If there is one truth about null sec, it is that no matter the time, day or night, somebody out there is sitting in an Ishtar, semi-AFK, orbiting a mobile tractor unit, and letting their drones kill NPCs for the bounties, usually in Forsaken Hubs.

And a lot of them get blown up.  Just look at the Ishtar loss page over on zKillboard.  It is Ishtars all the way down.

Some of them get zapped by NPCs.  You can see the ones that decided to go for a Haven and drew a dreadnought spawn and didn’t get away.  That is why the Forsaken Hub is the anomaly of choice for Ishtar ratting.  The NPCs are safe and predictable.  Even if you get the occasional double spawn of NPCs, if you have fit your Ishtar correctly, it isn’t a problem.  (Also Haven NPCs seem to go straight for my drones.  I tried a couple, didn’t like it.)

But most of them are caught by other players.  That is to be expected.  There is a risk in just undocking in EVE Online, so sitting out in space and not paying close attention to your surroundings… well, that is asking for trouble.  Destruction can come randomly.  I have stepped away for a minute to answer the door and found myself blown up… and I have gotten distracted and left myself sitting uncloaked on a gate in a high traffic pipe for an hour and have come back to find that luck favors fools.

Ishtars are the favored hull because they are durable and not too expensive… and they are setup for drones.  Drones are the key. (More about drones.)  They have a big drone bay, the bandwidth to run five heavy drones, and some nice drone bonuses.

What the Ishtar gets

The Ishtar hasn’t always been the star.  For a while it was the Vexor Navy Issue, the VNI menace that was so prevalent that CCP felt they had to nerf the hull.  (And Alpha clones too, because they could rat in them.) Then there was the Myrmidon.  I even wrote a post back in 2019 about Myrmidon ratting, where I managed to make 1.6 billion ISK before I lost my 75 million ISK Myrm.

And that is the calculation, the economic attraction.  Hunters can’t be everywhere.  They might come your way one day and then not show up again for weeks.  So the economic calculus is whether or not you can make back the investment in your ship before it is your turn in the barrel.

Ishtars are kings right now because of CCP, because they screwed up moon mining for a bit, leaving us with a glut of tech II materials, so it is now a somewhat economical hull to fly.

They Myrmidon might still be cheaper, but the Ishtar has durability.  It might even survive an encounter with somebody who didn’t bring enough DPS to the party.

For an investment of about 250 million ISK for hull and fittings, you too can undock and try your hand. That is a lot more expensive that the old Myrmidon… but the Ishtar makes up for it in toughness and drone capabilities.  The Myrm can’t run five heavy drones, so you have to go with three heavies and two mediums, which slows down the killing.

There are different approaches to fits.  You can leaf through the kills I linked above to see the variations.  Sometimes it is an oversized afterburner to keep the sig radius of the ship low… the lower it is, the harder you are to hit while in motion… while keeping speed high enough to stay out of too much trouble.  Or you can tank it up… as a heavy assault cruiser the Ishtar starts off with decent damage resistance… and put put along, repper running to offset hits, and not worry too much about staying in motion or about bumping into any of the objects in a Forsaken Hub, something that can be awkward if you’re sig tanked.

So does it pay?

I mean, it must if so many people do it, right?

I decided to give it a shot.  There was the who thing about getting in a titan I wrote about the other week.  I picked a system in our new territory in one of the regions where they have installed ratting upgrades… we have a choice of areas with ratting upgrades, with mining upgrades, and the new exploration upgrade option… fitted out an Ishtar with one of the new recommended fits, and sent an alt out to see if I could get beyond breaking even.

I lucked out, managed to pick a system with a Bounty Risk Modifier of 150%.  That means I my bounty payouts would be multiplied by 1.5, which is always nice.  My alt had trained up just enough to be able to run the fit I chose.  The goal was a one billion ISK, enough to replace the Ishtar four fold.

In the interest of the experiment, I got out Excel and made a spreadsheet to track my progress.

The routine of Forsaken Hubs is the same.  I just so happens that in my part of space they are Angel Cartel Forsaken Hubs.  Back in Delve they were Sansha’s Nation Forsaken Hubs.  But the plan is always the same: warp in at range, make sure your modules are on, launch your drones, deploy your mobile tractor unit, set yourself an orbit around it, and let the drones do all the work.

If your drones are set to aggressive, they will attack anything that attacks you, so will start chewing through the NPCs while you happily orbit the MTU.

The start of every Forsaken Hub

Each NPC has a bounty assigned to it, the amount of ISK rewarded for blowing up, which is then multiplied by the Bounty Risk Modifier for the system.  As noted above, that was 150% when I started (though it was down to 142% by the time I was done).

So every NPC battleship with a 1.3 million ISK bounty was worth 1.95 million ISK.

Of course, you don’t get all that ISK, and the ISK you do get is doled out over time.

40% of your bounties goes to the Encounter Surveillance System, an odd mechanic that CCP made a thing a while back which allows other pilots to come in and steal your ISK.  There are mechanics around the whole thing, but it basically pays out every three hours.

Anyway, over the course of four days I ran maybe 25 or so Forsaken Hubs… the one thing I didn’t count was the actual number… silly me… to get my billion ISK.  Let me break that out.

While I did not count the number of hubs, I did log all the payment ticks.  Those run on a 20 minute cycle and pay out all the bounties that did not go to the ESS, with a summary of what you blew up, less the tax applied by your corporation.  I pay KarmaFleet 15%.  They aren’t going to get rich off of me.

