In 2020, CCP introduced Metaliminal Storms: multi-system weather effects that roam nullsec and affect the stats of all player ships within them. These storms are considered annoying by many null residents, but they can also be immensely valuable with some understanding of how they work. How valuable? Over the course of 2 evenings, I yanked over 3 billion ISK out of an electrical storm in Insmother. I haven’t seen this kind of ISK/hr with non-combat exploration outside of getting lucky with quiet Sansha systems, drone data escalations, or wormhole Ghost Sites. And none of those are nearly as consistent or predictable.
To find a storm, just go to your ingame map and toggle the Metaliminal Storms filter. The map won’t tell you which storm is which, but Signal Cartel runs a public storm tracking service.
Basics
There are currently 4 types of metaliminal storms: Electrical, Exotic, Gamma, and Plasma. With 2 of each type existing simultaneously, that makes for 8 storms at a given time. Each storm’s effects are divided among “strong” and “weak” systems, with some additional hidden effects. Eve Uni has a wiki page covering the weather effects of each storm. There’s also a good visual guide in this Reddit post.
Each storm is based around one system, which I’ll call its center. Each system one jump from the center via stargate as well as the center itself has the “strong” effects of that storm. I’ll call these systems 1 jump from the center strong systems. Each system 2-3 jumps via stargate from a strong system has “weak” effects. I’ll call these weak systems.
Every 24-48 hours, a storm’s center will move and take the rest of the storm with it. This movement doesn’t have to be at downtime, and storm pathfinding tries to avoid dead-end systems or retracing its steps. Storms can’t move more than once every 24 hours, and they must move within 48 hours. While a storm’s center must be in a null system, neighboring strong and weak systems can be in lowsec or even hisec.
Multiple storms can overlap, which causes their effects to overlap as well.
Electrical Storms, or Why Isn’t My Cloak Working?
As an explorer, the storms you’ll be interested in are electrical storms, 2 of which exist at once. While they have some other effects, the 2 main ones are that cloaking is disabled in all systems affected by the storm, and probe strength is significantly increased. Additionally, center and strong systems (not weak) will spawn additional relic sites.
Specifically, the cloaking restriction works by preventing cloaking devices from cycling (if you cloaked prior to a storm entering your system, you’ll remain cloaked). While this makes exploring in electrical storm systems more dangerous, the extra relic sites more than make up for it. Probe strength is also considerably increased in electrical systems. You get a 25% increase in weak systems and a whopping 50% increase in strong ones including the center.
Relic sites from all 5 pirate factions will spawn in center and strong electrical storm systems. These sites spawn very quickly (as in a new site will spawn every few minutes). Yes, this means you’ll get Sansha and Guristas relics in the middle of Blood Raider space. The sites themselves are subtly different from normal pirate relic sites in a few ways.
Firstly, there are only 3 types of pirate relic site that can spawn, and certain sites will only spawn in certain storm systems. Center systems will spawn Crystal Quarries (the most lucrative pirate relic sites). These sites will show as level 3 relic signatures, instead of level 4 like normal in kspace. Strong systems will spawn pirate Monument Sites (the least lucrative null pirate relic sites). These sites come in 2 varieties: a level 1 relic signature with a slightly smaller initial size than normal (roughly 5au), and a level 4 relic signature. Aside from the different signature level, these monument sites appear to be identical. This makes center systems more valuable than strong ones.
Secondly, there cannot be more than 5 storm relic sites in a given system. There also can’t be more than 1 storm relic of the same pirate faction in a given system. If a center system already has Guristas, Blood, Angel, and Serpentis storm Crystal Quarries, the next storm site to spawn in that system must be a Sansha Crystal Quarry. This means that if another explorer cherry-picked the sites, it’s in your interest to pop the remaining cans to allow fresh sites to spawn in the same system.
A storm’s presence doesn’t appear to affect normal site spawning. Local data and relic sites, Ghost Sites, Sleeper Caches, event sites, and combat sites will all spawn normally and don’t obey the 5-site limit.
Here’s an example of a fully spawned center system:
And here’s an example of a fully-spawned non-center strong system:
Tactics
The most important things to keep in mind when planning a storm chasing expedition are that your cloak won’t work, your probe strength will be substantially increased, and you’ll be roaming the same handful of systems.
For loot storage, I recommend bringing a few secure containers and anchoring them at deep safes. This’ll keep you from running out of cargo space due to all the sites and massively reduce the risk of not having a cloak. Secure containers do expire after 30 days of disuse, so don’t leave them unattended for too long.
Given the lack of a cloak, you’ll be very vulnerable to bubble camps on gates. For this reason, I highly recommend using a ship that can fit a nullifier and warp in under 2 seconds. Fleet Interceptors are excellent for storm chasing (and the storm’s hefty probe bonus makes up for not having a hull scanning bonus). Covops frigs including Pacifiers are also great. While they do need pricey Nomad implants to achieve <2s align, they can still get under 3s easily and that’s sufficient against most players if you have a nullifier. I do not recommend Asteros. They’re expensive targets and easy instawarp doesn’t matter if any bubble will leave you dead in the water.
Unfortunately, alphas can’t use nullifiers, which means that sooner or later you will die. Just stash your loot in a secure container at a safe and use a cheap ship so you won’t lose much when it eventually happens.
The probe bonus also applies to combat probes, so it’s a lot easier for someone to scan you down. You may want to consider having a few Noise or Pochven filaments on hand to escape should someone really want you dead (remember, you can’t cloak and are vulnerable going through gates).
Fortunately, campers and hunters can’t cloak either, so you’ll always know if you’re actually alone in a site and if someone’s coming for you. Unless they’re using a Combat Recon ship, but that’s where your fast align time comes in. I’d even say that you’re safer in site in an electrical storm than in a regular system.
Interactions with Event Storms
Some ingame events feature extra storms roaming the map, which can make it hard to determine which storm is which. Fortunately, event storms tend to have slightly different mechanics than metaliminal ones. For example, Winter Nexus event storms only have weak systems 1 jump out from strong ones. Regular metaliminal storms don’t have this restriction, as you can see in this horribly edited screenshot:
Now get out there and make some dank ISK!