EVE Frontier: A Favorable Bug And Solo Fueling My Base

This morning I decided to log into EVE Frontier and do a little mining. One can never have enough fuel so I thought I'd go ahead and get some in a short play session. I saw patch notes and a new build were deployed so I went ahead and read them. 

Patch Notes for 2025-09-24

Features & Changes:

• Significantly reduced the build cost of the Chumaq and Smart Gate to promote gatebuilding.

Defect Fixes:

• Removed a Flegel used during the Hackathon that was causing issues with the buildable ships mission.

I bring up the patch notes because I think the fix for one thing broke another. When I went to the mission page to check how many people were ahead of me, I saw an unexpected gain of 300 Grace. I was credited with completing the mission to manufacture one of each module. Kind of hard to do that when I just started gathering materials to build a Printer M, a requirement for completing the module mission. So I dutifully submitted the bug to the Discord server.

Why did I submit a bug that benefitted me? I'm playing the game a bit differently that others. I use my position on the Grace list to see how many people are playing the game. As of Sunday over 2000 players had joined the Discord server, finished the tutorial, and set up a network node. With the Grace bug I moved up to 1824th place. I'll move up the rankings a little more as within the next week I'll receive another 200 Grace for logging in 10 times this development cycle.

The UI controlling my base

But the original purpose for writing this post wasn't to point out a bug in a system that won't make it to the release version of the game. I want to know how much of an issue a lone player will have keeping a base up and running. The answer is, not much if combat isn't a threat. If I spend 10-15 minutes or so mining carbon ore every play session I can build up a reserve of cheap D1 fuel. Enough to both fuel my ship as well as run my base. With the cheap fuel I can keep the base running for over 2 weeks. I even have enough fuel to completely refuel my ship.

Also going back to the bug, I need to make a Printer M so I can start cranking out modules. Over the past few days I build a small shipyard and a second portable storage unit. I use the portable storage units when interacting with my refinery or printers and the smart storage unit for long term storage. I now have one portable storage unit set up to only deal with fuel.

With the immediate grind in Final Fantasy XIV out of the way I can spend a little more time building my base in Frontier. Hopefully before Cycle 2 ends I can build and equip a new ship, preferably two. I do want to have enough playtime in the game to write an end-of-cycle review of my time in the game, as boring as my activities are in Frontier.