It has been a while since I participated in an Ingress event. I’ve just been too busy with other things. I have been doing minimal daily ingress, mostly just enough to keep some of my streaks alive.

Today, I was supposed to go to a poetry picnic, but it got cancelled at the last minute, so I went to “Mission Day” in New Haven. People who play Ingress gathered on the Ingress Green at 11 am to start their mission day. They came in from Maine and New York City. Many wore their team colors, blue or green, carried flags, and had t-shirts, buttons, or other symbols of their participation.

In Ingress, you go from portal to portal, capturing the portal if the other team has it, hacking to portal to get more gear from it, and creating links, which joined together create fields. There are also missions where you interact with a group of different portals. Then there are groups of missions that some people participate in.

In Ingress, you get various badges for your participation. Some of the badges are for participating in large Ingress events. Others are for accomplishing various tasks, and you get different levels of badges depending on how many times you’ve completed the task. Having played for a long time, it is harder and harder to get new badges. Partly, these days, I am looking at hypothetical badges for multiples of the highest level. For example, the highest level recharger badge is for recharging 25 million XM. I am currently at 266 million. I celebrated getting to 10 times the top recharger badge and figure the next celebration will be at 12 times the top recharger badge.

Likewise the top Guardian badge is for holding a portal for 150 consecutive days. My record is 365 consecutive days, and my current oldest portal I’ve held for 141 days. For consecutive days hacking, the top badge is for 360 consecutive days. I’m currently at 471.

For Glyph hack points, the top badge is 50,000 points. I’m up to 90,000 points and approaching two times the top badge. For total hacks, I’m about 12,000 hack short of the second highest badge, having added 213 hacks today.

One badge that I haven’t done much with is the one for participating in missions. I completed 13 missions today, getting me the silver badge, but still leaving me many missions to go. For the distance walked badge, I’m current at 2,731 kilometers, having walked 13 kilometers today. That is a little bit beyond the 2,500 kilometers for the top walking badge, but a long way from the next multiple of that.

Another badge I am approaching and will hopefully get sometime this year is for the total number of portals captured. I’m currently at 14,610, which is 390 away from the second highest badge. Mission day was a good day for capturing portals. I capture 103 portals today. 48 of these portals were ones that I had not captured in the past, pushing me over 2,000 unique portals, but I have to hit 5,000 to get the next badge. Likewise, I visited 66 portals I hadn’t visited in the past, although I’m still a long way from the next badge for total portals visited.

I did deploy 549 resonators, pushing my total over 121,000 resonators deployed, but I still have a long way to go.

All in all, it was a good day, made all the better by running into various Ingress friends throughout the day.