New Mining Character Day 10 - Optional Skill Training

Now I enter the period in the mining career that is a bit boring when it comes to blog posts - waiting for the skill training to finish. My Industry V skill is slowly being trained and there isn't much to do except mining and earning ISK. That could be good if you don't have much time to devote to playing EVE during this period anyways. I will try to mix things up a bit though so that I will be able to have something interesting to write about!

There are several career paths that are closely related to mining in my opinion: refining ore into minerals, manufacturing and, to some extent, salvaging. The reason why I lump salvaging in there is because you don't need to have gunnery or missile skills to do it and salvaged material is used for manufacturing. I suppose you could consider all of these to be part of the general Industrialist career path.

Refining the ore into minerals is something that a vast majority of miners do right away. It certainly is easier to haul minerals as opposed to the raw ore, but I'm interested in finding out if it's really worth it to invest skill training time into refining in the beginning stages or not. Of course, the market will always dictate whether it's worth to refine or not, but I will go through the calculations used to find out the value of ore in terms of the minerals it is refined into. I will only use the very basic Refining skill that won't take long to train. 

Manufacturing in-game items uses the minerals that you refine from the ore. That's why many miners go straight from mining raw ore to refining and manufacturing. However, failure to account for market mineral prices may mean that they're operating at a loss, manufacturing a product that is sold for much less ISK than simply selling the ore or minerals would net them. The basic idea behind manufacturing is showcased very well in the introductory in-game tutorials and Career Agents. I won't need to train any additional skills to be able to manufacture and I will only briefly touch on what you should be paying attention to when manufacturing.

Salvaging could be a very profitable endeavor, especially if you will be able to tag behind a group of mission runners and salvage the wrecks that they leave, or perhaps get into the Ninja Salvaging aspect. The salvaged materials can be sold on the market or used in manufacturing of rigs. Salvaging requires Survey III, Mechanics III and Salvaging I at the least. The Salvaging skill itself is rather pricey, but I think it may be still given out by Career Agents or during tutorial missions. I will try to give a brief overview of Salvaging and offer tips on how to find wrecks if you don't have friendly mission runners leaving a path of destruction for you to clean up.

Installing rigs is a good ability to have. Rigs enhance your ship of choice even further. Since Mechanics III skill is required for rigging and salvaging, I might as well train up rigging right away.

So the training queue for today is:

- Mechanics III
- Survey I
- Survey II
- Survey III
- Refining I
- Refining II
- Refining III
- Refining IV

Hopefully training up these skills will give me some useful things to do and write about while waiting for the skill training to complete.

Day 11 - Salvaging

Waiting for Skill Training to Complete