**DUDREDA** — Tensions in the Strait have reached a cultural breaking point.

The ongoing blockade in the Strait of Dudreda has entered what military historians are calling “the propaganda phase,” which in EVE terms means both sides are now producing posters, banners, and elaborate in-character manifestos accusing the other of crimes ranging from the mundane to the metaphysically impossible. The conflict, which began as a dispute over a Medium Navicitas Refinery in a system nobody had thought about since 2019, has now generated more community art than most actual wars.

The defending coalition released a propaganda poster this week depicting the attacking fleet as a nest of shrieking space rats emerging from a crack in reality, overlaid with the text “Dudreda Is Ours.” Stylistically ambitious. The problem is that close inspection of the poster reveals the background image to be a still from the 2019 EVE Online cinematic trailer featuring a Titan fleet over a planet that is definitively not Dudreda. The CCP logo is visible in the lower right corner. Several members of the attacking coalition have since set the poster as their desktop wallpaper, which the defending coalition has described as “ironic.”

The attacking coalition, unwilling to be outdone on the propaganda front but seemingly allergic to visual communication, responded by publishing a 4,000-word document titled “The Legal Status of the Strait of Dudreda Under Historical Maritime Law and Its Implications for Contemporary Sovereignty Disputes.” The document cites the Treaty of Westphalia, three different interpretations of UNCLOS, and a 14th-century Icelandic water dispute that the authors appear to have discovered during a genuinely extensive Wikipedia session. It does not contain any images. It does contain a footnotes section. It has been widely praised by people who have not read it and accused of being “unhinged” by people who have.

Both sides have called for a diplomatic solution. Neither side has explained what they are actually fighting over, which at this point may be the blockade itself. A follow-up propaganda poster featuring the opposing fleet as tax collectors has been announced but not yet released, pending legal review of whether “tax collector” is historically accurate enough to avoid the CCP promotional video problem.

**VALE** — The most consequential forum thread of the week has reached 96 comments.

User HuntBuzzR successfully killed the Rorqual of a player widely understood within the EVE Online community to be one of the most prolific input broadcasting botting operations in existence, netting a comfortable 2.3 billion ISK in hull, modules, and what appears to be the digital equivalent of a sourdough starter that has been running continuously since 2019. The killmail was celebrated briefly in local, then screenshotted, then posted to r/EVE with the headline “Maybe This Will Finally Be The One That Gets Attention.”

It was not the one that got attention.

Instead, the thread devolved within minutes into a 96-comment argument about CCP’s enforcement record on input broadcasting, with opinions roughly splitting into three camps: those who believe CCP is actively investigating and will act “soon,” those who believe CCP does not care about botting because bots pay subscription fees like everyone else, and those who have simply posted screenshots of their own Rorqual losses as a kind of cathartic screaming into the void. A betting pool has since opened on the EVE subreddit with odds on whether the broadcaster in question will receive a ban before the heat death of the universe, with the current favorite being “never, actually.”

CCP’s official statement on the matter, copied from the previous 46 statements, reads in part: “EVE Online has a zero-tolerance policy for any activity that violates our Terms of Service, including but not limited to the use of third-party software to automate gameplay. Players found to be in violation may face disciplinary action up to and including account closure.” The statement was posted to the forums at 3 AM on a Tuesday, received 14 views, and has been reacted to with 23 laughing emoji by people who have been watching this particular Rorqual pilot conduct industrial operations across three different time zones simultaneously for the better part of five years.

The Rorqual has been replaced. HuntBuzzR has been thanked by approximately 200 people in local. The bot continues.

**THE GAME** — The silence is deafening.

The Fourth of July in EVE Online arrived not with fireworks, not with fleet actions, and not with the kind of catastrophic war that reshapes the political map of nullsec, but with something far more profound: a post in r/EVE asking “anyone else just logged on to dual-box Vexors in peace?” that received 400 upvotes and a comment section full of people agreeing that yes, actually, this is peak gameplay. The post has been awarded Community Award. Someone replied “this is the content CCP should be making” and received 89 upvotes. A moderator pinned it.

In the Dudreda Strait, the blockade fleet that had been forming for three days assembled, sat in a formation for approximately 20 minutes, exchanged some choice words in local about the nutritional merits of various grilled meats, and then docked up and went to participate in what multiple pilots described as “the IRL holiday event.” The blockade is still technically active. Both sides have promised to resume hostilities after the BBQ. One pilot from the defending coalition posted a photo of a brisket in local and received more positive reactions than any killmail in the history of the game.

In nullsec, a CEO of a mid-tier alliance attempted to start a war by issuing a formal declaration of hostilities against a neighboring entity that has been their rival for two years. The declaration was met with 14 responses, 11 of which were variations of “brother it is a holiday weekend, we have a family thing.” The remaining three responses were a GIF of someone falling asleep, a meme about the Declaration of Independence being a rough draft, and someone saying “I respect the passion but this can wait until Wednesday.”

The Jita local channel is quieter than it has been at any point in recorded history. Someone reported seeing two players in a station together and described the encounter as “surreal.” Markets are stable. Mining barges are mining. The servers, for once, are not on fire. Every pilot online has described the experience as “actually pretty nice.”

