EVE Online: Rubicon out today with 1.29GB patch

Reading patch notes is a good way to start your day

EVE Online: Rubicon, the 20th free expansion for EVE Online, is here at last with a hefty patch. The 1.21GB download has a crap ton of new features and bug fixes. I’m downloading it right now, and I should have impressions on it for you guys soon. Also, here’s the Rubicon soundtrack on Soundcloud.

You can read all of the patch notes right here, but I listed the most notable changes below.

• Four new types of personal deployable structures have been developed – Mobile Depot, Mobile Tractor Unit, Mobile Cynosural Inhibitor and Mobile Siphon Unit. 
• The maximum penalty for attacking a Mobile Structure in any area of space is a Crimewatch suspect flag.
• All Mobile Structures appear on directional scans and can be found using combat scanner probes. 

Ghost Sites

• New Anomalies called ‘Ghost Sites’ added to High Sec, Low Sec, Null Sec and WH space – one for every pirate faction in each area. See this blog for more information

High-Sec Player Owned Customs Offices

• All Concord operated Customs Offices in Hi-Sec are now controlled by InterBus. Interbus stations have a tax rate of 17%.
• InterBus Customs Offices can be attacked by anyone.
• Players can build a Customs Office orbiting a planet that has no Customs Office. This is true for all security bands, but existing planet restrictions for Custom Offices (like those in Jita) will remain.
• Player Owned Customs Offices in Hi-Sec will have an NPC tax rate of 10% for export, 5% for import.
• New Skill: Customs Code Expertise reduces the NPC tax rate by 10% per level.
• The tax base value for Planetary commodities are being reduced by between 11% and 20%, based on tier.
• Attacking POCOs in Hi-Sec will bring Concord response, unless the attacking player is in a corporation that is at war with the owner of the POCO.

New Certificate and Mastery Systems

• The Certificate System has been completely overhauled to be more intuitive to use. For more information, please refer to this Dev Blog for more details on the changes.   

Interbus Ship Identification System

• A visualization tool has been added to represent progression and clear identification of all the non-unique ships in-game. This ship tree, named the “Interbus Ship Identification System”, may be accessed by clicking the new button available in your NeoCom, by pressing ALT+& or by clicking the “Show in ISIS” button in the ship show-info. For more information, please refer to that Dev Blog