Katia Sae - First to Visit Every System Without Loss

Katia Sae - First to Visit Every System Without Loss

On 9 March 2019, after nine years and three months in the saddle, Caldari Achura explorer Katia Sae - the in-game persona of player Ethan Richards - finished visiting every reachable solar system in EVE Online: 7,805 systems across all of known space (K-space) and Anoikis (wormhole space), without ever losing a single ship. She had left her home station in Saisio on 1 December 2009.

Featured persona - Katia Sae

The journey was logged in real time on Richards's "EVE Travel" blog and on the Signal Cartel forums (Katia Sae was the in-character Executor of the EvE-Scout Enclave and Signal Cartel was her home corp). Guinness World Records ratified the achievement as the "first person to explore all reachable systems in EVE Online without a single combat loss." CCP responded by building a permanent in-game monument, the Journey of Katia Sae Memorial, at the Abagawa stargate in Saisio - the very first gate she jumped on day one. At the time of the unveiling CCP had honoured exactly two players in this way: Chribba and Katia Sae.

The monument carries an in-character dedication, written by CCP's George Kelion on behalf of the Achura Stargazers Society in association with Signal Cartel, that casts her as a beacon "friendly to all in her travels, neutral and never initiating aggression, and very, very hard to catch":

May Katia Sae's epic journey be remembered forevermore by all who travel into the furthest reaches of New Eden and the fathomless depths of Anoikis. Every star is one of her footprints, and every heavenly body tells the tale: "Katia Sae was here."

The achievement is the canonical proof-of-concept for high-effort non-violent play in a PvP-default sandbox - wormhole transits, hostile nullsec pipes, lowsec gate camps, and the slow grind of empire high-sec, all run on cloak, scan and patience instead of guns.

The explicit speed counterpart, Henrique Arnolles's 224-day full-cluster tour in 2021, reframed the same map around the opposite optimisation target.