EVE Frontier Feral Surge: pilots have until Oct. 27 to wipe out 20,000 Feral Drones

In Brief:

• Feral Surge, a week-long event in EVE Frontier (official site), runs from Tuesday, Oct. 20 to Tuesday, Oct. 27. The community is working together toward 20,000 Feral Drone kills.
• Manufacturing and combat missions earn pilots Grace, and the KEEP Monitor tracks their progress.
• The event arrives in the middle of Cycle 7: Vestiges, the Sept. 29 update that reworked Feral Drone behavior.

The EVE Frontier community has a deadline: 20,000 Feral Drones need to be destroyed by Tuesday, Oct. 27. That shared target is the heart of Feral Surge, a week-long event that kicked off Tuesday, Oct. 20.

Each kill adds to the community count. Along the way, individual pilots pick up Grace by finishing event missions.

By Oct. 21, the official EVE Frontier account had counted 5,064 Feral Drones destroyed. That left 14,936 to go.

Crafting comes first

Feral Surge is split into two tracks. The first is manufacturing: players are rewarded for producing the weapon, ammunition and protection they’ll need against the ferals.

The combat missions come next. To progress through them, players must land the killing blow on Feral Drones, and the Grace payout grows as they hit higher destruction targets.

Every Feral Surge mission is listed in the KEEP Monitor, which displays each target and follows a player’s progress across the week. The developer advised checking it before setting out “so you know what to craft first.”

Throughout the event, the studio plans to share progress updates on its social channels showing how many ferals are left before the goal is met. Its teaser summed up the event in four lines: “Complete missions. Earn Grace. Search the wreckage. Every kill counts.”

None of the sources reviewed for this story say what Grace reward, if any, comes with the community reaching 20,000 kills.

Ferals that act like players

This is the first community kill event since Cycle 7: Vestiges went live on Sept. 29. Fenris Creations announced the update on Sept. 24. Because it changed how the universe is generated and discovered, the game world was wiped.

The Feral Drones at the center of this event were rebuilt in Cycle 7. They now operate with the same knowledge, rules and abilities as players. They can scan, travel, mine, salvage and scavenge, which puts them in competition for many of the same resources.

Their view of nearby space is also limited. The drones pick up signatures, interpret them and act on whatever they can figure out. Some go on patrol, some salvage wrecks and some mine asteroids.

According to the official support guide, careless movement can attract unwanted attention, and keeping out of sight can be as effective as fighting. The guide also notes that Conservator groups can contain mining drones, salvage drones and combat escorts.

Combat carries a risk. The guide says fighting Ferals can expose a player’s Creation to Corruption, the status that used to be called Feralization, and it advises keeping an eye on HUD status effects.

Pilots without much firepower have a backup option. The Small Cutting Laser is built mostly for harvesting, but it can also damage and destroy Feral Drones.

Grace and earlier events

Grace is the progression currency for the game’s current development phase. Players collect it during a Cycle, and it converts into EVE Points once that Cycle wraps up. The KEEP Monitor is located in the Terminal, beside the Broadcast Terminal.

Before Feral Surge came the August Dermestid hunt, where the community had to bring down 20 Dermestids together. Everyone who took part got 1,000 Grace.

Cycle 7 brought other changes too. Aim flight became the default control scheme, Characters and Shells gained a skill system, and ships can now dock directly to ports on structures in space. Signatures are discovered while traveling instead of being displayed upfront.

The studio kept its rallying message for the week brief: “The Frontier moves this week. Be part of it.”