EVE General Discussion

TL:DR: Tank your ship, move your opp, look at the killboard, set up fleet bonuses, mine in mission sites, do some other **** that helps you mine better later.

This was going to be a response in a thread, but it kinda metastasized and now I decided to post it as a thread. The basis of it is basically that it is not really that hard to mine fairly safe during Hulkageddon. There are a few steps you can take to make yourself safer during the few weeks this is going on.

1) Tank your ship. For a hulk, drop a lowslot for a damage control, and if you have good fitting skills, you can have 2 meta small shield extenders and 2 meta invulns. This gives you just over 20,000 EHP, far more than the HP on a standard hulk fit. If your fitting skills are not so great, you may have to jiggle this fit around, but you should still be able to fit the damage control (most important), the 2 invulns, and at least one extender. And keep in mind, you don't have to re-rig your ship, this isn't just a 'bait hulk', its a totally usable and reasonable refit.

2) Look where you are mining. Areas near trade hubs and production hubs are convenient to mine in because of the short distance to good points of manufacture and sale of minerals, however, areas near hubs also attract more gankers. Use resources like Dotlan to find places that are fairly out of the way to mine in. There are plenty of systems with lots of belts and good refining stations that don't have activity, simply because they are on the way to nothing in particular. As an added bonus, these systems tend to have a small local chat, which allows you to keep tabs on everyone coming and going in local, which is not really doable in a system with tons of people. Keeping tabs on local leads us to number three.

3) Examine the killboard. The Hulkageddon prizes are pulled via Eve Kill, which means the vast majority of the kills will be there. By looking at the systems you have chosen to mine in, you can see the kills and losses over a period of time. If you see there are mining barge kills and losses, you may want to reconsider your location. Keep in mind however that there is always a first time, and using dotlan does not make the first two points unnecessary.

4) If you run an alt, consider fleet bonuses. Most miners know about mining ganglinks, and the bonuses that they give. You can also use that to your advantage if you run an alt, and you dont need an orca or a command ship to make it work. Train up Siege Warfare to give your fleet a bonus to shield HP, and Armored Warfare to give a bonus to armor hp. Every little bit helps, and with a hulks native resists and invulns, that little bonus to hp adds up to pretty big numbers on total HP.

5) Consider mining in combat mission sites. Most gankers don't run with combat probes, so if your cozy corner out of the way has a mission agent, even low level missions can have tons of ore in them as background scenery, and once you are done clearing all the rats, you can use the mission site like your own private belt. Just make sure to read MissionReports to make sure there are no timed respawns, and remember missions reset after downtime.

6) Do something else for a bit. If you don't feel like mining safely, there are other things you can do that will make your mining experience better and easier once hulkageddon is over. Do you have good standings with the stations you refine in? Maybe run some missions for them, so when you start mining again you refine with less waste. How about with the stations you sell in? Same deal, better standings helps. How about bookmarks? In the belts and systems you love, do you have book marks like 300k above the belt? It allows you to warp up to the bookmark then down to the next roid if its out of range, saves time on slowboating. Can be worth doing if your roids are all spread out usually. PI setups and/or research agents? Takes some time and effort to set up, but passive income is always good. Basically, anything that you've been putting off, get it done now and you'll be better off later.


To wrap up this wall of text, Eve is a game about interaction and challenges, and the best response to something like hulkageddon is a proactive one. By taking hulkageddon as a challenge, and using some of the suggestions here and in other threads, you can mitigate your risk exponentially, and still have fun playing eve when you want to. Highsec is not perfect safety and nor should it be, treat it like any other type of action in the game, and adapt to changing situations. Just like in pvp you would adapt to a patch suddenly nerfing your race or buffing X ship, miners can change and adapt to threats to their income as they appear.

I'm sure this has all been said before somewhere at some time, but hopefully a bunch of stuff together will help. Feel free to add any tips and tricks people have tried, i'm sure there are tons more.

-Dimi

Impressive, Sir.

Well written and good advice.

Greetings capsuleer Dimitryy,

I would like to congratulate you on being a denizen of New Eden that understands how the universe fits together. You have encapsulated a number of mechanisms for avoiding those who prey on Industrialists.

Let us hope they read and understand this and will put it to practice.

Regards,

Shian Yang

ECM drones are another option as they can potentially cause a solo ganker to flub.

then again expecting miners to put any effort towards staying safe instead of whining about suicide ganking is wishful thinking

Those are great forum suggestions.

Let me know when you log in and try them.

Good read .

Ok, avoid the gankers with your own wit then.

You can be sure that the never undock trick works.

What happened to staying docked and watching the prices climb?

id say stay docked and work on distribution missions just to watch the prices climb even higher tbh. You guys make isk in your little hauly ships and the gankers get to watch their pvp ship prices climb to ungodly prices with the way prices are high enough already.

Love the advice...

I mine through Hulkaggeddon, but in a tanky Hulk well out of the way...

And I can always jump in the mother of all tanked mining ships... The Rokh
:)