The graphical updates and additions to the New Player Experience are a substantial part of this patch, but, at its core, Apocrypha is the exploration expansion. There's the new scanning system, which gives players a more intuitive, graphical interface to use when scanning down cosmic signatures, and the number of exploration sites has also been doubled. Amongst the various hidden asteroid belts and pirate bases there are also the new wormhole anomalies. Wormholes are quite possibly the biggest change to the landscape of EVE that has ever occurred. These randomly spawning gateways link to other solar systems (also at random), eve isk and can even lead to one of the thousands of new unknown systems that have also been added. Players will need to tread carefully though, as the wormholes will collapse after a certain ship mass or time limit has been reached, leaving them "lost in space" until they can find another exit. Inside, there are a whole host of exploration sites that contain, amongst other things, the artifacts and materials to build the new tech three Strategic Cruisers.

The four Strategic Cruisers function a little different than other ships. Instead of buying a single ship hull, there is a base hull with slots for five different subsystems (electronics, engineering, offensive, defensive, and propulsion) that affect the stats and abilities of the ship. This allows you to tailor the ship to specific roles, and they can only get more diverse as new subsystems are released. Although, at the moment, there are only three versions of the five systems for each of the four races, but a fourth one is already in development. However, if you want the resources to build them, then you'll need to fight the guardians of unknown space, the deadly Sleepers.

These enigmatic drones are something we haven't seen before. eve isk They are very dangerous, and they don't like you. It's no secret that the NPC AI in EVE isn't that great, and the Sleepers are using a brand new AI system that makes them much more challenging to fight. They can web and scramble targets from long range, switch targets intelligently, and repair each other. Their damage and tanking abilities are also high enough that it takes teamwork to bring down all but the easiest of Sleeper spawns.