Cycle 7 of EVE Frontier, Vestiges, went live on Tuesday 29 September. It's now very early on Monday morning and I've been fairly quiet all week, mostly because I've been playing it. Me and Ocky, another of the Luminaries, have been putting hours in every day since launch, and I think it's the most I've played since I started back in February 2025. So this is my start of cycle review, a week in, while it's still fresh.
If you want the official version first, there's the Vestiges launch dev blog and the 0.7.0.0 patch notes, which are long. Three things made the week for me. The flight model, the new mining and Fog of War. Most of this is about those.
One bit of context before any of it. EVE Frontier is an alpha, and I mean an actual alpha. They're building the systems, not tuning and balancing a finished game, so when I mention a niggle below I really do mean a niggle, the kind of thing that probably gets sorted in a patch or two. The game now tells you it's an alpha when you first load it, which I think is a really good change. People were coming in off Facebook ads expecting a finished game and then wondering what was going on.
Flying is not a chore any more
In my review back in August the flight model was my standing complaint. It sat somewhere between arcade and six degrees of freedom, there was no roll, and I said I didn't mind which way they went, I just wanted them to pick one and make it feel good. Cycle 7 is a big step towards that.
Before, WASD pitched you up and down and turned you left and right, which always felt a bit weird to me in something that's meant to be free movement. Now there's roll and strafe, and the new default is Assisted Flight. You point the mouse where you want to go, the ship turns to follow it, and the keyboard handles your speed. I put a fair few hours into another space game during Cycle 6 that worked the same way, heavier ships turning slower and so on, and I like it a lot. Manual flight first went in back in December 2025, they've been through a lot of iterations since, and the patch notes say this one is "by no means the finish line". It doesn't need to be finished to be a big improvement. It's just not a chore to fly the ship now.
My one personal niggle is the right mouse button. At the moment right mouse zooms in, which you do need when you're shooting NPCs, and free look sits on a key press. I'd swap them round. Right click and drag to look around without the ship following the mouse, and zoom on a key or a toggle. That's preference, not a problem.
How the ship is built feeds into how it flies as well. Thrusters give you the push, the engine decides how well your fuel turns into thrust, and the old Propulsion Engine has been split into three, the R10, R25 and R50, each one suited to a different grade of fuel. It's not intuitive, and it's complex. But CCP games have always been complex, that's a big part of the appeal for the people who play them, and I enjoy it.
The new mining is the standout
If I had to pick one thing, it's the mining. It's only the first pass, and it's already a lot more engaging than pressing start on a mining laser and watching your cargo hold fill up.
Asteroids are now solid bodies with an inside. There are sixteen types, and one rock can have a crust that's different from its core, so you often have to cut through the outside to get to the good stuff. There's no going to a belt knowing you'll get 100 cubic metres a minute for two hours. You check each rock, and you find out what's in it by mining it, not by scanning it. What you cut doesn't go straight into your cargo the way it does in EVE Online either. Bits come off the rock and drift. If you leave them they clump together, and you fly round and scoop them up.
That changes everything around it. There's no hauler at the moment, so hauling is a lot of back and forth. Do you build a base in the belt and process it there, or haul it home? Ocky and I both tried building in a belt, each in a separate one, so we wouldn't have to haul anything. Then the NPCs turned up. I've got one base I genuinely can't get back to, because after a server restart it's swarming with NPCs and I get blown up every time I go near it while the server's still coming up. It's things like that you end up laughing about later, the "do you remember when" stories. The lesson for now is to build somewhere central. From what's been hinted, bases are going modular, maybe as soon as next cycle, and they might even be able to move. We'll see.
The dev blog talks about reading the cut face and following a seam. In practice most people I've seen are just mining out the full rocks, so I think that part needs more iteration, and to be fair the patch notes more or less say the visuals for it aren't there yet. That's fine. I've watched this pattern a few times now. Something from EVE Online gets ripped out of the client, the EVE Frontier version goes in, it gets a polish mid-cycle, and the next cycle there's another iteration. It gets better every time, and it's been fascinating being along for that.
Fog of War, and why EF-Map hid its own map
The patch notes introduced Fog of War as "good news for explorers and bad news for Lacal specifically". That's me. I'm taking it as a compliment.
Your galaxy map now only shows what your character has actually discovered. Bright stars can be picked up from a long way off, dim ones only up close, and a system stays an unexplored outline until you fly there. The World API also stopped serving the universe, so tools that pulled the map from it stopped working on day one. I wrote about what this might mean for EF-Map back in September, before anyone had played it.
I decided EF-Map would go with the spirit of it. Rather than publish a full map, the live map started empty and fills in as players chart it. If you've found a system in game you paste the star link in and it appears. If you've been inside it you can submit its details, and that opens it up in Solar System View for everyone. I ran the approach past Fenris before building it. In the first six days, 12 players charted 281 of the 24,026 systems, 10 of them sent in details for 48 of those, and there are 91 gate connections on the map. That's sparse, which is sort of the point.
I know not everyone has gone that way. Some people have full maps of their own, and some sites are running full maps with catapult and gate planners. That's their call. I've had people ask me to publish the whole thing and I'm not going to.
What I can say is that playing blind has been great. Ocky and I don't know exactly where we're going. We don't know what's in a system before we jump in. We don't know if we'll find what we need there for the next leg, or if we'll have to backtrack. Not knowing adds a bit of spice to it. It's a strange thing for somebody who builds a map to say, but hiding the map has been one of the best parts of the week.
