Ninja Salvaging Character - The Essentials

To get the ball rolling on ninja salvaging, you'll need to bring your skills up to speed in certain areas. Obviously, you'll need to train from scratch if you're a brand new or relative new character. Maximizing the Salvaging skill is a must and you have to have very good Astrometrics-related skills to be able to scan down ships faster. Additionally, to increase your survivability, you need very good navigation (speed, agility) and solid damage-tanking skills.

That's not a list of things to be able to train quickly. Getting the most optimal skill levels will take some time. In the meantime, it's still possible to successfully get some stealthy salvaging going. Firstly, though, we'll need to get some income going and purchase necessary skill books.

Going through the Exploration career agent missions will provide you with roughly 500k ISK and the Astrometrics skill book. Having earned that, I went ahead and purchased several navigation skills. Since microwarp drives are disabled inside deadspace mission sites, you have to invest heavily in afterburner-related skill training. Evasive Maneuvering, Fuel Conservation, Acceleration Control, Afterburner are all good skills to train up.

You also have to get Survey and Mechanic skills up to level 3 so that you can train the Salvaging skill. Running the salvagers and the afterburner in the mission sites will quickly deplete the capacitor, so improving your Engineering skills is also a must, particularly Energy Management and Energy Systems Operation. 

Purchasing the Salvaging skill book set me back quite a bit in terms of ISK. Good thing that the Exploration career agent missions also provide you with a free frigate. In my case it was the Probe - Minmatar exploration frigate. I outfitted that frigate with just a barebones fit of two salvagers and an afterburner. After making my way to a system with an Ice Belt, I had no problem finding wrecks to salvage. Ice Belts are always frequented by a lot of ice miners who leave tons of wrecks floating around.

Salvaging a wreck

The list of skills that I trained in order so far is:

Astrometrics 1
Astrometrics 2
Minmatar Frigate 3
Survey 1
Survey 2
Astrometrics 3
Survey 3
Mechanics 3
Salvaging 1
Acceleration Control 1
Afterburner 1
Evasive Maneuvering 1
Afterburner 2
Fuel Conservation 1

Just slowly getting the skills up to par to be able to drop in on some mission runners unannounced. While the necessary skills are being trained, I will be spending time earning ISK by going through asteroid belts and mission beacons (more on that later) salvaging wrecks and swiping some loot if an opportunity arises.