CaldariPrimePonyClub: The Capsuleer Who Painted EVE Before CCP Did

CaldariPrimePonyClub: The Capsuleer Who Painted EVE Before CCP Did

For most of EVE Online's history your ship came in exactly one colour: whatever the faction that built it had decided. If you wanted to see a Megathron in a different livery, make propaganda art for your corp, or simply admire a hull from every angle, the game gave you no way to do it. For roughly six years one capsuleer fixed that for everyone. CaldariPrimePonyClub built a free website that let any player open a browser, load any ship in the game, spin it, and paint it; the tool was called Jeremy. It cost nothing and asked for nothing, and it made CaldariPrimePonyClub one of the most quietly beloved figures in EVE: the creator the community leaned on to imagine the ship customisation that CCP would not ship for years.

Background - CaldariPrimePonyClub and the EVE art community

CaldariPrimePonyClub was a fixture of the EVE community long before the ship painter existed, and in more than one role. There was event-running inside the game; there was a steady output of ship-art and screenshots feeding communities like shipsofeve and the famously sharp-tongued Failheap Challenge forums; there was a stint on the Council of Stellar Management, EVE's elected player body, across its fourth and fifth sittings. CaldariPrimePonyClub once rattled off the whole tangle of handles in a single breath:

I'm a long time Eve Online community member whom some of you may know as T'amber (ingame events, shipsofeve, csm4/5, serious space ship art, FHC), the caldariprimeponyclub (random reddit wallpaper posts, pink ships, tweetfleet, jeremy), the most recent member of Eve_NT, or maybe not at all

One capsuleer, many hats. The personal posts are signed T'amber and the in-game character is Apricot Baby, who runs the single-member corporation that carries the brand name. But the public face of all of it, the one EVE players actually came to know, was CaldariPrimePonyClub: a unicorn logo, a fondness for painting ships an aggressive shade of pink, and a handle that became shorthand for "the person who can show you any ship in any colour." The unicorn and the pink were a joke everyone was in on; the work underneath the joke was serious enough that CCP would eventually put it on a stage.

Featured persona - CaldariPrimePonyClub

CaldariPrimePonyClub sits a little apart from EVE's usual roll of warlords and scammers. There is no body count here, no stolen titan fund, no betrayed alliance. The reputation was built entirely on making things: a free tool, a stream of ship-art, and a willingness to spend personal time and money so other players could create too. It is a rarer kind of EVE fame, earned by giving the community something rather than taking it from them.

Jeremy: a ship painter in your browser

The tool was a piece of in-browser WebGL that loaded the full EVE ship roster and let you do several things the game would not. You could pick any hull and spin it freely in three dimensions; filter the roster down by faction, race, or class to find the ship you wanted; toggle details like turrets on and off; and drop the result against a chosen backdrop, a nebula or a sun, so the screenshot looked like it had been taken in space rather than in a viewer. A 2014 newcomer asking what the fuss was about got the plainest possible summary from another player: it is a website that uses WebGL to let you see and paint all the ships in the game.

Painting was the heart of it. Colour could be applied per section of a hull, so a single ship could be given a two-tone or three-tone livery that looked nothing like its faction default, and there was more control under the surface than the casual user ever found. The application was named Jeremy, and the name was also a door: clicking the "Jeremy" text in the top-left corner opened a hidden developer toolbox with far finer control over each section of the hull. As one regular explained it to a new user in 2017:

If you guys want even more control over the colour you can bring up the Dev toolbox by clicking the Jeremy text at the top left.

It ran in any browser, cost nothing, and asked for nothing - no client, no login, no account. For years it was simply where you went when you wanted to know what a ship would look like, and that low friction is most of why it spread as far as it did.

"How is it that CCP comes up with such bland designs"

What made the tool quietly subversive was the comparison it invited. EVE did eventually sell cosmetic ship skins, but they were sparse and conservative, and a player armed with Jeremy could out-design them in an afternoon. The point was made over and over on the forums and on reddit, sometimes admiringly and sometimes pointedly. One 2017 thread spelled it out and then proposed, unprompted, the exact mechanic CCP would later build:

I'm actually surprised at the versatility of this system, and wonder how it is that CCP comes up with such bland designs.

The same poster went on to suggest that CCP simply let players buy and apply per-section colours directly, four sections to a hull, applied as needed - which is, more or less, what the official system would eventually become. That was the recurring shape of CaldariPrimePonyClub's reputation: players used the tool, were impressed, and then asked why the studio that owned the ships could not do the same.

It became a fixture of the community's creative side. Video-makers used it to frame hero shots of their fleets; propagandists mocked up corp liveries with it; reddit carried a steady trickle of CaldariPrimePonyClub wallpapers. When the site finally closed, the first reaction in the thread was a video editor mourning a workflow - he had used it many times for his projects and was relieved only that a replacement with rotation and a green-screen existed. A free fan website had become part of how a substantial slice of the playerbase made art about the game.