In the September article I sketched out public, personal and tribe tiers for all this. What I actually built is one community layer, and for now I think that was the right call. People are banding together to reveal stars, they're asking for things, and I'm learning a lot about what a map needs for when Fog of War is properly finished.
Is it a grind?
A lot of people are saying it's a grind. You do need to put a lot of hours in. I don't think that's the problem it sounds like, and I'll explain what I mean.
They're building systems for a game that's meant to last decades, the way EVE Online has. You're not going to go from zero to done in a week, and a cycle is three months. If it wasn't grindy, people would play for a week, build huge gate and catapult networks, get to wherever they wanted to go, and find out that most of the universe is the same. I think they said as much on a Frontier Friday, that travel is constrained partly because there isn't much variation between systems yet. The digital chemistry they've talked about, different resources in different regions, isn't in yet, so there's no big reason to travel massively far. Explorers are a bit hurt by that. But there needs to be some grind so people actually use the systems and find the issues with them.
It was never going to be a game you put a hundred hours into and then say you're good at it. A hundred hours is barely scratching the surface. A thousand probably is too. So is it grindy? Yes. Is it an entertaining grind now? I think so.
Fitting, skills and the rest
Modular fitting is fantastic and it isn't even finished. There's no EVE Online style "this is the best fit for that ship". Even the starter ship, with very little space, has masses of variations, and modular ships are still to come, along with modules that have different stats. It blows my mind how complex that's going to get.
Skills and progression are a lot more intuitive than they were. Your Memories now deepen as you do things rather than you waiting for the next milestone, and it just makes more sense. Is it impactful? A little bit. Not so much that you'd notice yet. But it's an iteration of a system that's been there a while, and it's had some polish.
Some systems now have more than one star, and asteroid belts reflect the stars they orbit, so when you jump in you can get a fair idea of whether a system is going to be any good just by looking. I think that gets more interesting once digital chemistry arrives.
The icons have been cut right back too. Arriving somewhere used to be a mass of brackets that dragged you out of the world, and now it's very light. They might have gone a bit too far, because some things are quite hard to find now, but maybe that's the intent.
As for the Feral Drones, the dev blog makes them sound better than what I've seen. They now mine and salvage and react to your signatures, but in fairness I haven't spent enough time around them to judge. The jury's out.
If you're coming in on the free trial
A few things that have been around for a while and might trip you up if you're trying the five-day free trial. There are effectively two inventories at the moment, the normal in-game one and the one that touches the chain, and switching between them is clunky. That goes away once everything is on chain, so I won't flog a dead horse. Firing two guns at the same time isn't obvious either, and the Discord is the quickest place to ask.
While you're firing or mining, opening your character sheet or industry, or clicking out to another window, stops your weapons. So if you're mining for half an hour, you can't really nip out to reply to someone on Discord without stopping. And if you dismantle one of your own structures, the cargo container it drops has no icon and is really hard to find, which hurts when it's holding hours of work. There's been talk of some kind of mini radar to help find things, and it hasn't made it in yet.
None of those are reasons not to try it. They're just the things I'd want somebody to tell me.
EF-Map this week
EF-Map is getting used more this cycle, and a lot of what I've built this week has come straight out of playing. The bookmarks have been getting a heck of a lot of use for planning. People asked for tasks they could hand out, so marks can now carry a checklist you can assign to tribe or alliance mates. There are alliance bookmarks for groups of tribes, transponder codes on marks with a Copy button, and dormant stargates can be planned into a route alongside catapults and gates, on top of the route links I added in July.
Shared Storage got used out of necessity. Ocky and I are in separate tribes, and even inside one tribe the game doesn't really let you share items, so we've been using the shared shelf on our own storage units. Using it every day showed up the friction fast, and it's now an icon grid that looks and works more like the game's own inventory windows.
I think the better the game gets, the better the third-party tools get. Slower this week, admittedly, because I've been playing rather than building.
On the numbers side, EF-Map's activity tracker counts players who do something on chain. Since launch, 312 different players have, against 667 in the first week of Cycle 6. So fewer, but the daily count has gone up every single day, where Cycle 6 had its best day on day four. As far as I can tell a lot of what you do in the first week of Cycle 7 is flying and mining, which the chain doesn't see, so treat this as a trend line rather than a headcount.
Cycle 7, first six days in numbers
From EF-Map's community map and activity tracker, as of 5 October 2026.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Systems charted on the EF-Map community map | 281 of 24,026 |
| Players who charted at least one system | 12 |
| Systems with details submitted | 48, by 10 players |
| Gate connections on the map | 91 |
| Chain-active players since launch | 312 |
| Chain-active players, first week of Cycle 6 | 667 |
| Chain-active players per day, 30 Sep to 4 Oct | 106, 157, 165, 189, 209 |
So, a week in
I've had a great week. The Frontier systems that were clunky are getting less clunky, easier to use and more fun, and it's starting to feel more like a game. Flight, mining and hiding the map are what made it for me. It's still an alpha and there will still be niggles for as long as they're building it. If you played this week and think I've missed something or got something wrong, let me know.
Related Posts
My EVE Frontier Review After 18 Months of Founder Access is the August review where the flight model was my main complaint. This is the follow-up a cycle later.
EVE Frontier Cycle 7 Fog of War: What It Could Mean for EF-Map is what I thought Fog of War would mean before anyone had played it, with the launch-day updates on how the community map works.
EVE Frontier Cycle 6 in Data has the full Cycle 6 record the numbers above are compared against.
Shared Storage covers the shared shelf Ocky and I have been leaning on all week.