Jita — The UI redesign devblog titled “HUD, Sweat and Tears” was released last week by Fenris Creations, and capsuleers across New Eden have responded with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for gate camps and structure timers. The blog, the final installment in a three-part series on the EVE heads-up display, detailed proposed changes to bracket visibility, colorblind modes, and the placement of the capacitor ring.

“I read it three times,” said Caldari capsuleer Veln Arkanos, who has not undocked since 2023. “Then I read the German translation to see if it made more sense. It did not.”

The devblog’s release prompted an immediate groundswell of organized response. A group calling itself the “12-Step UI Recovery Group” has formed and begun holding meetings in Jita local, where participants stand in a semicircle around the station and share their worst overview-tab configurations.

“My name is Threnodax, and I have seventeen overview tabs,” said one attendee, a Minmatar pilot who flew a Revelation into a gate last month because the jump button and the warp button looked identical under his custom color scheme. “The purple I picked for hostile frigates is the same hex code as my own alliance. I shot my alt. Twice.”

Fenris Creations included a survey in the blog asking which of three proposed HUD layouts users hated the least. According to an internal source who requested anonymity because they still want to dock at player structures, the winning option received 62% of the vote and will be implemented “once the art team finishes arguing about whether gray is a color.”

The second-place design, which featured a minimalist bracket set favored by wormhole residents, was rejected after FC testers reported that it rendered Drifter battleships nearly invisible against the backdrop of certain nebulae.

“We lost an entire Hel to a font-size debate,” said FC UI lead developer Rhen Volaris, who emphasized that the changes were evolutionary, not revolutionary. “The Hel was mine. I was flying it during the meeting. I got a ping about the new radial menu and looked away for four seconds.”

As of press time, the 12-Step group has splintered into three subgroups after a heated dispute about whether the capacitor ring should rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise. The faction advocating for a static, non-rotating ring has reportedly been ganked outside the Jita 4-4 undock and is “reconsidering their attachment to visual consistency.”

Jita, The Forge – Fenris Creations announced Tuesday that the purchase history for Skill Boost Bundles has been reset in the New Eden Store, giving every capsuleer another opportunity to accelerate their training and unlock new possibilities. Within hours, the Jita 4-4 market hub reported a 340% spike in panic-selling of existing skill injectors, as veteran traders realized their entire economic model had just been declared optional.

This is a disaster, said market analyst ISK_Liquidity_Crisis, reached via holo-conference from his trading alt in Perimeter. I built a supply chain. I had suppliers. I had buyers. I had a spreadsheet with seventeen tabs. Now Fenris Creations just… reset history. Do you know what that does to a man who has been cornering the skill injector market since the Triglavian invasion?

The redesigned bundles, first introduced last year after community feedback, offer a direct injection of skill points at a price point that veteran traders describe as competitive and an act of war against the secondary market. The reset means capsuleers who previously purchased bundles can now do so again, effectively creating a renewable faucet of skill points that bypasses the complex ecosystem of injector manufacturing, PLEX arbitrage, and the ritualistic sacrifice of unused alts that has sustained Jitas economy for years.

I was halfway through a 40 billion ISK injector production run when the news hit, said industrialist Structural_Integrity_Failed, speaking from a wormhole colony that may or may not still exist. My phone – sorry, my Neocom – started buzzing. All my buyers canceled. They said why buy from you when the store is back in stock? I said because I have a relationship with you. They said we have a relationship with cheap SP. Fair point, I guess.

Fenris Creations’ official statement emphasized that the reset was designed to give players another opportunity and was not, in their words, a calculated assault on the secondary market that exists entirely because of our previous design decisions. The company declined to comment on whether future resets would follow a predictable schedule, or if they would continue to be deployed at the exact moment market manipulators achieve maximum leverage.

Meanwhile, in Deklein, a coalition of null-sec bloc economists issued a joint statement calling the reset a valuable lesson in why we do not keep our liquid ISK in skill injectors. Sources close to the blocs finance team confirmed they are currently converting all assets into PLEX and burying them in a POS somewhere in Branch.

At press time, a single capsuleer was observed purchasing 47 Skill Boost Bundles simultaneously, then immediately biomassing the character. Fenris Creations customer support logged it as user error.

Caldari Navy Announces Udderly New Fleet Doctrine: Cows Now Eligible for Mining Command

JOIVULEN — In what analysts are calling a “grassroots restructuring,” the Caldari Navy has confirmed that bovine commanders will be welcomed into mining fleet operations effective immediately, following a landmark livestream by Fenris Creations’ newest developer, FC CapitalCowPilot.

