Birth of an MTU Hunter

Hello there, my name is Pix Severus and I have been playing EVE Online since 2010. This blog is about my adventures in EVE Online as I strive to become New Eden’s ultimate MTU hunter.

If you’re here, you may have seen me appear red or yellow flashy in local and found the link to this blog in my bio after checking me out. If that’s the case, don’t worry, I’m probably not after you, but if you have an MTU deployed right now you should probably get ready to scoop it.

Not creepy at all.

After returning to EVE Online from a year’s hiatus, I decided to take a break from suicide ganking in highsec to pursue a different career altogether: Hunting Mobile Tractor Units (MTUs).

An MTU is a large metal container with a tractor beam on it that sucks up nearby wrecks in space. These metal containers can be shot at by other players until they pop (explode) and then the contents of the container can be looted by anyone. It is classed as a mobile deployable structure, and players can use them to store ship modules for the purpose of refitting their ship in the field. However, they are most commonly used for automatically looting wrecks in missions, or dumping ore into for easy collection whilst mining. Many players leave these containers behind, and either forget where they left them, or simply don’t know how to scan them down to find them again. That’s where I come in.

Can you guess which system I was in when I took this screenshot?

There were 2 factors that influenced my decision to start down this road. The first was that I would constantly see MTUs appear on D-scan while travelling through highsec, even in systems that aren’t populated or typically used for mission running. The second was when I was poking around some asteroid belts and saw someone shooting an MTU that had been left behind by a miner. I had mistakenly thought that shooting MTUs without a wardec would result in CONCORD intervention, but the person shooting it was in an NPC corporation and therefore not at war with anyone. While he was shooting the MTU, he had suspect status (indicated by a yellow flashing skull) which meant that any player could freely attack him, so doing this is not without it’s risks, just like anything in EVE. Knowing that I could attack these things freely made quite the difference in my attitude towards them, which up until then had been one of nonchalance.

With this revelation, and the knowledge that these things are all over highsec and could contain any number of expensive items, I decided to start actively hunting them down. My long term goal with this is to eventually start killing mission runners, with MTU molestation being merely the bait to lure them into attacking me. For now, however, I’m quite content traversing the known galaxy and removing every abandoned MTU from the spacelanes.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m about to take killboard padding to the next level.

Part 2