One of the more common beginner professions is mining. There are a couple of reasons for this:
- It requires very little starting ISK and equipment.
- Not a lot of (expensive) skills required to improve throughput.
- It can be done solo and safely in HighSec space.
- It can be done AFK (within limitations).
- The created products (ores) are a high volume trade good, making it easy to sell or process further.
- Can be done in groups or alone, with different boosting options.
As a beginner, you will want to mine ore in HighSec. Yo can change from ore to mining ice or gas at a later stage, gas mining being for the advanced miner that is willing to take larger risks. For now, let's stay with ore mining.
The initial procedure is simple as well: Undock your ship, warp to an ore belt, target an asteroid, activate your mining module, wait until asteroid pops (is empty), target next one, repeat until cargo hold is full, dock. Sell your stuff.
A beginners journey into mining starts with the Venture, the first mining frigate, and this very basic fitting layout:
[High]
Miner I
Miner I
[Med]
Small Shield Booster I
Survey Scanner I
[Low]
Mining Laser Upgrade I
Even from a completely fresh character, you only need these additional skills, trained within a few hours:
Mining Frigate I
Shield Upgrades I
Mining Upgrades I (Requires Mining III)
Well, this little ship can yield about 200m3 of Ore a minute with minimal skills, meaning the ore hold fills up in 25 minutes. Assuming you could mine for an hour straight, you'd earn around 1.6 Million ISK worth of ore and hour.
That is not a lot. To pay for your account, you would have to mine for over 345 hours, meaning 11.5 hours a day, for a PLEX. Not really that good, right? But don't worry, we can change this. What options do we have?
- Increase our skills to get more ore per cycle from the miners.
- Upgrade the mining equipment we have.
- Get into a bigger and better mining ship.
The later two options are dependent on the first one: Better skills.
So, let's assume we want to stay in our Venture for a bit because we are low on money, so we upgrade our equipment and use the skills we have available:
We can upgrade Mining, Mining Upgrades and Mining Frigate to get upgrades to our yield:
- Mining will give us 5% more yield in general per Level and enable T2 Miners.
- Mining Upgrades skilled to IV will enable us to use T2 Mining Laser Upgrades
- Mining Frigate skill will give us 5% for our Venture only.
Additionally, Mining to IV (Together with Science to IV) will enable us to use the Astrogeology skill, with another 5% per Level.
So, let's assume we skill Mining to IV, Mining Upgrades to IV, Mining Frigates to IV, Science to IV and then buy the Astrogelogy Skill and skill that to IV, which takes a couple of days. These skills also come in handy later in your life as you upgrade into bigger ships, so nothing is really lost there. We can then also upgrade our ship a bit:
[High]
Miner II
Miner II
[Med]
Small Shield Booster I
Survey Scanner I
[Low]
Mining Laser Upgrade II
Now, this gives us a yield rate of 377m3 per minute, filling our hold in around 13 minutes. Now we are up to 3.1 Million an hour, 177 hours, or 6 hours a day for a PLEX. That's better, but I assume you have a life, so you don't want to mine 6 hours a day just to fund your account. We need to get "bigger". And this time, we need more skills, and more ISK... because we need a Barge.
The next step in Mining is getting into a Mining Barge. The T1 Barges come in three sizes: The Retriever, The Procurer and the Covetor. To learn the Mining Barge Skill, we need to learn Industry to Level V, so that will take a while. But that's not that bad because we can mine some ores... and we have some decisions to make:
a) Which Mining Barge do we want to fly?
b) Do we want to continue to mine Ores or do we want to start Ice Mining?
The first question, for a beginner, is simple: Your options are a sturdy ship, a ship with a large cargo hold, or a fast miner. You should take the sturdy ship, the Procurer. Although the other ships are more efficient, losing a ship would hurt you a lot in the beginning, so we will focus on a ship that we can fit with a sturdy tank, making it less likely for you to be targeted.
The second question, Ore or Ice is a matter of preference. It does require a few different skills as Ice Mining requires the Ice Harvesting Skill, while Ore mining will focus on the already present skills plus future skills to use dedicated T2 Ore mining equipment.
From here, you can follow through with the following posts: (Links will follow when posts are online).
