Life in a Wormhole: Clone Jumper #eveonline

Jay asks:

Hey man,
I am a little confused about all this cloning stuff, how and why would I want a lesser clone? how do I jump between the 2 or 3 or 4…?

Okay, so that’s a really good question, but it’s a little complicated.

Think of clones like cars.

Most of us have just one car. We spend a lot of time in our cars, and over time, we tend to customize and maybe even pimp them out a little bit. (In this case: Implants.)

If we wreck our car and total it out, we need to get a new one, and that new one is going to be “plain”, it’s not going to have all the custom stuff in it, until we pay to add in all that stuff too.

In EvE, as a capsuleer, this “plain new car” happens automatically. If your ship gets blown up, that’s really no worse than losing a (really) expensive set of tires or getting an expensive fender bender, but if we get our pods destroyed, the body is destroyed, and with it all our little customizations (implants). But we’re SPECIAL, so we get downloaded into a “medical clone” that remembers all the skills we’ve trained (if we remember to keep the clone updated to a point where it’s smart enough to remember all our skills). However, that body obviously doesn’t have all the cybernetics the old body did.

That’s all a medical clone is — the assurance that if we get our car totaled, we get a new one.

Jump clones are different. They’re like someone who has more than one car, who selects whichever one they want for the day.

So here’s the most basic example. Let’s say you’re a normal guy with one body (car), and you’re planning on doing some risky stuff. Problem is, you have some implants in your head, and if you roll out into the Danger Zone and get podded, you’ll lose that stuff. The main rule of EvE is ‘don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose’, and that includes the wires in your head.

So you have options.

• Option One is ‘don’t do the risky thing’. Lots of people opt for that.
• Option Two is “risk it, cuz I can’t figure out how jump clones work.” LOTS of people do that, whether they want to or not.
• Option Three is ‘get a different body to use for the risky stuff’.

So here’s me: I’ve got well over 200 million isk worth of implants in my head. It’s all +4 stat bumps and some modules that increase my abilities in ways important to me. Keep in mind: the value of the wires in this is example is MINISCULE compared to some folks. You can easily spend multi-billions on a complete implant “set”, with inherent set bonuses. In any case, the fact that someone else has way more valuable stuff in their head isn’t relevant; in this example, the implants in my head — whatever they are — are more than I’m willing to lose.

Anyway, pretend-me wants to go into wormholes, but because I’m new to wormholes and imagine the odds of getting podded are high, I don’t want to risk these implants (and also there’s some implants that boost scanning strength that I want to get, specifically for wormholes), so I train the skill that lets me have Jump Clones, then I either go to a station that has cloning facilities and is owned by a corp with which I have a really high standing, or one with which my CORP has really high standing, or a join a corp called Estel Arador for a day for the express purpose of making clones and then leaving again (that’s just something Estel Arador does for pilots, for free, because they’re awesome).

So now I have a second car/body. I go to a different station, unplug my fancy clone from my ship, jump over into this new body, and put in some implants that will be (a) more useful in wormholes and (b) less risky to lose, like maybe just +3 implants, which are about one-third the cost of the +4s — and maybe not as many of them — like, for instance, I’m not going to need a Social implant, cuz I’m not training Social skills in a wormhole (no agents to schmooze).

24 hours later, I can jump back into my high-end clone, which I do so that I’ll train skills a bit faster than my wormhole clone, but when it’s time to go to the wormhole, I’ll jump into my cheaper, less risky wormohle body and head out, leaving the shinier clone in storage for now.

Maybe a few months later, I decide that I’m going to start going on short roams out into nullsec on the weekends, just for a few hours on a Saturday, just for fun and laughs.

Now this is MUCH more risky than plain old wormhole living. With the wormhole clone, I’ve put in implants that I feel I need for long-term play (I still want to train reasonably quickly), but which minimize my losses if something goes wrong. And in any case, I generally try to keep things from going so wrong that I get podded.

But with this new ‘weekend roaming’ situation, I’m actually looking for trouble and EXPECTING to blow up. Repeatedly.

So I head back into a station and make a third jump clone: my throwaway clone. This body gets no implants at all. I just jump into this car when I’m going to go off-roading up in the mountains. Thing doesn’t even have any doors on, and half the paint is just primer, cuz why bother?

I jump into this body when I’m headed for serious hijinx, and if I survive, great, and if I get podded, I’ll just reboot back in my medical clone (which is always what happens when you get podded, regardless of which jump clone you’re in), and since I have now used my medical clone backup, I’ll pay to upgrade the memory on my new medical clone, cuz you really always have to remember to do that after a podding.

24 hours later, I jump back into one of my ‘nice’ bodies, resume normal activities, and the body I just left behind becomes my new ‘junker car’ for weekend shenanigans.

Note: In most situations, all these clone jumps take place at stations. It’s possible to do them in known space, outside a station, IF you have access to specific kinds of command ships (like the Rorqual) with clone bays fitted, but please note: even if you have access to those ships, you can’t clone jump into or out of wormhole space.

What happens if I get podded while in one of my ‘good’ clones? Well, then I have two stripped-down clones, and either don’t have the pimped-out or semi-pimped out version anymore. That one will need to be replaced, by buying implants for one of the naked clones. Super fun.

Got it?