CCP’s community team, which had prepared a full slate of in-game events for the holiday, posted a notice that all events had been postponed due to “player availability constraints.” The notice received 200 upvotes. The top comment reads: “Let them have their peace.” Someone replied: “This is the real EVE.” Nobody disagreed.

**FAN SITE** — Three separate teams are now building third-party clients. One is crashing on purpose.

In a move that CCP has described as “continuing our commitment to player empowerment and the longevity of the EVE Online ecosystem,” the Carbon engine was open-sourced on July 1, releasing the 20-year-old codebase into the wild where it immediately became the most popular repository on GitHub among people who play exactly one video game and are extremely normal about it.

Within hours of release, the community had extracted a fully functional Space Tetris minigame buried in the test files, complete with Tetrimino rotation, line clearing, and a high score board that appears to have been last updated in 2011. A Discord channel was created. The Tetris high scores are being contested. Someone has already made a speedrun leaderboard.

Also discovered: Easter eggs from 2008 still intact, including a hidden “DICK.TASTIC” username that appears in a character creation file with no further context, a complete EVE-themed version of Snake hidden in a planet management UI panel that was never shipped to production, and literally hundreds of developer comments. The most prominent reads, in full: “// TODO: fix this never, no one will ever notice, I’m going to lunch.” The comment was left above a function that determines loot drop rates in asteroid belts. It has been there for 18 years. No consensus has been reached on whether the developer in question should be celebrated or fired.

Three separate teams have now announced they are building third-party EVE clients using the Carbon codebase. Team Obsidian is going for authenticity and stability. Team NovaCore is adding modern UI features and quality-of-life improvements. Team Heritage is explicitly building their client to crash every 90 seconds as “a tribute to the authentic legacy experience,” which has attracted a devoted following of 400 people who say it “feels like home” and “captures something real about the game.” Their Discord has posted a donation link.

CCP has not commented on the Space Tetris situation.

JITA — Local channel is still recovering.

A ganker operating under the increasingly ironic pseudonym “TearsForFears” intercepted Mike Azariah’s Bowhead on a 49-jump leg of what appears to be an ongoing charity run to Exordium, exploding the industrial vessel in a flurry of Concord-documented violence and posting the killmail to zKillboard with the caption “L + Ratio + Built Different.” The implication, presumably, was that the victim would show up in the comments to rage, cry, or at minimum acknowledge the cultural victory.

Mike Azariah did not rage. Mike Azariah did not cry. Mike Azariah opened a public broadcast channel and spent the next 45 minutes explaining to the ganker, in calm and measured detail, why reacting with anger to loss is “like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” He then continued his route, picked up the replacement Bowhead from a contact in Dodixie, and delivered a package of rookie-fit Rifters to a corporation of brand-new players who had no idea they were being used as the closing image of a real-life parable about emotional regulation.

TearsForFears has not posted in local since. Sources close to the ganker, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are embarrassed on his behalf, say he has been in his quarters “processing some things.” The Killboard shows his activity since the interaction has dropped by 60 percent. Mike Azariah’s charity run continues. He is now on jump 31 of 49 to the next delivery node, and has not mentioned the gank once.

The Exordium rookie corporation issued a formal statement thanking Mike Azariah for “the ships and also for being a better person than whoever blew them up.” The statement did not mention the ganker by name, which somehow makes the burn worse.

Developers promise the code is “production-ready,” which is EVE speak for “we have no idea what this does either.”

REYKJAVIK – In a move that stunned the gaming industry and absolutely nobody who has ever read EVE Online patch notes, Fenris Creations announced Monday that it has open-sourced the Carbon engine, the same framework responsible for the game’s legendary time dilation, UI latency, and that one bug where your ship spins in the opposite direction if you look at it funny.

“This is a gift to the community,” said a Fenris Creations representative, speaking from an undisclosed server room currently on fire. “For twenty years, players have asked us what Carbon actually does. Now they can read the source code and learn that we were asking the same question.”

Within hours of the GitHub repository going live, Jita local chat – already a cesspool of scams, poetry, and existential dread – transformed into a torrent of fork notifications. Developers, pirates, and at least one person claiming to be a “certified blockchain visionary” began porting Carbon to platforms including but not limited to: a smart toaster, a Tamagotchi, a blockchain, another blockchain, and a blockchain on a smart toaster.

“I have rewritten the inventory system in Rust,” announced pilot Gorzakk ThePatient, who has not undocked since 2019. “It compiles. It does not run. But it compiles. This is what progress looks like.”

Other community projects include:

• A complete Carbon engine reimplementation written entirely in Excel macros
• A VR mod that renders station interiors as actual, explorable, soul-crushing bureaucracies
• A fork called “Carbon Zero” that removes all spaceships and is just a spreadsheet about Icelandic tax law
• A neural net trained to predict which module will randomly offline next; it currently outputs “yes”

Fenris Creations has already merged seventeen pull requests, twelve of which simply add comments reading “TODO: figure out what this does” next to functions with names like ProcessLegacyLegacyLegacy_02b_final_FINAL.

