Gareth Harmer wonders if chaos is about to rush into New Eden.

It’s been an incredible week in EVE Online. Goonswarm Federation has conquered the Fountain region of New Eden, driving out TEST Alliance and gaining access to some incredibly rare moons. The Alliance Tournament XI ended in a gripping final between Hydra Reloaded and Pandemic Legion, with the contest going right to the wire before PL emerged victorious.

These are both incredible achievements, requiring months of work, hundreds or thousands of players, and vast resources to draw from. As I watched the ATXI, one of the commentators mentioned that over 700 billion ISK worth of ships had been destroyed during the tournament – that’s over $25,000. Winning, it seems, is an expensive business.

But now that winners have emerged, where will these great forces turn their attention? There’s a feeling in my small industrial corporation – part fear, part anticipation – that things are about to become a whole lot more unstable.

After mining for over a month, I was starting to run on autopilot. Mister Business had worked his way up from a small mining frigate to a much bigger barge, with an enormous exhumer hovering on the horizon. But I’d settled into a routine, going through the rotation of locking targets on an asteroid, firing mining lasers and switching to the next floating rock once the first was obliterated.

While I was chewing through one such belt, my target overview blipped up to show a small mining Venture. That itself was nothing special – new players start out in Ventures all the time as a way to gain a foothold on the industrial path. I shrugged and went back to picking out the next set of targets for my lasers to gnaw on.

Then I noticed – the Venture was closing in on me, fast. I didn’t know why, but it looked suspicious. I aimed for an empty pocket of space, slammed my jets to full and punched the warp drive.

But the drive wasn’t responding. A destroyer had warped in alongside the humble-looking Venture, and was locking on with everything it had. As I desperately tried to pull away, it opened fire.

The first volley ate through my barge’s shields, while his warp scrambler stopped me from jumping to safety. My sentry drones started picking away at his ship, but their efforts were tiny by comparison. Sirens screamed at me to do something.

The second volley melted through the armor plating and cut away at the substructure. Streams of smoke and flame vented from the hull, as if the blue touchpaper had been lit on a giant metal firework. Unless I got to safety soon, I’d have front row seats at the explosion.

Just as suddenly, it stopped. Concord, the space-police of New Eden, had arrived to destroy the aggressor’s ship. A single burst from their cannons left nothing but wreckage. The deceitful Venture stayed a brief moment to pick over the remains of his fleet mate’s ship, then vanished into the dark.

I surveyed the scene for a moment, watching the Concord ships slowly patrol the belt. I’d survived – more by luck than anything else – but my ship, my capsule and my cargo were intact. Sure, it was smoldering and smoking something fierce, but it was still in one piece.

And that’s when reality snapped back to me. The scrambler had dropped. I aimed for the nearest station, punched the warp drive so hard my keyboard buckled, and docked as fast as faster-than-light travel would allow.

It’s moments like these that could become all the more common, as idle hands roam New Eden looking for targets. And that’s a good thing – heading out into space should always have some risk attached, whatever you happen to be doing. After all, I was flying around in an expensive ship with no armor plating, no shield enhancements and a handful of sentry drones to protect me. I’d grown complacent and was lucky enough to survive.

Now that I knew my ships needed hardening, the task became working out how. To do that, I’d need to dig in to the intricacies of ship fitting. My previous approach of taking a freshly built hull and slapping on some weapons just wasn’t good enough, and the in-game tools only help with testing ship parts I already owned. This particular task would take some theory crafting.

Of course, theory crafting isn’t unique to EVE. If you’ve played World of Warcraft’s endgame, you’ve probably tried out Ask Mister Robot or WoW Reforge – both of which have helped players optimize their equipment quickly.

By contrast, EVE’s rich API has spawned a number of applications. There’s Neocom for tracking characters on the iPhone, EFT for testing ship fits, EVEMon for creating and tracking skill plans and EVE HQ as a ‘do everything’ console. Even websites are built on the back of EVE’s API, including killboards, poker and ship gambling.

While I was testing ways of beefing up my mining barge in EFT, I realized something. I’ve been playing for roughly two months, and yet not encountered a single spread sheet. Sure, I was tinkering with tools to get the best setup, but I’d probably be doing that with any game that offers an API. So much for that myth.

Once I’d worked out a set-up that seemed to offer a strong level of protection without being incredibly expensive, I used EVEMon to plan a training course so that I’d be able to use all this shiny new gear. Skills that provide bonuses to shields and armor got bumped up in priority. It means that I’ll be waiting a little longer for that exhumer, but all the benefits will carry up.

As it is, I think my efforts have paid off. My mining barge shouldn’t collapse under the first sign of hostile fire, and hopefully survive long enough for CONCORD, the galactic police force, to arrive. But there’s no certainty – there are still ships that would make short work of it. The best protection is to keep my eye on the screen and be prepared to react to anything unusual.

And Mister Reckless? He’s still around. Last I heard he was window shopping for cruisers. Something about a Rupture…

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Senior Contributing Editor

Follow me on Twitter @Gazimoff