Saturday, I went to Boston with a bunch of friends who play Ingress, an augmented reality game, somewhere between geocaching and capture the flag. It was a special event which drew people from across New England. This post is going to get into the underlying details about the event. If you don’t play Ingress, parts of it might not make a lot of sense.

In Ingress, you can carry two thousand items in your inventory. These can be bursters and ultra strikes, for blowing up your opponents portals, resonators and shields to put on portals you have captured, or a bunch of other items. Some items, like bursters, ultra strikes, resonators, and power cubes, come in strengths of Level 1 to Level 8. Other items, like shields, can be common, rare, very rare, or have some special capabilities.

Prior to the event, everyone tried to reach capacity in their items, with the right mix of offensive and defensive items, as high powered as possible. Before I left, I recorded what I had in my inventory. During the afternoon, I used a lot of my inventory, and at the after party and on my way home, I started replenishing my inventory. Here are some general details of what I used and what I had left over.

During the event, different people take on different roles, that may be more offense of more defense. I ended up starting off doing light offense and soon moved into pretty full time heavy defense. This determined what I used. I did find opportunities to play a little offense during brief periods of defensive play.

For resonators, I used about 275 Level 8 Resonators, 175 Level 7 Resonators, and 75 lower powered resonators. I ran out of lower level resonators first. I also farmed new resonators throughout the day. At the end of the day, I deployed just shy of 900 resonators and captured over 250 portals I am now less than 8,000 resonators deployed from getting my next badge for resonators deployed and less than 4,000 captures away from getting my next badge for captures.

I did not end up using many shields, deploying less than 30, and coming back with many of my very rare shields.

In terms of weapons, I ended up using about 275 Level 8 Bursters. I started with a lot of Level 8 Bursters, and came back with quite a few. On top of this I used over 100 Level 7 and Level 8 ultra strikes, which was all that I had. Ultra strikes are harder to get and I always try to get as many as I can for events like this. In terms of my own statistics, I destroyed over 175 resonators and neutralized over fifty portals. However, I’m not close to getting new badges in this area.

I also recycled a lot of portal keys, and got a bunch of new keys. Ultimately, I ended up with about 75 more keys than when I started. I visited nearly 150 new portals, and captured about 50 of those. I’m still a long way from getting badges in this area.

My role for the day didn’t involve as much walking as for others, and I only walked 14 kilometers, or about eight and a half miles. I try to walk a couple of kilometers each day playing Ingress, so this gave me about a week’s worth of Ingress walking. However, at my current rate, it will still be half a year before I get my next Ingress walking badge.

I also brought a lot of power cubes, but ended up using very few of them, so at the end of the day, while waiting for one thing or another, I used power cubes to recharge various portals, not something one normally does during an event like this. I ended up recharging around a million XM and using a little over a hundred power cubes, and I still have a bunch left over.

Now, I’m busy building my inventory back up. That will take a little while. All in all, it was a good day.