After two months in small ships, Gareth Harmer decides it's time for an upgrade.

The Jita System. Home of the most important trading hub in all New Eden. Scene of the biggest riots EVE Online has ever seen. Den of countless scammers, con artists and felons. And yet, anchored off the fourth moon of the fourth planet in the system, the Caldari station continues to welcome capsuleers from across the galaxy.

It plays such an important role in EVE’s economy that almost every industrial corporation makes a regular visit, either to trade commodities or deliver finished goods. While there are other hubs to hawk your wares at, Jita is the one that most flock to. And, since I had minerals to sell, it was about time I made the trip for myself.

I’m not able to pilot the big cargo freighters with their cavernous holds, so I ended up flying wingman with a strangely fitted frigate. The lumbering freighter takes a while to reach maximum velocity and hit warp, so my job was to bring that top speed down and trick the warp engines into firing earlier. To do that, I’d be using three webifiers to snare the hauler – a ship fit that’s otherwise rarely seen.

As we progressed through the fifteen or so jumps toward Jita, I noticed that each stargate had a number of ships around it. This started out as just one or two, but increased to almost ten by the time we arrived at our destination. Some were probably just keeping tabs on the flow of goods up and down the major space lanes, but I reckon there were also a fair number looking for easy targets, like a weak frigate stuffed with expensive cargo.

Another trick I heard about is one favored by wardeccers. By scanning ships heading in and out of Jita, you can find those that mainly sell minerals. In all likelihood, they’re a bunch of small-town miners that would make easy prey to a tooled-up PvP corporation. Slap a war declaration on them, and you’re then free to hunt them in easy-to-access high-security space.

It’s why neutral haulers in NPC-led factions are so popular. They can’t be subject to a war declaration, allowing you to move goods around with (relative) impunity.

While in Jita, I decided to spend some time shopping for new ships. After spending much of my time in one destroyer or another, I wanted to move up to something bigger - cruisers. Mister Reckless gained a Minmatar Rupture, while Mister Business picked up a Gallente Vexor and Thorax. These new additions wouldn’t be gathering dust in some space station either – I had plans to put them into service immediately.

After doing some of the more basic missions EVE has to offer, I was eager to move up to something more challenging. But, in order to tackle the pirate fleets and navy incursions that make up Level 2 missions, I’d need something that could withstand a little more damage. This is where the cruisers would come in.

It would also mean getting used to a new set of guns and making better use of drones. When I’d been out mining, these automated sentries were seen as a deploy-and-forget countermeasure against the NPC pirates that would occasionally spawn in asteroid belts. By using them in missions against tougher targets, I needed to get better at deploying them against targets the railguns couldn’t reach.

In the end, my tactic was to focus fire on anything within railgun range, but use the drones to pick off anything that flew too close for the guns to be effective. I also quickly learned that sending my drones to attack far-away targets was an easy way to lose them, as my enemies would slowly pick them off. It felt better to use my Vexor to tank all the incoming fire while the drones swarmed like killer bees.

But, while my ship hangar starts to fill out with an interesting mix of vessels (incidentally, something like this for iPad would be brilliant), I feel like my journey into the unknown regions of EVE is at a crossroads. On the one hand, there’s the lure of low-security space and the risks and rewards that come with it. On the other, there’s the mystery of wormhole space and the unknown dangers that lie beyond.

Likewise, my ship training is at a crossroads. Do I continually push for bigger hulls and tougher cannons, or do I look at exotic ships with interesting capabilities? EVE’s training system is unique, in that it encourages specialization without making you feel like you’re losing anything. And with two characters, there’s no reason why I couldn’t do both.

One thing is clear though. No corporation stays in high-sec forever. Sooner or later you have to sail out into that big black ocean, knowing that the kraken are out there.

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Senior Contributing Editor

Follow me on Twitter @Gazimoff