What is CPPC? The persona, the tool, and the corp

The name caused a recurring confusion, because CaldariPrimePonyClub is at once a person, a website, and a real in-game corporation, ticker CPPC., founded in 2013 with the character Apricot Baby as its chief executive. New players kept running into the name in different contexts and assuming it was one thing. A 2014 reddit thread captured the muddle exactly: a player wrote that they kept seeing Caldari Prime Pony Club described as an in-game player corp, yet every other mention pointed at a ship-design website, and they could not work out which it was. The answer was that the persona came first and everything else was named after it. The corp was not a fighting outfit; it was a flag, a one-person banner for the creator, the tool, and the art.

That community streak ran through everything CaldariPrimePonyClub did with the corp. In 2013 it became the launch point for a CSM Participation Reward Program, an effort to get newer players paying attention to the Council of Stellar Management elections by handing out prizes to anyone who took part and posted in the thread. It was the same instinct as the painter: lower the barrier, hand people something for free, and pull them into the wider game. The corporation existed to serve the persona, not to shoot anyone, which is exactly why a new player trying to slot it into EVE's usual taxonomy of corps and alliances came away confused.

The 2016 CreatorStudio fundraiser

By 2016 CaldariPrimePonyClub wanted to build something larger than a ship painter: a tool for composing full three-dimensional EVE scenes, not just lone hulls on a backdrop. The project was called CreatorStudio, and unlike Jeremy it was put to the community as a crowdfunder. The pitch was characteristically modest about where the money would go - a year of the necessary software subscriptions for development and design, a small server bill, and enough of a cushion to free up the time to actually build it. Every donation, the campaign said, was to fund more EVE art and to help others make it more easily. It set an honest expectation on delivery, promising usable versions with limited features at the end of each month while the full feature list came together over roughly half a year, and it noted up front that CCP had been made aware of the project and that it complied with the third-party developer rules.

CreatorStudio was its own undertaking, a next step rather than a rebuild, and it is the reason the painter and the studio are sometimes spoken of as one thing when they were two. Jeremy was the tool that already existed and that everyone used; CreatorStudio was the more ambitious follow-up CaldariPrimePonyClub beleived players wanted, funded by the same community that had spent years painting ships for free.

Retirement and the eve-nt handoff

In 2018, after a little more than six years, the original site was switched off. The retirement notice was short, warm, and entirely in character:

After a little more than 6 years of service www.caldariprimeponyclub.com has been retired. This domain will start forwarding to the excellent eve-nt ship designer created by Veetor and the eve-nt team soon. Thanks to all of you who used CPPC and for sharing your 3d creations with the rest of the community

It was signed, as the personal notes always were, "Love, T'amber." The domain was pointed at the eve-nt ship designer, a community-built successor maintained by Veetor and the eve-nt team that carried the same idea forward and then some, with free rotation and a green-screen export for video-makers. The thread filled with the kind of farewell a genuinely useful free tool earns: thanks, a little mourning, and relief that the work would continue somewhere. A six-year run had not so much ended as been passed on, which is its own kind of compliment in a game where most fan projects simply go dark.

Recognition: SKINR, SKIN concepts, and a Polaris Award

The deeper vindication came from the direction of CCP itself. The studio eventually shipped SKINR, a proper in-game system that lets players design their own ship skins from a palette of patterns and colours and apply them to their hulls - exactly the thing CaldariPrimePonyClub had been letting people do in a browser for the better part of a decade, and almost exactly the mechanic that forum posters had been asking CCP to build while they used Jeremy to do it themselves. CaldariPrimePonyClub never stopped making the case for it, either, posting long galleries of polished SKIN concepts on the official forums. The hulls in those galleries were dressed up as everything from a caramel waffle to a clean white showpiece, the sort of work other players pointed at while asking why the official skins could not look like that. They were proposals as much as art, and they read in hindsight as a one-person campaign for a feature that did not yet exist.

That long campaign was recognised in the most public way the game has. At EVE Fanfest in 2026, CCP handed CaldariPrimePonyClub a Polaris Award - its honour for the community's most significant long-term contributors - alongside the veteran EVE artist Rixx Javix. It was an unusual award for an unusual career: not a battle, not an empire, but years of free tools and ship-art that helped point the studio toward a feature it would eventually build itself. And it was emphatically not a posthumous nod to a closed chapter. Jeremy retired, but CaldariPrimePonyClub, the concept art, and the pink ships are still very much part of New Eden, and the 2026 award is the community and CCP agreeing, finally and on the record, that the capsuleer with the WebGL canvas had been onto something all along.