During last week’s Fanfest CCP finally opened up to talk about the changes coming in this June’s Odyssey expansion. We’d already had some specifics, like the new private hangars in Player-owned Stations, but it was only during the event in Reykjavik that the developers were free to talk about all the granular adjustments.

One of the announcements, moving ice belts into anomalies, may sound small on the surface but will significantly reduce the amount of ice available in Eve, making the resource that’s essential for big ship warfare significantly more valuable.

We spoke to Eve’s lead game designer Kristoffer Touborg about the changes.

“I’ve always thought that ice should be the [core ore] of Eve,” Touborg told me. “You have to have ice to go to war […] While moon minerals are your monetary resource to keep your empire running I think that ice should be the tactical resource that people use and we haven’t really done anything with [ice belts] but we’re going to start now.

“It’s going to be a big change […] there’s like 1/900th of ice left compared to what there is right now after the changes. So we’re taking a lot of it out but we’re still going to leave enough of it in to keep the machine running”

Currently, ice belts are found in a multitude of Eve systems and they can’t be depleted. So the ice miners just sit out there mining a bottomless supply of the capital ship fuel and sell it on the market, it’s easy money and there’s no complexity to it – simply mine, haul, and sell.

Moving the ice belts into the anomalies changes all that.

With ice being made so much scarcer, the demand for the resource is going to spike. The belts are no longer limitless, forcing miners to move about the systems with anomalies, searching out the precious white gold, competing with other miners. Control of those systems will also become a much vaunted thing, alliances with their own ice belt-spawning anomalies will be significantly more able to go to war than those that do not.

When these changes are implemented on 4 June we’ll see a further nuance added to Eve Online.