Quantum Cores Now Required in Upwell Structures

Today is the day that Quantum Cores are required for all Upwell structures that provide tethering.

There is 100 billion ISK in cores

Quantum Cores were introduced in a Dev Blog back in September of 2020 and the cores themselves were seeded into the game as part of a patch that month.

The schedule for their deployment to the game was

• Seeding – September 8, 2020
• Required for new structures – October 13, 2020
• Required for existing structures – January 12, 2021

Now that the final date has passed, any currently deployed Upwell structure without a Quantum Core will face the following restrictions:

• The structure will not provide any tethering support to nearby ships.
• The ship fitting service will be unavailable to any ships docked within the structure.
• The ship/module repair service will be unavailable to any ships docked within the structure.

In addition, any NEW structure that is deployed as of this date without a Quantum Core installed will remain in the onlining vulnerable stage where the hull HP layer is exposed and the structure is vulnerable to destruction.

So structures already out there will still require the usual pass through the armor and hull timers.  My mention of a possible new “happy time” of destruction yesterday was incorrect.

The idea behind Quantum Cores was to curtail some of the structure spam in New Eden… again… by making Upwell structures more expensive and awkward to deploy as well as providing an incentive for people to blow them up.

The first two come with the price and size of the cores, which have to be purchased and transported to the structure being deployed.

The Quantum Core Menu

Those prices inflate the cost of deploying structures significantly.  An Astrahus can be had for about 800 million ISK in Jita and a Raitaru just under 400 million.  And the high end, a Sotiyo is about 22 billion ISK in Jita (nobody sells Keepstars it seems) and the core adds another 10 billion on top of that.

The need to buy cores was part of the reason why the Imperium issued war bonds at the end of last year; there was a spike in our liquid ISK requirements.  Likewise, I mentioned that TEST was pulling down some structures in order to avoid having to spend the ISK to core them.  So they are having an impact of sorts.

As for the incentive, when you kill a structure the core drops 100% of the time and can be sold back to the NPC vendor for the full price it cost to buy, so there is a 600 million ISK incentive to blow up an Astrahus and 30 billion ISK incentive for a Keepstar.

A tidy sum if you can collect.

As for whether things will go as CCP plans, we shall see.  I am pretty sure people blow up structures already just for the joy and the kill mail.  And I know that making deploying a structure more expensive and awkward to deploy will keep some people from bothering.

But when I looked out on the array of structures in 1DQ1-A this morning on the main Keepstar grid and didn’t see a single one with the “CORE ABSENT” status, so if somebody was hoping the Imperium would be unanchoring structures they might be a bit disappointed.