The very first unexpected thing I encountered after undocking is being unable to find asteroids in any asteroid belt of the starting system. The asteroid belts have been completely mined out. Usually, the asteroids will reappear after the server downtime, but I needed ISK right away in order to buy the Drones skillbook. Finally, two jumps away from the starting system, I found asteroids belts that still had some ore that could be mined. Apparently Lonetrek is quite a popular region.
I selected the most profitable ore, based on the local market, and started mining it. You have to keep in mind that it's not just a simple issue of mining the ore that is being bought at the highest price. You also have to consider the fact that different types of ore take up different volumes based on one unit of the ore. So you have to get some math involved to figure out the most profitable ore per cubic meter (m3) to maximize your profits. At this point, maximizing the profits is not very important, but once we start mining large amounts of ore, 1ISK price difference may compound to hundreds of thousands of ISK in lost profit. But more on determining the most profitable ore later.
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| Ibis Mining Asteroids |
After doing a few hauls, I set off to the home system of my character's school's Career Agents. You can find your particular Career Agents by selecting Help (or pressing F12), and then "Show Career Agents". Usually their home system is about 3 jumps away from your starting system.
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| EVE Help Window and Setting Destination to Career Agents |
I have opted to follow through only the Industry Career Agent missions. If you are new to EVE, it is a good idea to try them all out. The missions will give you an idea of different things you can do in EVE and they also provide very good income for being so simple and easy to complete. However, keep in mind that you can only do the missions from each agent once.
Another reason why I chose to complete the Industry Career Agent tutorial is that the very first few missions reward you with Bantam along with Miner I and Expanded Cargohold I modules to get you going with mining. Even if you don't complete the whole set of missions (10 in total), just completing roughly half of the missions through will set you up for mining practically for free (not to mention reward you with very decent ISK). For the full list of rewards granted by the Industry Career Agent, click here.
Finally, the skills that I set up for training on the first day are as follows:
- Mining III (will increase mining laser yield)
- Drones I (needed for later use with Bantam and Osprey)
- Industry I (one of the requirements of one Industry Career Agent mission)
- Mining IV
- Caldari Frigate III (improving the frigate stats such as bonus mining laser yield)
Drones and Industry skills had to be purchased, but they should be trained as soon as possible.
Overall, by the end of just a few hours, I was flying one of the best (if not THE best) mining frigates in the game, fitted with basic equipment needed for mining. The cashflow was roughly 45000ISK per each haul (356.89 m3) that took about 3 minutes to fill up.