THERA — A wormhole expedition team has confirmed completion of all 100 waves of the newly reintroduced Rampant Drone Fabricator site, a feat that required 14 hours, 3,847 reloads of overheated modules, and what the fleet commander described as “a spiritual commitment to suffering that I didn’t know I had in me.”
The site, which returned to wormhole space on July 23rd as part of the Version 24.01 update, features an escalating “Rampancy” point system that increases threat level based on the ships in proximity to the Fabricator. A single capital ship adds 72 Rampancy. A Marauder adds 12. A Logistics Cruiser, apparently, adds 2 Rampancy, a detail that one participant said “feels personally insulting given what we went through.”
“We started with a fairly standard wormhole doctrine,” said fleet commander Veldrin Corvus, speaking from his medical bay after the 847th wave-related anxiety episode. “Two Nestors, a couple Lokis, some Guardian support. Then someone said, quote, ‘we should probably bring a carrier for the later waves.’ I now understand that this was the exact moment our lives ended.”
The carrier, a Thanatos flown by a capsuleer who asked to be identified only as “Regret_2026,” added 72 Rampancy to the site. The resulting escalation, described by participants as “what would happen if a spreadsheet became sentient and also hated you,” produced waves containing what Corvus estimated as “somewhere between 300 and 400 individual drone entities, all of which needed individual locking and shooting.”
“At wave 67, we started using the term ‘wave’ very loosely,” said Logistics pilot Jaina Starweave, whose Guardian spent approximately 11 of the 14 hours running its capacitor from 5% to 8% and back again. “There’s a point where the concept of discrete, sequential encounters breaks down and you enter a state of continuous, unbroken drone presence. We started naming them. Wave 73 had ‘Barry.’ Barry was an Apostle-class repair drone with what I can only describe as a personality. He showed up in four consecutive waves. He may still be out there.”
CCP Games, in a statement that several participants described as “characteristically helpful,” confirmed that the Rampancy system was designed to “give players more control over the level of risk and reward they want to take on” and noted that “most setups prior to this change will continue to face the same level of difficulty.” The statement did not address what happens when players voluntarily assemble the most dangerous possible combination of ships and then act surprised.
“I read the patch notes,” said Corvus. “I saw the table. I saw the numbers. There is a difference between intellectual comprehension and existential comprehension. I intellectually understood that 72 Rampancy from a carrier plus multiple Marauders at 12 each would create a mathematical result. I did not existentially understand that this mathematical result would take the form of 40 consecutive battleship-class drone entities vomiting target painters onto our Logi wing while some kind of ‘Scrutinizer’ EWAR battlecruiser applied sensor dampeners that reduced our scan resolution to what felt like guessing.”
The patch notes also introduced four new Nanoswarm varieties — Light Squadron, Rapid Squadron, Focuser, and Prolonging — which drop from specific waves. The fleet reportedly acquired 17 Nanoswarms during their 100-wave run, a haul that Corvus estimated at “approximately 600 million ISK in total value, or roughly 0.04% of the fleet’s collective repair bill.”
“The economics are challenging,” admitted one member of the fleet’s finance committee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because “I’ve done the math and I don’t want anyone else to do the math.” “We spent roughly 1.2 billion ISK in ammunition, capacitor charges, and replacement drones. We lost one Nestor to what we’re calling ‘the Barry incident’ in wave 89. The Nanoswarm drops would need to sell at roughly 70 million each for us to break even. The market is currently offering 8 million. The spreadsheet does not lie, and the spreadsheet is extremely disappointed in us.”
Despite the financial catastrophe, the team insists they would do it again. “There’s something pure about it,” said the Thanatos pilot. “No politics. No diplomacy. No structure timers or alarm clocking for timers in other time zones. Just you, your fleet, and an endless, remorseless tide of Rogue Drones who have apparently achieved a level of technological sophistication that allows them to produce new combat platforms faster than we can shoot them. It’s like gardening, if your garden actively tried to kill you and also your garden was a sentient factory.”
Other wormhole groups have reportedly begun organizing their own 100-wave attempts. One C6 corporation, whose name was withheld at their request, is reportedly developing what they call a “smartbomb doctrine” despite the patch notes’ explicit 95% damage reduction to area-of-effect weapons within the site. When asked about this contradiction, their fleet commander responded: “Yeah, we saw that. We’re mostly doing it for the aesthetic.”
CCP’s Game Design Director FC Okami, reached for comment through the official EVE Online Discord, responded with a single message: “o7 and see you in space.” Participants uniformly described this as “unhelpful but, honestly, fair.”
At press time, the fleet had returned to their home system and begun preparing for a second attempt, citing what Corvus called “a need to know whether wave 100 is actually different from wave 99, or if the developers just ran out of escalation ideas around wave 40 and kept going.”
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