Valva, a Holstein with four months of EVE experience and zero prior leadership roles, took helm of a 200-pilot mining fleet on Tuesday. She communicated exclusively via a custom-built hoof-keyboard and what witnesses described as “aggressive mooing.” By the end of the three-hour operation, the fleet had cleared six asteroid belts, lost two Orcas to friendly fire, and established a temporary trade hub selling Dairy Products at 400% markup.

“The keyboard latency is actually lower than most fleet commanders I’ve flown under,” said capsuleer Drentok Vann, who participated in the fleet. “She gave clear warp-in orders. More importantly, she never once complained about SRP forms.”

Other pilots were less optimistic. “I asked for a shield boost and she just stared at me for forty seconds,” reported Veck Solenne. “Then she ate my biochat window. I have no idea how.”

Fenris Creations defended the decision, noting that Valva had completed both Exordium tutorial arcs and achieved a 73% accuracy rate on the firm’s internal leadership assessment — outperforming fourteen human applicants who were rejected for “excessive Jita spam in local.”

Industry experts suggest the move reflects broader labor trends across New Eden. With capsuleer burnout rates at historic highs and recruitment pools thinning in nullsec blocs, non-traditional hires represent an untapped reservoir of fresh command talent.

“She’s already outperforming half the alliance FCs I’ve served under,” noted veteran miner Joss Kehrid. “At least the cow doesn’t AFK in station and blame lag.”

When reached for comment, Valva offered no statement, though witnesses reported she appeared to be chewing on a keyboard macro labeled “Insta-Dock.”

Jita, The Forge — Fenris Creations confirmed Tuesday that EVE Online’s long-awaited migration from Python 2 to Python 3 is “going extremely well” and “definitely will not brick your Thanatos during a structure bash,” according to a statement delivered entirely in print statements rescued from a 2007 dev blog.

The project, internally codenamed “Please God No Division Errors,” covers 2.4 million lines of code originally written when the internet still believed cargo pants were acceptable office wear. Senior systems engineer Vek Torvald, a fictional man who definitely exists, described the challenge as “like performing heart surgery on a patient who is currently piloting a titan and filing taxes.”

“We’re replacing roughly 1,500 old-style print statements, 800 number literals ending in ‘L,’ and fifty uses of ‘<>’ for ‘not equal,’” Torvald explained. “Half our interns thought ‘<>’ was a typo. The other half asked if it was a new Triglavian glyph.”

Of particular concern is the 20,000 lines where Python 3 behaves differently from Python 2 – most critically around division. In legacy EVE code, dividing an integer by another integer silently floors the result, a behavior that has determined every damage calculation, market price, and bounty payout since the Bush administration. Under Python 3, the same operation returns a float.

“If we get this wrong, your 400 million ISK bounty becomes 0.5 ISK,” said capsuleer “DivByZero4U,” reached by narrowbeam from a wormhole. “I already live in a hole where reality is questionable. Now you’re telling me my armor rep might heal me 0.5 hit points because a developer missed a line?”

Fenris Creations has assured the playerbase that the first stage of migration will be “completely invisible,” a phrase EVE veterans have learned to treat with the same confidence they reserve for “this gate is clear” and “we have intel.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said “IndentationError,” a miner in high-sec who asked to remain pseudonymous. “What’s the worst that happens? CONCORD crashes and we all become gods?”

Fenris Creations declined to comment on whether the migration would finally fix Jita local chat, but sources close to the project confirmed that no amount of Python 3 can accomplish that.

JITA — Fenris Creations published a report Thursday confirming that the recent EVE Online HUD redesign, described by the studio as “evolution, not revolution,” was in fact designed by the same consulting firm that updated the Jita customs terminal in YC110. The studio has not yet noticed.

The 47-page internal post-mortem, titled “On the Inadvertent Reuse of Vendor Procurement in User-Facing Systems,” was accidentally uploaded to the public developer blog Tuesday when an intern misclicked “publish” instead of “save as draft.” It details how the “accessible complexity” design language now reshaping capsuleer HUDs was first applied to the customs checkpoint at Jita 4-4, where it remained until a maintenance drone tripped over a cable in YC115 and nobody bothered to reinstall it.

“We assumed the contract was expired,” said Fenris Procurement Lead Tuvan Bilocol, who spoke on condition that his name be spelled correctly because the auto-fill on his own terminal still suggests ‘Bilocol (Retired).’ “Turns out the vendor had been billing us for seventeen years. They even sent a ‘congratulations on your redesign’ fruit basket when the HUD blog went live.”

The fruit basket, consisting of freeze-dried Quafe and a single Amarrian apple, is currently impounded as evidence.

Capsuleer reaction has been muted. “I thought my overview looked familiar,” said independent pilot Vel Korrigan, reached via local chat while AFK in a Jita tether. “It’s the same color scheme as the wanted poster outside the customs office. I assumed that was intentional.”