“We are excited to see what the community builds,” the representative added, while quietly pushing a commit that added a root password to .env.example. “The future of persistent world technology has never been more collaborative. Or more on fire.”

At press time, the #carbon-dev Discord channel had pinned a message from a senior Fenris engineer reading simply: “please stop.”

Fenris Creations Open-Sources Carbon Engine; First Community Fork Immediately Adds Battle Pass

REYKJAVIK — In a move hailed by developers and deeply feared by players, Fenris Creations has released the complete source code for Carbon, the engine that has powered EVE Online for over two decades. Within forty minutes of the GitHub repository going public, a community fork named Carbon-X had already merged a pull request adding a seasonal battle pass, daily login rewards, and a premium currency called AurumCoin.

“Carbon was built for a very specific purpose,” said Ben Hunter, Senior Development Director for Core Technology at Fenris Creations, in what analysts now believe was either genuine optimism or an elaborate cry for help. “Open sourcing Carbon is about making that foundation visible, understandable, and useful to others.”

The foundation, it seems, was immediately made useful by a GitHub user named @capsuleer_42069, whose first commit replaced the venerable EVE skill queue with a Battle Pass Tier System requiring players to accumulate “Space XP” through daily challenges like “Mine 100 units of Veldspar” and “Lose a battleship to a gate camp.”

Other early forks include:

• Carbon-NFT: Replaces all ship textures with procedurally generated monkey JPEGs
• Carbon-Twitter: Auto-posts every gank to a dedicated social feed with unskippable reply threads
• Carbon-EA: Charges 500 AurumCoin for docking permission; loot boxes contain random module drops

Sources inside Fenris confirm the company is “monitoring the situation closely,” which industry observers translate as “watching in horror from behind reinforced glass.” A spokesperson noted that the original EVE Online repository remains the canonical version, though they admitted the community fork now has more stars, contributors, and active Discord moderators.

When reached for comment, a Fenris Creations representative stated: “We anticipated modding. We did not anticipate the modders would be faster than our own build pipeline. The Carbon-X branch currently compiles in twelve seconds. Our internal Jenkins takes forty minutes. We are taking notes.”

The company has promised to review major community contributions for possible integration, though sources say the first candidate under consideration is a pull request that replaces the entire sovereignty system with a rock-paper-scissors minigame accessible via the Neocom.

EVE Online remains free to play. Carbon-X requires a “Founder’s Pack” available for $49.99.

NEW EDEN — A massive in-game Ponzi scheme that saw a high-profile EVE Online corporation promising new players 400% returns on their “strategic investment tokens” has concluded with investigators revealing the mastermind made off with approximately $400 and what sources describe as “an extremely robust sense of personal satisfaction.”

The scam, which ran for seven months and involved roughly 3,000 players across seven nullsec alliances, promised a “revolutionary new economic model” backed by Fenris Creations. Players were asked to invest ISK in something called “The Cascade Protocol,” which allegedly generated returns by “leveraging dynamic synergies across quadrant markets.”

“This is the largest psychological operation in EVE’s history,” said the scammer, who has requested anonymity but did not provide any verification. “Three thousand people trusted me with their ISK, and I delivered on absolutely nothing. The efficiency ratio was unprecedented.”

Investigators say the scammer used proceeds to purchase one (1) PLEX, a significant quantity of convenience store energy drinks, and a third-generation Alpha clone. He claims the clone was “worth it.”

Fenris Creations declined to comment, though a spokesperson noted that “there have always been, and will always be, people trying to take advantage of others in New Eden. That’s kind of the point.” The corporation reportedly lost approximately 890 billion ISK across all victims, which converts to roughly $4,000 at current market rates.

“I invested 2 billion ISK because the website had a really professional color scheme,” said victim CaldariTrader99. “In retrospect, that should have been my first warning.”

JITA

Local capsuleer Delet3_Everything confirmed Tuesday that he has been playing EVE Online incorrectly for the past 14 years, having recently realized he had been attempting to play what he believed was Starfield while logged into New Eden.

“I just want to clarify: I bought Starfield. I paid $70 for it. And then I accidentally clicked on EVE Online and have been playing that for 14 years,” the player explained in a widely-shared Reddit post that received 40,000 upvotes and several awards. “I thought EVE was a beta version of Starfield that hadn’t loaded properly. I kept waiting for the character creation screen. It never came.”

According to Delet3_Everything, the confusion began when he purchased both games in late 2024 and “got them mixed up” after spilling coffee on his keyboard. “My finger slipped and I clicked on the blue icon instead of the orange one, and then I was in space shooting people, except I didn’t know they were people. I thought they were load screens. I kept trying to exit out of them.”

The player says he has now successfully located Starfield on his desktop and is looking forward to “finally playing the real game.” He added that he had managed to sell his Titans, Rorqual, and 12 PLEX for approximately 45 billion ISK, which he intends to convert into “actual money or whatever Starfield uses for currency.”

“I think it’s a real shame,” he concluded. “EVE seemed like it had a lot of potential if you ignore the graphics.”

Delet3_Everything was last seen attempting to craft a mining laser in Starfield’s ship builder.