Corpses in New Eden

If you don’t play EVE Online you might not even suspect that player corpses are a thing in the game.

Technically the claim for many years that you could not get out of your ship and your pod has been incorrect.  You could, and can, you just have to die to do it.  Not very useful or convenient, but you are out of your pod.

The thing is, it likely isn’t something that happens to people very often.  There are security status and CONCORD complications when blowing up people’s capsules, except in null sec (and wormhole space), and who ever goes there?  So while the outlier empires might pop pods as a matter course, all those people roaming low and high sec probably don’t run into corpses very often.

And even if they are there, you might not see them.  When I started writing this I logged on to look at a corpse in space, only to find that none of my overview settings had them enabled, including the default “All” setting which, true to CCP form, was actually missing A LOT of checkboxes.  Every time they add something it is unchecked by default, because comedy I guess.  And it took me a bit to figure out which checkbox even applied.  There isn’t one for corpses, but down the list there is one for biomass.

Biomass is what we become…

I am not sure why that is under the celestials category.  Probably more Icelandic humor.

To figure that out I had to find a test corpse.  As it turns out, I actually have a couple of corpses in the stash of stuff that has followed me around New Eden.

Corpses in Storage

That gave me the group name so I could search the overview settings for the entry and check it, at which point I could see corpses in space.

Corpse in the overview

I like that little person icon.

I think I have dragged the corpse of Jesus Nazarene around with me for a few years on the off chance it might come back to life and due to the theological implications of it being female.  Where is Professor Robert Langdon when you need him?

Corpses sit there in space when you get podded.  They are not much to look at, though I found if you alt-zoom with the camera you can get a pretty good close up.

Zoomed in… confirmed female I guess…

I actually had to jettison space Jesus to get it on the overview, which you can do because they are just objects 2 m3 in volume as far as the game is concerned.  Corpses don’t end up in a jettison can when you toss them into space, which makes them a little different than other items in your cargo hold… again, I assume somebody in Iceland thought this through… but otherwise they take up space and you can scoop them up.

Running in to pick up Jesus

And that is the key.  You can pick up corpses, and anything people can pick up they start to collect.  I know people who collect corpses, or who collect specific corpses.  Corpses of the space famous are in demand and I have seen people scramble to get to the corpse of a well known FC.  A Gevlon corpse would go for a lot.  The Mittani offered up corpses of himself as one of the initial incentives for the Fountain War Kickstarter until CCP told him that counted as RMT and he had to remove it.

And you cannot even make your own corpses.  Self-destructing does not yield a corpse, you need to be shot by another player.  But if you’re in a battle, at least in null sec, there are generally enough corpses to go around if you want to start collecting today.  A look at my updated overview after a quick drop/counter drop battle with PL in Delve last night.

Lots of corpses… the scroll went on for a bit

All of which might be mildly interesting data points for the outsider.  But I bring up the subject of corpses in New Eden for a few reason.  There is more to this than just a rather macabre thing to collect in an MMO.  CCP has used corpses before and seems to have some plan for the future.

First, there is the Drifters connection with corpses.  The Drifters showed up in 2015 and had an affinity for corpses, collecting stray corpses and, as I seem to recall, even becoming aggressive towards player ships with corpses in their cargo hold. (I might be wrong on that last bit.  Age and memory don’t mix well.)  Corpses were being collected by NPCs for some nefarious purpose.

Second was this year’s CCP April Fools joke, the Upwell Biomass Granulator, and MTU-like deployable that would harvest corpses from space and refine them into raw materials that could be used to make new sorts of boosters.

Corpses go in, but they don’t come out…

There were even faction variations listed that would create special items from specific inputs.  I heard a few people on coms who were excited/disappointed about this April Fools because they wanted it to be a thing.  Corpse collectors unmasked.  In any case, it seems like CCP has corpses on the brain of late because…

The third item is the Blood Raiders capital ships that are going to be hitting New Eden at some point in May.  Among the features of these pirate faction capital ships are special corpse bays.  The Dragon force auxiliary, the Chemosh dreadnought, and the Molok titan will have 1000 m3, 1000m3, and 2000 m3 corpse bays respectively, which will house 500 or 1000 corpses.

Something like the Molok

That was enough to get an article about the ships over at Kotaku, though the size of the corpse bays has been revised since that article ran. (Massively OP covers the likely reason for the change.)

The Blood Raiders have their own grim reputation, and earned their name for a reason.  But I do wonder if the corpse bays are there just for lore/show reasons, or if CCP has other ideas when it comes to corpses in New Eden.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about the humble corpse in New Eden.

Just hanging in space…

Do you have any corpses in your hangar?