disabled on structures in the Abandoned state, which a structure is converted to if it has been in a Low Power state for 7 days.

Added during the Forsaken Fortress update in Late May 2020, the Abandoned Structure State occurs when a structure has been in a low power state for 7 days. All structures in this state lose access to tether, reinforcement timers, and Asset Safety. Structures in this state can be destroyed in one attack, and everything contained within will drop for the attackers to loot just like in wormhole space.

This change was most impactful in highsec where structure spam used to be rampant and otherwise abandoned structures were unlikely to be attacked. If you had assets stored in an unmaintained citadel (for example one owned by an alt-corp) during this period, it and the assets within were likely destroyed in the weeks following the update. Since this update, you should only store assets long-term in citadels that you trust will be maintained indefinitely, or in NPC Stations.

A few major capital changes have happened since 2016, which may impact your ability to utilize them.

The Capital Ship Overhaul started in October of 2015, and continued into early 2016. Several aspects of capitals were standardized, including the Jump Drive, 10,000 m3 Fleet Hangar, 1,000,000 m3 Ship Maintenance Bay, and the ability for other ships to refit off them. This means all capitals can be used as a suitcase if needed, making it easier to move around large amounts of ships and assets.

This update also changed a lot of things critical to capital usage, including module layouts, specialized modules, and general mechanics. Any capital fit before this time is probably not in a usable state.

The Jump Fatigue Changes happened in February 2018. This change was designed to balance the movement of capital ships, making it easier in some ways, more difficult in others.

The main change here was a huge reduction in accumulated Jump Fatigue, with a new maximum Jump Reactivation (Orange) timer of 30 minutes, and a new maximum Jump Fatigue (Blue) timer of 5 hours. This makes it generally easier to move and utilize capital ships more often.

The other major part of this change was the addition of a 30 second timer which prevents you from tethering (but not docking) after using your jump drive. This adds a period of time in which you can be tackled after moving, and is part of why bait citadels are so dangerous.

The changes which have become referred to as 'Cynogeddon' happened in August 2019. This update encompasses 2 major changes; the addition of industrial cynosural fields, and the removal of regular cynosural fields from most ships.

Industrial cynosural fields can only be jumped to by Jump Freighters and Black Ops Battleships, and share the same basic requirements that regular cynos used to. However they can only be fit to T1 industrial ships. If you had a cyno network setup for jump freighting, it will likely need some updates to get working again.

The big change in this update though was the removal of regular cynosural fields from all ships except for Force Recons, and Blackops Battleships. This change massively increases the cost and risk involved in moving and deploying capitals. Alts dedicated to cyno ceptors, cyno rookie ships, and hard cynos are all now effectively useless, and likely require significant training to become useful again. (Graphic: types of cynos)

Depending on where you last left your assets and how long it's been, most of your assets are likely locked away in a citadel somewhere or in lowsec stations.

If your stuff is where we are, then your process for getting everything where it needs to be is quick, cheap, and easy!

There's ton of options for moving things within allied space, including Brave Freight and the #hauling channel on Slack.

If you decided to stash away your assets in highsec before you took a break, getting everything to our staging is still fairly easy.

The cheapest option is to use a service like Red Frog, PushX, or Public Courier Contracts to get your assets to Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant or Amarr. From there you can use Brave Freight to get your assets to our Querious Staging of K7D-II - Broadcast4Reps.

In many ways asset safety has been super helpful to returning players. Unfortunately though it does have one major downside; Asset Safety tends to cluster in a few major lowsec systems, which are extremely heavily camped. You have a few options if your items are in a lowsec system due to this mechanic:

• If the system isn't being camped (do some research on the people in local, look for people undocking bumping faxes, and look for insta-lockers on the undock to confirm this), you can evac as normal either yourself or using a service like PushX. Get your stuff to highsec then follow the instructions in that section.
• If the system is camped, your options become a bit more uncomfortable:
  • You can try to run the camp if you have a capital ship. This basically involves utilizing your undock invulnerability to jump out safely, but everything has to be done perfectly. If you click jump at the wrong time, don't have fuel, or lose invuln you're pretty much guaranteed to go down.
  • If the station has a market you can try to firesale your assets to get some return out of them.
  • You can try to negotiate a mass-sale of your assets with the campers. NEVER EVER TRY TO NEGOTIATE FOR THE ABILITY TO ESCAPE! THEY WILL TAKE YOUR ISK AND STILL KILL YOU!