New Mining Character Day 16 - The Retriever

The time has come to upgrade the mining cruiser to a dedicated mining barge. All of the skills have been trained and more than enough ISK has been earned. From this point forward, the only major step left is to train for the mining end game: The Hulk. The Retriever will provide a solid base whether you want to advance further in mining or just rely on casual mining for passive ISK grinding.

New Mining Character Day 15 - Low Sec Mining

Having some disposable income, I decided to plunge into what some new miners will likely try to do and, also likely, get destroyed while doing it: low sec mining. The allure of higher profits and mining some exotic ore types is rather strong. Even when taking all sorts of precautions, it's still very easy to lose your ship, but it definitely adds a lot of excitement to something that otherwise may be rather tedious. Here's a few tips on making sure you survive for as long as possible.

New Mining Character Day 14 - Refining vs Raw Ore

Today I decided to finally figure out when it becomes more profitable to sell refined minerals rather than raw ore. Having only Refining IV and no standings with the corporation that owns the station (meaning 5.00% tax on refining), I set out to refine Veldspar and Pyroxeres ore as examples and go through the calculations to determine which one gives more profit according to current market conditions.

New Mining Character Day 11 - Salvaging

The basic skills necessary for salvaging were the fastest to train up. Salvaging in a nut-shell is relatively light on skill intensity. It's a good idea to train up the Salvaging skill as much as possible so that it'll take less cycles to salvage a wreck. Having good skills to boost your capacitor capacity and recharge rate is also recommended as salvagers eat up a lot of cap. I did not train any additional skills support skills though.

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!

New Mining Character Day 9 - Better Mining Yield and Ore Prices

With Astrogeology skill trained to level IV, just two mining cycles is now almost enough to fill the Osprey's cargohold (with cargo expanders). The skill training is slowly progressing, now with less than 5 days remaining till being able to fly the Retriever (considering direct training). Seems now the only options are to chill and mine or to try out some other things in EVE.

New Mining Character Day 8 - Crossroads and Badger Mark II

At this point in the game, if you're new, you may want to consider if you'd like to go forward with mining. You already have rather decent mining skills and ship. It'll be able to provide you with steady income to fall back on, while you explore other aspects of EVE, and you can always come back to training mining skills and continue on down this path later. If you're still very interested in mining, then let's carry on!

New Mining Character Day 7 - Upgrading the Osprey

Wasting no time, I upgraded the Osprey right way. I had enough ISK to get the best equipment for it and enough back-up ISK in case I somehow manage to lose the ship. Judging by the amount of ISK I was getting per haul, I could see that splurging on the best equipment would quickly be recovered.

New Mining Character Day 6 - Flying the Osprey

And here we go. Skill training is complete, and now I am able to fly the Osprey. The income from mining is going to increase quite a bit. The Osprey sports a large cargo hold (plus 3 low slots for Expanded Cargohold modules) and is able to fit 3 mining lasers. With all the skills trained up, the Osprey will easily approach, only slightly falling short of the mining yield of the Retriever.

New Mining Character Day 5 - Mining Missions

There is a special subset of mission agents of various NPC corporation that offer mining missions. I have decided to mix it up and compare mining missions to just plain old mining. Doing missions is useful if you're manufacturing or refining as increased standings with a corporation will decrease the cost of doing those things at the corporation's stations.

New Mining Character Day 4 - Ore Hauling

Very quickly I hit the wall when it comes to getting more profit from using a Bantam. Warping back and forth between the station and the asteroid belt started getting too repetitive and it felt like all of that time spent in transit was cutting into the bottom line. So I decided to experiment with using an Industrial ship that I got as the reward for the final Industry Career Agent mission.

New Mining Character Day 3 - Slight Equipment Upgrade and Relocation

Having completed the Industrial Career Agent missions, this day was all about simple and pure mining. To increase the income, I moved away from the Career Agents' system but it was still a 0.7 sec system, meaning the belt rats were still a bother to handle at times. Additionally, the expanded cargohold modules were upgraded in order to increase the cargo space.

New Mining Character Day 2 - Kernite Asteroids in Caldari High-Sec

Continuing on with the Industry Career Agent missions, I stumbled upon a very lucrative find in one of the mission deadspaces. While completing mission 9 of the tutorial (Making Mountains of Molehills), I noticed that there were lots of Kernite asteroids around. Even though you don't ordinarily find Kernite in Caldari high-sec space, this particular mission provided you with some. 

New Mining Character Day 1 - Starting Skills and Earning ISK

Right after setting up the overview and remapping the neural attributes, it was time to queue up the first skills. Additionally, since new characters start off with only 5000ISK in the wallet, I needed to earn some ISK in order to buy skillbooks. I also took advantage of the tutorial missions given by the Industrial Career Agent. The tutorial missions offered by the Career Agents is a great source of revenue and lets you try out different career paths available in EVE.

Setting Up the Overview for High-Sec Mining

At times new characters do not have the overview correctly set up for mining. Certain asteroid types might not be visible or the overview can be cluttered with all of the asteroids, cargo containers, nearby ships, planets, etc. Here's one way that you can set up your overview for more efficient organization of information.

New Mining Character - Neural Remap and Attributes

The first step to a speedy skill training plan is to properly set up your character's attributes. All new characters receive 2 free neural remaps. It may be a good idea to hold off remapping the attributes right away if you're not sure what you would like to specialize at but if you have a general sense of direction, then there's no need to waste time.

New Mining Character

After some consideration, I have decided to create a brand new character dedicated to mining asteroids. The basic goal of this little experiment/tutorial is to go through all of the steps that a new player would ideally encounter in trying to create a mining character. This should provide a guide on what to train and how to maximize income from mining, especially in the initial steps where every little bit of ISK or training time counts.

This will be a very streamlined character, dedicated solely to mining and training the skills required to fly the Retriever. I will be outlining all of the necessary skills and the order in which I have trained them along with any gameplay issues or obstacles I encountered along the way. All of the ISK income will be derived only from mining or mining missions (plus the initial Industry Career Agent missions).