After Tuesday’s patch introduced the Blood Raider Sotiyo to the game, the hunt has been on since Thursday to find it. Thursday was the first possible day that it could be found as the Blood Raiders needed to build it first.
It was suggested that people could find the haulers as they assisted NPCs with mining, and follow them back to the Sotiyo. However, according to Joe Barbarian from Goonswarm Federation, there were bugs with the rats which made locating the Sotiyo extremely difficult. The bugs include but are not limited to, haulers docking in player owned Raitaru’s, haulers warping to deadspace locations and sitting there for 7 hours, and haulers with infinite cargo (meaning they stayed in the belt indefinitely).
The Imperium Incursion SIG, working with other Imperium groups have had fleets out looking for the Sotiyo in the 240 or so systems that it could possibly be in round the clock since yesterday. Joe Barbarian told us that the solution to finding the Sotiyo came to him in a dream….yep, he dreamt of the movie Battleships where they misquote The Art of War as “Fight where they are not”. Joe decided to apply this to the Sotiyo hunt and instructed his fleet to confirm where it isn’t so that they could find where it is. Within an hour they had tracked down the location.
The pilot who found the Sotiyo was Theyrin Maricade of House Aratus in Goonswarm. He was searching in his allocated systems, finding miners, watching for haulers to warp in, and waiting for them to warp off again. He located a hauler, and after 20 minutes it warped off, he moved his combat probes in the general direction that the hauler had taken, and started probing it down.
After 3-4 cycles, he was able to pinpoint the Blood Raider Bestower and warped to 100km of it once he had full signal. He told us “I don’t even remember the last time this game gave me the shakes like in that moment, I was thinking if this was just like yesterday when the haulers warped to a safe”. He landed 100km from the Bestower, and 50km from the Sotiyo, just as the Bestower docked. As soon as the Bestower docked, a small fleet undocked, and he was able to relay on comms that the Sotiyo had been found.
After the hours that the fleets have spent hunting for this shipyard, we would like to congratulate The Imperium on being the first to find it, and we will, of course, keep you updated with developments in this story as they happen.
Update 19:06 : The location of the Sotiyo is E-DOF2 in Period Basis, and Red Alliance have lost a Rattlesnake fleet to it.