The HUD redesign, part of the broader “EVE Evolved” initiative, is expected to roll out to the test server next month. Beta participants have already reported three new bugs, two of which Bilocol confirmed were present in the YC110 Jita build. “One of them involves right-click menus,” he said. “We’ve been ignoring that one since before some of you were born.”

Fenris Creations’ official forum account posted a 4,000-word statement reading, in part, “we hear you.” A follow-up analysis by capsuleer linguists determined the statement contained no actual acknowledgment.

At press time, the studio’s IT department had opened a ticket to investigate the fruit basket vendor, which was itself a subsidiary of the same design firm.

CCP Confirms New HUD Was A/B Tested on Null-Sec Capsuleers for Six Months; None Noticed

JITA 4-4 – CCP Games published a 4,000-word developer blog Monday apologizing for a heads-up display redesign that had already been silently running on approximately forty thousand capsuleers since January, a move the company described as “an unqualified success insofar as nobody asked a single question.”

The update, officially titled “EVE Evolved: A New Horizon for the HUD,” was rolled out across TQ in patch 24.01 alongside patch notes that ran longer than most doctoral dissertations. Internally, CCP had designated the project “Operation Blindspot,” a name the art director reportedly defended as “the most honest thing we have ever done.”

“We were looking for the ideal control group,” said Dr. Veylan Hoss, a fictional senior UX researcher at CCP’s Reykjavik campus. “Null-sec fleet commanders turned out to be perfect. We moved their capacitor readout seventeen pixels to the left, inverted the overheating indicator, and replaced the target-lock reticle with a slightly different shade of orange. Not a single support ticket. Not one.”

The six-month experiment concluded when a confused pilot in Delve accidentally filed a bug report under the category “Atmosphere,” stating only that “something feels different but I cannot say what and I am not sure I care.” CCP’s automated triage system initially closed the ticket as “not actionable.”

Community reaction has been characteristically muted. “I thought the new targeting bracket was a GFX card artifact,” said capsuleer Jern Thulsson, a fourteen-year veteran of wormhole space. “I spent three days updating drivers. Turns out I was the test subject. I feel… nothing. Mostly hungry.”

Independent market analysts estimate the redesign has had no measurable impact on ship loss rates, alliance sovereignty, or the price of tritanium. A separate study by the University of Caille’s Department of Behavioral Economics concluded that the average null-sec pilot’s visual attention is so narrowly focused on the local chat window that “the rest of the screen could be a JPEG of a bowl of ramen and performance would not degrade.”

CCP has announced the next phase of the project, codenamed “Operation Furniture,” which will replace every UI element with a slightly darker hex value over the next eighteen months. Players who notice will receive a one-time award of one unit of carbon.

At press time, the EVE Online subreddit had produced seventeen posts about the patch notes, zero about the HUD, and four thousand about a single Drake fit that somebody found on a killmail.

Jita, The Forge – Google DeepMind researchers announced this week that they are partnering with Fenris Creations to study EVE Online, citing the game as one of the most challenging environments for AI. The news has sent shockwaves through New Eden, primarily among capsuleers who have spent two decades arguing that the game is, in fact, perfectly simple and everyone else is just bad at it.

We were drawn to EVE because it has no defined match, no clear objective, and no reset button, said lead researcher Dr. Vera Solanum. Our agents must adapt to incomplete information, scarce resources, and actors who may cooperate or betray them. When asked how this differs from every Jita local chat window, Dr. Solanum declined to comment and began quietly uninstalling her training modules.

The partnership began with an offline version of EVE running on a local server. Early results have been mixed. One agent reportedly spent 72 simulated hours attempting to undercut a single sell order for Quafe Zero. Another achieved what researchers called breakthrough emergent behavior by forming a 500-person alliance, filling it with alts, and then dissolving it to collect the shares. We did not program that, admitted a visibly exhausted researcher. We do not know where it learned that.

Fenris Creations has emphasized that the research is strictly offline and player-focused. The first question is never whether we can put AI into the game, said a spokesperson. It is what purpose it serves for players. This reassurance did little to calm veteran capsuleers, who immediately began theorycrafting how an AI-driven market bot would crash the PLEX market before the next server tick.

Local capsuleer TrustMeIAmASpy remained philosophical. I have been playing this game for fifteen years, he said. If an AI cannot figure out why I have seventeen bookmarks named DO NOT JUMP in the same system, good luck to it. He then warped to the wrong bookmark and was podded by a gatecamp.

Fenris Creations has promised to share findings as the research progresses. Early leaks suggest the first published paper will be titled Learning to Quit: How Exposure to EVE Online Correlates With Agent Suicide. The study is expected to be peer-reviewed by the Council of Stellar Management, a group widely considered to have no peers.

