EVE Frontier drops Cycle 7 mid-cycle update with EREV and VATRA ships

In Brief:

• @EVE_Frontier announced the Cycle 7 mid-cycle update, which adds two ships called the EREV and VATRA.
• The patch also brings new Feral drones, a new crafting system and a new 3D ship manager.
• It lands about six weeks into Cycle 7: Vestiges, which launched Sept. 29, and arrives later than the October date on Fenris Creations’ July roadmap.

EVE Frontier (official site) pushed its Cycle 7 mid-cycle update live, adding two new ships and replacing its ship management screen with a 3D version.

“Cycle 7 continues with two new ships, the EREV and VATRA, alongside new Feral drones, a new crafting system and a new 3D ship manager,” the official @EVE_Frontier account said in a post on X headed “THE MID-CYCLE UPDATE IS UPON US.”

The update went out Nov. 10. The post didn’t include ship stats, crafting recipes or a breakdown of how the new drones differ from the ones already in the game.

Ships and fitting

The EREV and VATRA join the hulls players have been flying since Cycle 7 opened. The announcement gave no roles, prices or stats for either ship.

The 3D ship manager is the bigger change to how players handle their fleets. Fenris Creations’ July roadmap had promised full ship and structure modularity for the mid-cycle patch, and fitting has been moving that way all year.

Ferals and crafting

Feral drones got an overhaul when Cycle 7 began. They now play by the same rules as players, with the same knowledge and abilities. They scan, travel, mine, salvage and scavenge toward their own goals, which puts them in competition with players for many of the same resources. They also react to what players do around them.

Fenris ran a one-week community event called Feral Surge starting Oct. 20, ahead of the mid-cycle release. The new update adds more Feral drone types, though the post didn’t name them.

The studio hasn’t published details on the new crafting system yet. In a Cycle 7 Q&A, developers described a planned “digital chemistry” approach where recipes would ask for properties such as an amount of metallic content in place of fixed quantities of specific ores. That would let different ores, or mixes of ores, fill the same recipe, and the inputs could change the finished item’s characteristics. The developers said many of those ideas were intended systems, not finished features. Fenris hasn’t said whether this update is that system.

Roadmap slip

The July roadmap put the mid-cycle patch in October. Along with modularity, it listed temporary teams and shared storage for that release. Neither feature is in the mid-cycle announcement.

That same roadmap put Cycle 8 in December, with community and social tools as its focus. Cycles run about three months, and each one ends with a full universe wipe. Vestiges opened Sept. 29 with a wipe of its own, plus a new skills system for characters and shells, changes to flight and fog of war covering uncharted systems.

Studio background

Fenris Creations is the name CCP Games took on May 6. The studio also makes EVE Online. EVE Frontier is in early access on PC, and its blockchain infrastructure on Sui is optional.

The patch follows layoffs on the EVE Frontier team, which Fenris confirmed earlier this month. Some of the people let go said publicly that they were made redundant, and they include engineering and quality assurance staff. Fenris hasn’t said whether the cuts will change the development schedule.

Players in the replies to the post had already made plans for the patch. “We will be jumping on this in tonight stream,” @troubles_strife said.