I Have The Power Of ANTIFLUX!
The ECM at the center of every Jumpgate controversy (almost).
The Antiflux is an equipable ECM that was introduced, along with the Whistle, some time after Jumpgate Episode 2 came out, I reckon in 2004.
Both these items can therefore be considered rather late gameplay additions to the game, and we might argue that they’re not really “additions”: they look a little like an attempt to patch up some janky mechanics. Jumpgate started as a purely PvP game, with the Conflux only being introduced over a year into the beta, and only 3 major enemy types making it into the release - squids, snails and mantas. The conflux implementation may be described as rather trivial. A player will usually spawn only a few of them, they only ever dart towards the player (occasionally colliding with terrain, the player, or each other) and will essentially keep shooting till death ensues.
As a result of these circumstances, there’s always been some division about the Conflux in the player base. Some enjoy having them around and hunting them, but some would rather focus on the PvP, or even simply plying trade routes.
There’s also the issue of the ECM equipment slot, which frankly has always looked like one of the most neglected, or abandonned, features in the ship’s list of capabilities. The initial ECM implementation quite simply sucks some juice out of your powerplant in exchange for reducing the range at which other players can see you on radar. I don’t think most players ever fly one.
So, the Antiflux and the Whistle offer a few new possibilities:
Players who can’t be bothered with Conflux can use the Antiflux.
Players who like fighting Flux can use the Whistle.
Both items fit in the under-used ECM slot, giving it some purpose.
So What Controversy?
Of course, the advent of the Antiflux did not quell any outcry. On the contrary, many players felt it essentially castrated the game, removing much of the challenge associated with exploring sectors with a high threat-level (such as the unreg space around Pulsar, Mokk’s Battlefield and so on).
With the Antiflux fitted, you will NEVER spawn a flux upon entering a sector (outside of Conflux space, I am told). Flux that have been spawned by other players can still turn on you, and swarms will still occur. But after I fitted my Antiflux, I could basically go around space and mine away without bothering about armament for days. I almost forgot what color squids might be, and completed my Ice Gem medal in a couple hours, in high contrast to my Precious Gem misadventures. I just showed up at Mokk’s Battlefield with two Prospectors and a MLAmplifier, filled two heavy miner hauls, dropped them at Primus depot, and freighted them to Octavius Storage. Done!
The same goes with hauling heavy loads across dangerous sectors, mining pure asteroids, etc. After a while, I must say that entirely disabling a whole part of the game felt weird. It’s definitely a bit like activating a cheat code, and that’s the root of the controversy.
The Antiflux in Modern Times
I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking the Antiflux looks like some overly glazed pastry. It may be a poisoned one too, akin to the arsenic pudding that gets delivered to Cleopatra in the classic Asterix adventure. Nonetheless, as a player on the private server, you might just want one because you want the same toys as all the old timers. And that’s probably when you’ll notice that it’s not exactly in high availability.
You see, current management has an opinion on the Antiflux too, and at some point decided to make it hard to obtain. To this effect, they added a rare artefact component to the Antiflux recipe, the UC15. This artefact is a drop from “gold cube” unknown wreckage. Because it is so rare, there are quite few instances of one being found, and it is hard to guess the drop rate. Players are not stupid, so of course as soon as the recipe changed, the hoarding started. I don’t know when that change went live, but let’s just say many years ago. So, all Antiflux were removed from market, stashed in player-owned stations. You might still find one (or a UC15) in the POS market search. It might cost you in the region of 20 millions, or who knows?
I will now tell you how it went for me. I decided I would build my own Antiflux using a self-found UC15, which is the sort of weird things I sometimes decide for myself and stick with for no good reason (yes, like the Precious gem medal). Since I’d left Jumpgate EU soon after the exploration update, I had little experience and no memories of artefact hunting, so I figured it out again with some help from people around. I eventually settled on a cube search pattern with a 60K units long edge and went hunting in Arkan’s Cloud, which I have discovered has zero threat level - meaning it doesn’t spawn flux and isn’t a station sector, therefore ideal for mining, and also a little more chill for artefact hunting.
With a ranger, it takes me about an hour to fill a hold with 10 size 1 artefacts using this pattern. But after 95 artefact finds and no UC15, I was ready to give up. By that point, I had not even found one gold cube, and so I figured if, optimistically, one in 100 artefact was a gold cube, then, one out of four gold cubes would drop a UC15 (since there are four gold component types). So, the chances of an artefact being a UC15 maybe one out of four hundred. With this, it could mean on average 40 hours to find one UC15. For a high-rank player, a fairly simple cargo mission with a good haul can easily yield a few million per hours. So instead of artefact hunting for 40 hours, I could make, conservatively, 40 or 80 million credits. Of course, this calculation has a high margin of error, but this gives some order-of-magnitude estimate for the value of the Antiflux.
Being sick of artefact hunting, I switched back to the Vulture and went for some pure mining, and there you go: I immediately stumbled upon artefact 96, which was my gold cube. As luck would have it, it had a UC15 in it too. So in the end I estimate it took me about 10 hours to get one. There may be a little bit of optimization potential in there, but I doubt it’s much.
The UC15 is combined with the Antiflux’ advertised ingredient in a Science Factory at Hyperial. This is the only one in the galaxy that does the job - don’t trust the Custom Producer at Amananth, it doesn’t work.
If you decide to procure an Antiflux, it’s probably best to ask around first. Some of the more seasoned players will likely have some. They also appear occasionally as event prizes or in giveaways, so watch the news and follow the discord to make sure you don’t miss out. And once you got one, well, you’re flying a 8 or 9 digits ship fit, so make sure you don’t crash. I stashed mine because I was missing the squids.