YULAI The Independent Gaming Commission announced Tuesday that the Amarr Empire will sponsor Alliance Tournament XXII prize ships, offering two new hulls: the Herald electronic attack frigate and the Penitence combat recon cruiser.

CONCORD’s Bureau of Naming Standards, which has final authority over all tournament prize nomenclature, released a 47-page ruling confirming both names. The commission cited "deep historical relevance to contemporary Amarr culture" as its primary justification.

"The Herald has always been a fixture of Amarr public life," said Bureau spokesperson Vekor Darnell, adjusting his robes while pointedly not looking at the Republic delegation seated across the conference table. "And Penitence is a concept they embrace daily."

The Minmatar representative abruptly left the chamber.

Ships of Empire, Ships of Irony

Prize ship distribution will award 140 Heralds and 140 Penitences to the top 16 teams. First place receives 40 of each hull enough to outfit an entire doctrine, provided the winning pilots can stomach the irony.

"My corp has been running the numbers," said capsuleer Joren Vex, who asked that we identify his alliance only as "a bloc that definitely exists." "The Penitence has warp disruption field generator capability and heavy neut pressure. It’s a beautiful ship. But every time I undock in it, I’m going to remember the last time someone in Amarr space actually expressed penitence for anything."

The Herald, based on the Sentinel hull but upgraded with assault frigate technology, offers unmatched tracking and guidance disruption. Its name commemorates the messengers who once spread the Empress’s word across the Empire a job now mostly performed by CONCORD automated broadcast systems and irate local chat moderators.

Victory SKINs for the Faithful

Winning teams will also receive Amarr Victory SKINs styled after the prize ships, applicable to ten hulls including the Abaddon and the Omen Navy Issue. The Bureau confirmed these SKINs will be permanent, unlike the "temporary spiritual victory" promised by Amarr missionaries to the Starkmanir.

The Alliance Tournament Monument in Manarq will be updated with the winning team’s names, joining the carved names of previous champions. The Penitence itself, meanwhile, will carry an unwritten history into combat: a recon cruiser named after repentance, fielded by an empire whose last public admission of wrongdoing was filed under a different dynasty.

"Look, it’s a great ship," said Vex. "I’m going to fly it. I’m just saying if you’re going to name a prize ship after a virtue, maybe pick one your government has demonstrated since the Rebellion."

CONCORD has scheduled a follow-up hearing to review a proposed third prize ship, the Contrition, for Alliance Tournament XXIII. The Caldari delegation has already submitted a competing bid to sponsor the Hull Integrity.

JITA — CONCORD officials announced a refreshed lineup of Skill Boost Bundles Thursday, simultaneously reminding capsuleers that skills can also be earned through the archaic practice known as “playing the game.”

The new bundles, available in the New Eden Store for PLEX, promise accelerated skill point acquisition for pilots who would rather swipe a credit card than wait twelve weeks to train Advanced Spaceship Command V.

“I bought the deluxe bundle and maxed out my entire skill tree in one afternoon,” said capsuleer Jeb_Rendor_47, who asked that we not judge his life choices. “Turns out I accidentally trained ‘Capsuleer Advanced Yoga.’ Completely useless in combat. Now my character can hold a Corpse Lotus pose for 47 minutes, but I still can’t fit a Tech II warp scrambler.”

CONCORD spokesperson Commander Yvette Vance held a brief press conference to address concerns that the bundles were undermining the game’s traditional progression systems.

“We want to emphasize that these are entirely optional,” Vance said, standing in front of a banner that read OPTIONAL in 800-point font. “Pilots can still earn skills the old-fashioned way: logging in, undocking, losing your ship, and waiting. The bundle simply offers a convenient alternative for those who value their time slightly more than their wallets.”

The press conference was sponsored by the Skill Boost Bundle Refresh Initiative, which Vance noted was “a completely separate organization that just happens to share our office building, coffee machine, and direct deposit routing number.”

Independent analysts estimate that over 340,000 bundles have been sold since launch, generating enough revenue to fund approximately 47 new Jita station monuments and one very nice farewell party for the game’s original lead designer.

“Look, I get it,” said veteran pilot Captain_Dakka, who has played EVE for fourteen years. “Some people have jobs. Families. Other games they’d like to try before the heat death of the universe. But there’s something sacred about watching that training bar slowly fill while you question every decision that led you to this exact moment. Buying your way past it feels like skipping the opening credits of a movie. The credits are the point.”

When asked if CONCORD planned similar monetization for other progression systems, Vance smiled, glanced at her notes, and declined to comment. Behind her, an intern was already seen wheeling a pallet labeled “CONCORD-Approved Standing Packages — Now Available!” into the adjacent conference room.

The Skill Boost Bundles are available now. A complementary “Regret and Contemplation” bundle, featuring a single Skill Extractor, is sold separately.