A payout for a hub tick

Over the course of my run I logged a total of 743,015,118 ISK in bounties, less 80,022,514 ISK paid in taxes, giving me a net of 631,562,850 ISK paid out over 56 ticks.

So my net per tick was 11,277,908 ISK.  Since you get three ticks per hour, that sets the bounty payouts at around 34 million ISK per hour for orbiting in an Ishtar.

However, as noted, that was in a system where my bounties were multiplied by 1.5, so the hourly bounty payout is probably closer to 22 million ISK per hour once a system has fallen down to a 100% Bounty Risk Modifier, which they eventually do over time.

In addition to that, none of the ISK that went into the ESS was stolen, so that paid me out an additional 425,725,123 ISK in three hour increments, which gets me to a total of 1,057,287,973 ISK paid out.  That gave me a little less than 19 million ISK per tick all combined, or about 56 million ISK per hour.

Which isn’t bad.  But, again, that was in a system with a 1.5x modifier, so in a 100% Bounty Risk Modifier that would be closer to 38 million ISK an hour.  That isn’t bad.  That will keep me in Ishtars.  But at that rate I would need 5,264 hours or payouts, or 15,792 ticks to raise the 200 billion ISK needed to get that titan the coalition wants us to aspire to.  I don’t have the will for that.

You can get some more ISK out of the whole thing.  With my alt I also flew out a blockade runner to collect all the loot that the MTU scoops up.  That can add up.

Filling up with loot from wrecks

I collected all that up to bring back to market.  Some of it is actually in demand and will sell for something in the neighborhood of what the in-game estimate says.  But there are a lot of Ishtars running out there, so there is also a glut of a lot of things that drop.  Those items I reprocess into minerals and sell, which gets me maybe 75% of the estimated value.

Occasionally you will get a bonus item.

Domination Shield Booster sells for some ISK

The thing is, time spent collecting loot and hauling it back to market… that is time not spent sitting in a hub earning ticks.  Asher Elias, who runs Ishtars all the time, says the optimum is to just pick up the choice items from the MTU before you head off, which means you have to dock up every few hubs to unload, but will still come out ahead.

You also can get escalations, but I tend to let those pass unless they are close to hand.  I got an Angels Mining Colony escalation just a couple jumps away and did that.

Blowing stuff up in the mining colony

You get bounties and a payout at the end worth about a tick in a hub, plus some random faction loot… I got some faction ammo, which is kind of mid… so was okay, but I might have made a bit more ISK just going to the next hub.  It was at least a change of scenery.

Of course, it is only a matter of time before somebody shows up to try and kill you.

Asher, who is good at this, apparently kills Lokis with his Ishtar.  Then the MTU scoops up some even better loot.

I, however, didn’t have quite that level of luck with my first interruption.  I looked up from what I was doing and found a fleet of Kikimoras had landed on me, and there isn’t much you can do then.  There were 47 ships on my kill mail.  I nearly got one of the Kikis into hull before they got reps.

So there is one Ishtar lost against the balance of my gains.  And the lesson learned was maybe not to push my luck by trying this on the weekend when there are a lot of people on and looking for something to do.  I’m better off on an evening during the week when the player count is under 17K.

Still, when things are a bit more even, I have managed to at least survive.  A Stiletto entered the system, came to my hub, and tackled me.  Oh noes!

Tackled in my Ishtar

Yeah, I wasn’t too worried about an interceptor killing me.  I grabbed the MTU… they might just blow that up out of spite… recalled my drones, aligned to the Fortizar in system, and launched my EC-300 ECM drones to try and break his lock.  I am not very offensive minded as I have a long history of being blown up in solo engagements.

But it wasn’t just the Stiletto for long.  He had a buddy in a Khizriel close by and they showed up in the hub and joined the action.  That is the Angel Cartel battlecruiser and it seemed like bad news time for me.

There they are on me

I watched my shield, over heated my shield booster when I started falling behind, and sat there focused on that for a few minute before I realized I could maybe, you know, shoot him.  (I did so many things wrong, my survival was solely due to the strength of the fit.)  I pulled my ECM drones, which were useless as both ships had me tackled, and got out my Berserkers again and put them on the Khizriel.  He had guns and drones hitting me and got me into armor a couple of times.

My armor damage wasn’t so bad

But my drones started tearing into him (but the little guns in the recommended fit didn’t do anything, so I’ll probably omit that later… though there isn’t much room to fit anything else), and it seemed that the NPCs wanted some of that action, so that one moment I was wondering if I was going to need to overheat again and the next the pair of them warped off.  I waved in local and he explained that the situation had gotten “awkward” and went off to find another target.

23:46:56: Selirus Szin > o/
23:47:07: Thomas MacKenzie Kendrick > lol lil awkward :D
23:47:36: Selirus Szin > Yeah, was curious how that would play out
23:49:13: Thomas MacKenzie Kendrick > should've just brought my drake i guess

He later got popped in or space by some Pandemic Horde out on a roam, so I got to see the fit I somehow managed to stand up to.  Fun stuff.

I warped to the Fortizar, tethered up to repair the damage from overheating, then went back and finished up the hub with the pair of them still in the system.  Why not?

My main problem is the AFK part of the assignment.  I can mostly manage it when I am working on something at my personal computer, such as writing this blog post, where EVE Online, full screen behind my browser, sticks out enough that I can see local chat off the the left and my overview off to the right of the window I am working in.  But if the game is hidden, or if I have turned 90 degrees to my second desk to use my work computer, the compulsion to keep checking gets the best of me.

But that might just be a “me” thing, because all over null sec, other Ishtars are undocking and spinning around in anomalies, mostly unattended.  It is a thing.