Crimson Harvest, the annual space terrors event, return New Eden today.   It remains one of the yearly events we can generally count on, as most of the others have faded and become just sales promotion opportunities.

Crimson Harvest 2026 – Open the Bloodgates

The event runs from today, October 6th, through until downtime on November 3rd, and brings with it most of the expected activities along with a couple of new items.  New on the list for 2026 is that the Blood Raiders have found their way into Pochven.  Even now somebody is probably losing their mind over on r/eve about how Pochven is even a bigger ISK printing machine with this event.

The headlines for the event are as follows, selected by the company and sorted by me:

  • Align with Blood Raiders or the Order of St. Tetrimon and earn rewards.
  • Accessible sites for capsuleers of all experience levels.
  • New Triglavian challenges and encounters across New Eden and Pochven.
  • Earn a blueprint copy for the new Akoman Blood Raider attack battlecruiser.
  • 90% PvP loot drops return outside highsec, with a 50% implant drop chance on pod kills.
  • Crimson Harvest escalates in the final week and the reward track gets extended.
  • Daily login rewards unlock Skill Points, boosters, SKINs & more.

So let’s go down the list.

As has become the custom, you have to pick a faction to represent; you either fight for the Blood Raiders or the Order of St. Tetrimon.

You must pick in order to participate

As I have no doubt said before, while I appreciate the role play possibilities this choice provides, it does mean that half the event sites will not be for you, and the least likely complaint about this event is that there are too many event sites.

Once you have gone into The Agency, found the event… which is NOT featured on the main page of The Agency because CCP/Fenris remain amateurs… and had chosen a side, then half the event sites are accessible to you.  Actually, all of the sites are, but you only make progress towards the rewards track by running sites for the faction you chose.

In The Agency under Encounters

There are both combat and hacking sites for the event, though combat makes up most of the activities for the event.

How “accessible” they are for players of all experience levels is debatable however.  In past iterations the hacking sites were level IV, which is likely too much for a new player in the Heron they got from the career agent.  We’ll see if that changes this year.

And the combat sites… well, they are doable with the right fits, but they are open to all comers, so the common high sec experience is running a site and having somebody else drop in and steal the kill you need in a highly optimized ship.  In low sec, by contrast, the experience is generally somebody dropping into your site to kill you instead.

The work around is generally to wait a week until the high achievers are done and maybe play at off hours to simply avoid other people.  This is an MMORPG after all, the point is to avoid other people right?

As for the Pochven stuff… well, there will be new wormholes to get you there.  But it is also a PvP arena and it is dangerous to go alone.  Your mileage may vary.

The reward track for the event looks fairly modest.  More SKINS, more SKINR elements, and more boosters you’ll likely forget to use so they’ll expire.

Crimson Harvest 2026 rewards track

The tease/temptation is at the end of the reward track, a single run blueprint copy that will let you build the new Bloodraiders battlecruiser, the Akoman.

The end blueprint copy

This too has become a feature of New Eden events, getting people an early look at a new ship that is coming with the next expansion.  That it is a Blood Raiders ship raises the question, “Are the Blood Raiders coming to Faction Warfare?”  The next two expansions are low sec focused, by which CCP/Fenris generally means Faction Warfare because they want to make a small gang version of null sec… so maybe?

We shall see.

Also, there are Twitch drops for the event and, if I am seeing this correctly, it looks like the company handed out some of the new battlecruisers to streamers.  Or maybe the BPCs.  I don’t know, but CCP/Fenris is taking care of their favorites once more.

Oh, and in an attempt to get back on track with the bullet points, there is this standard feature of the event.

  • 90% PvP loot drops return outside highsec, with a 50% implant drop chance on pod kills.

Its a thing.  Go crazy.  Everybody is a loot pinata for Halloween.  Expect a rise in suicide ganks in high sec as they are now even more profitable, and a corresponding rise in complaints about suicide ganking.  Some things never change.

Also on the list of things that are now routine part of events, for the last week of the Crimson Harvest there will be an additional event track with more rewards to get people back to doing sites again because most people were done in the first two weeks.

And then, finally, there are login rewards.  It wouldn’t be any sort of event if the company wasn’t trying to bribe you to at least log into the game to inflate their MAU stats just a bit.

Crimson Harvest 2026 Login Rewards

There are 28 days of rewards, made up of all the usual things.  Yay, more expiring boosters and EverMarks!  But there are also a pile of skill points to be had, with the big payout coming at day 21 which will get your Omega account 325K skill points.

As usual, Alpha clone accounts only get the top reward track, but if you decide to go Omega, which the company dearly hopes you will, then you get all of the bottom track rewards, even those for past days.

So it goes.  As I have said in the past, I tend to prefer the Winter Nexus event as it has a chill mining aspect to it.  I tire of the competitive combat sites which are either easy to the point of tedious if people leave you alone or super frustrating when somebody drops in and snipes the item you need.  I’ll take the login rewards and might do some exploration content once the initial rush settles down.

But it does answer the question, “Who are the real space monsters?”

It sure isn’t the NPCs.

Related:

  • CCP/Fenris – Crimson Harvest: Open the Bloodgates
  • CCP/Fenris – Crimson Harvest: The Bloodgates Are Open
  • CCP/Fenris – Blood Raiders Invade Unstable Pochven
  • CCP/Fenris – Patch Notes for Crimson Harvest
  • EVE University – Crimson Harvest 2026 (in progress)