It has been a bit more than eleven months since I hit a skill point milestone, the 270 million mark having landed back in September of 2024.  My experience in the past has been that, if I have my skill queue running all the time, these checkpoints arrive every 6-7 months.  So clearly I haven’t been doing that on my main this time around.  True enough.  In fact, I tried something completely different for this milestone.

First off, I have to say that image above, which shows me at 279,520,001 skill points is… well, not wrong, but also does not represent reality.  I have a further 499,373 skill points left that have not been allocated.

That puts Wilhelm over the goal… and demonstrates again that CCP is a small company that doesn’t have the bandwidth to think about how they display the same data in different places.  On the skill queue page in game, it includes the unallocated skill points in the total.

This actually applies to all three characters shown there.  Percy has 1,169,953 unallocated skill points and Escher has 245,000 unallocated skill points. (And the skill queue running.)  So my account-wide skill points across all three characters looks like this:

Wilhelm Arcturus - 280,019,374
Escher Alias -      84,284,488
Percy Dovetonsils - 29,620,530

Total -            393,924,392

Which is a lot of skill points.  Across all three characters I am up 27 million skill points in ten months.  How did I managed that?   Time to get to the experiment.

For this milestone I decided to not run the skill queue for Wilhelm at all.  I was going to focus on my alts.  So the skill queue was running on Escher or Percy the whole time.  Instead I was going to see how long it took me to accumulate 10 million skill points by just collecting whatever CCP handed out.

So Wilhelm got all the login reward skill points (which were pretty tasty through the holidays and at the expansion launches), the weekly 15K injector of skill points, and I did the AIR opportunities, which gives you 345,000 skill points every month.  I also finished the AIR career program for Wilhelm, with its double portions of skill points for Omega accounts.

All of that adds up… apparently to 10 million skill points eventually.  Had I been more thoughtful I would have logged all the event rewards to be able to show an accounting… but I didn’t.  So I can’t demonstrate exactly how I got here… I can’t remember if an Omega time pack I bought had skill points or PLEX or both… or if I had unallocated points I didn’t count previously… but here I am.

The other two characters also benefited from the monthly AIR opportunities… I have a whole monthly routine for that now… and whenever there was a cerebral accelerator to speed up training, whoever had the queue live got that as well.

I guess that is the biggest change for me in the last couple of years, focusing on progression for some alts.

That left Wilhelm with the following skill point totals, with an asterisk next to categories that changed since last check-in.

Spaceship Cmd         87,988,351 (76)*
Gunnery               36,729,648 (65)*
Drones                21,672,158 (23)
Navigation            16,096,000 (15)
Fleet Support         15,872,000 (14)
Missiles              12,550,911 (22)*
Electronic Sys        10,874,904 (15)
Armor                  9,924,549 (13)*
Engineering            8,939,855 (15)
Scanning               7,168,000 (07)
Neural Enhancements    6,882,275 (08) 
Shields                6,074,039 (12)
Science                5,714,282 (21)
Resc Processing        5,650,386 (11)*
Trade                  5,047,765 (11)*
Planet Mgmt            4,352,000 (05)
Subsystems             4,096,000 (16)
Rigging                3,209,100 (10)*
Targeting              3,207,765 (08)
Sequencing             2,058,211 (10)
Production             1,922,644 (06)*
Structure Mgmt         1,446,824 (06)
Social                 1,364,785 (06)*
Unallocated              499,373 (00)
Corp Mgmt                 24,000 (02)

Total                 280,019,374 (408)

The number in parenthesis is the number of skills in that category trained.  There is also now a line entry for unallocated skill points.

As always, spaceship command leads the pack.  That included training up Jump Freighters to IV and Amarr Freighter to IV… because I bought the Ark jump freighter, then realized that Amarr was the one freighter skill I had not trained.

But that is why you keep a bunch of unallocated skill points around, so you can just grab the skill and apply the unused skill points to it.

Gunnery and Missiles… I don’t remember, but suspect there was an advanced skill that I added to.  Your training history on your character sheet doesn’t go back very far.  I can see I applied the points to the freighter skills above in June, during the big move, but nothing before that.

Resource processing was probably some remaining skill related to turning modules into minerals, which I do with a lot of the loot from Ishtar ratting, as I mentioned earlier this month.

For Trade I felt I needed more contract slots… though I cannot remember why.  I basically only contract things between characters on the same account or to hand off a ship to an alt while I am elsewhere and cannot trade it.

Rigging… Shield Rigging to V.  Just because.  It isn’t like Armor Rigging V, which gets you a minor speed boost, but I took it.

On Production, I trained up a couple levels of Capital Industrial Reconfiguration because I was looking at what it would take to fly a Rorqual and that was a cheap-ish pre-requisite.  I did not, however, buy the actual skill to fly the Rorqual as it is 1.5 billion and I wasn’t in any danger of actually having a Rorqual any time soon.

Finally, I have no idea what I trained in social.

All of which leaves Wilhelm over the 280 million skill point mark.

As mentioned in previous posts, with the slow death of the third party app ecosystem it is now a bit of a pain to track things like the number of skills you have to level V or whatever.  EVEMon still runs, but it is stuck in 2021 or something, as it doesn’t recognize any recent skills or the skill points applied to them.

A skill queue in EVEMon

CCP has all that data visible… but I have to go in and hand count it.  So I gave up.

Now to get to 290 million… though that always leaves open the question of what is worth the effort?  I am pretty sure I can fly all of the current subcaps available.  So it will likely be rounding out the corners some more.  Maybe I should go for Minmatar Drone Specialization V next?

Oh, wait, I already have that.  I guess I went after drone specializations already.

As always, for those who want to know the history of this post… well, the series goes all the way back to 2007.

My skill queue is currently just level V skills, none of which are really urgent.  I will likely leave the training queue set for my alts so they can do things while I am deployed or otherwise engaged.