An EVE Online player has gone where no player has gone—or at least, has gone everywhere a player can go. That was the premise of the journey of Katia Sae, who finished a mission taking place over nearly a decade traveling to every single galaxy in Eve Online—in one undestroyed ship.
It’s hard to believe that was five years ago. Since then, Katia Sae, the journeywoman and starfarer behind the mission, has absolutely received her laurels.
After her journey, she was recognized all the way to the top levels of developer team CCP, which gave her an in-game monument in her home system less than a month after the feat. The team even invited her to the one system out of player reach: Polaris, a developer-only system. Even Guinness World Records took notice and issued an official award.
The journey began in December 2009 from Saisio, Katia’s home system located in the Forge. At her then-slower pace, it took five years to complete all Empire space, after which she moved into Null Sec in 2014, a journey that took over a year. The final frontier, Anoikis, was a journey spanning just over three years, ending in 2019.
Her journeys were written largely in-character on her now-defunct Sagan Explorations blog, though her player, Ethan Richards, most notably broke character for the celebratory blog, as well as several interviews given after the feat. Our editor-in-chief talked to Richards at that year’s EVE Vegas celebration, too, where Richards reminisced on mixing such a massive undertaking with his foray into EVE Online roleplay.
“So the dichotomy is I love to role play, but I've never role played in the game even though I've been playing it up to that point, like, six years,” he explained. “This was coming out of the new re-beautifying efforts of EVE Online and the Dominion expansion of December 2009.
"I thought, well, you know, I'd like to do something different in the game than I had been doing up to that point. Being a role player and with the beautifying efforts of EVE Online, now I have a reason to go exploring because I wanted to see."
Richards wrote down this journey through the eyes of Katia herself, down to the very last blog. While the proper blog itself isn’t available, much of it is available on Archive.org, and the final blog has been archived on the official wiki for his company Signal Cartel, which helped Katia on the last legs of her journey.
After the achievement, Richards told MMORPG.com that he rarely undocked Katia afterwards for fear of what may happen to her, though he’d do administrative duties for the company and play on other Capsuleers.
For a slew of reasons, whether it’s deep-space exploration roleplay or massive battles nearly sabotaged by real-life player-versus-player espionage, EVE Online still runs strong 21 years later. It’s even developing player-created missions to let players immerse each other in fresh new ways.
EVE players out there—what achievements do you have your eyes on?
