Science & Industry

Hey all,

Normally you'd never find me in this forum (I'm not too terribly interested in where my ships come from, only in using them to blow things up ), but my girlfriend recently began playing afterr watching me for a whie. She wanted to do something different from what I was doing, so she decided to try mining and building, with a side of exploration. I naturally did quite a bit of research so I could help her out, and what I came up with was essentially "lol noob u can't do that till u have 13 years of skills and 20 billion isk, and mining sucks, do missions instead", over and over again, from multiple industry players, blogs, and forum posts. I refuse to believe the game is THAT broken, but maybe I'm wrong. In short, my question is this: Is mining and building viable for a player just starting out? Or is it as impossible as they say? Thank you in advance for your replies.

Heh. I think her train of thought was "I need money to build, and I don't want to do missions, so I'll have to mine and explore." and I absolutely get the research thing. I'm actually frantically sifting through various websites trying to find some sort of profit calculator for manufacturing so I can give her the tools to succeed. What sort of startup capital would be recommended for a new manufacturing character (in other words, how much ISK do I have to give her )?

All of these vets have like 6 accounts, dedicated to R&I, even if they don't tell you. Even...just mining. If you get 6 accounts, yes it is viable, otherwise it is less viable but still viable considering this is a game and who cares.

Tell her to get PE to level 4 (shouldn't take too long) and focus on building ammo. Incidentally, while minerals you mine are not free, you can perfectly mine the minerals to build ammo with. Cos, ya know, factories don't require actual maintenance once started and you have to actually play too :). Ammo @ PE 4 is reasonably profitable. More so if you're not stuck buying minerals from other people's sell orders, as you cut out the market tax, which puts a fair dent into your profits without market skills. Just make sure to not throw her 50 million because that takes all the fun out of discovering industry for yourself.

Then, while building ammo, she'll find she wants more factory slots, for which she needs more researched blueprints as well as more materials to build and a bigger ship to haul more goods to and from markets. This is when she'll automatically discover Contracts, BPCs, Buy orders, Sell orders, regional markets etc. etc. etc.

Yes, to be a competitive produces on the t2/t3/capital market you need between a few hundred million and a few billion as upfront investment. And no, the t1 market isn't very profitable but it's a good place to start (did I mention ammo yet?). And no, no spreadsheet is going to tell you "make item xyz" and make lots of money, because if there was, everyone would be building it and profits would quickly fall.

Eve is a sandbox game. Play it as such. 99% of the fun in Eve is discovering how stuff works and figuring out the best way to use said stuff to your advantage. I started Eve in 2004, when there was no tech II, no PoSes, no Drone Regions, no capital ships, no Eve Wiki and no Jita (well the system existed...) Neither were there any sort of guides. You had to -literally- figure EVERYHING for yourself. It was the most fun I ever had in a game.

Whoever said you need 6 sccounts and 10 years of skillpoints on each and 20B isk to do industry is wrong.

I started my industry carreer as a miner, skilling up for the hulk, because I figured mining is a nice and easy form of getting money.
And it is, it's just not that profitable.
Hence I supplemented my income with exploration in high sec.

This got me a little starting capital, and I figured I'd try industry, as pew pew isn't something I am very fond of doing.

I skilled up my Production Efficiency skill to 4, and began making Scourge Missiles with the minerals I mined, then expanded into other little things. Soon my mineral requirements were getting far beyond what I could mine, and I fonud mining to be very boring, so was doing it less and less.

So I added some marketting skills, and began using buy orders like I was doing before for ore, using my refining skill to refine the ore and make profit, but instead of selling the minerals, I used them to manufacture things.

My manufacturing expanded, I began making more and more things, aquired soem nice new shiny BPO's, began making BCs and other nasty toys. Thus increasing yet again, my demand for minerals.

So in came the marketting skills again, now for buy orders for minerals as well. I also needed more orders because my repetoire of products was expanding and I didn't have enough orders to sell them all in my local hub.

Meanwhile, PE went to 5, as this is quite a requirement if you're serious about industry.

Then I started looking at T2 production and invention, I looked at my local market, saw there was a nice bare ground of stuff I could sell, and began getting the science skills for this.

Then I found that I needed more manufacturing slots because otherwise, production would be slowing down due to the expanded repetoire, so mass production went to 5, and advanced mass production came in.

Science skills continued to grow, adding more items to my lists of things I could invent and build. And my capital as well as my corp's capital both swelled.

As I wasn't doing any mining anymore except on corp mining ops to fuel our POS, all my minerals came from the market.
THis required more time spent hauling things, and soon this started to get out of hand with the amounts I needed to moe.
Hence I got myself an orca, and soon after, a freighter.

This gave me more time between hauling bauts again, to do other things. So I went exploring again, this time in low sec.
I discovered the abundance of Ladar sites, and after a bit of research found them to be most profitable when combined with the proper skills ( which I had aquired at said ladars ), A POS, and my already impressive amount of industry skills.

Exploration will always be 'hit and miss', but if you do it often, there's some consistency in it. Usually an evening scanning nets me at least 1 gas site worth doing, and a few radars.(I don't do combat sites )

As it stands now, I've gotten into Capital construction, pooling resources together with some corpies, we aquired some BPO's, researched them and have begun our path on building bigger and bigger things.

All this I've done with a single toon, on a single account and I'm only 18 months old ( or around that time anyway.. hmm 18 months.... )
Yes, I have a 2nd account, with 2 toons on it. one with some marketting skills who I've put in Jita, and one who has recently finished training up for a Jump Freighter, which is making life MUCH easier for me, as now I can easily obtain things I need in empire, or export goods to empire.

Another good moneymaker I have is my PI which I do in nullsec, using a covert transport, manufacturing P1s which are processed on a 2nd toon into P2s, which I send off to Jita.
This earns me about 400-500M a month as well.

Honestly, if your girlfriends wants to play eve and enjoys it, just let her play.
Who cares about how much money you earn if you have fun.

Just dont start bullshitting about those precious isk per hour ratio and you'll be fine.

I'd say it's perfectly viable. Just advice her to start small and expand (ammo is indeed a good choice if we're talking industry, Planetary Interaction might also prove interesting).

The ISK Guide has a ton of information on both mining and manufacturing; make sure to check it out.

As with anything in eve, it takes time to get good at mining and manufacturing. Pvp has a bit less of a curve that is very misleading. I would suggest letting your GF's character train up for a month or two and let her play on your tune so that she doesn't get bored.

is it viable yes. just make sure it is something that interests you and that it would be something you enjoy doing. start with ammo, rigs, and some PI.

tips:
buy a researched ammo bpo (it does not need to be 1000me. 15me will be good enough for you)
get production efficiency to lvl5
begin manufacturing.

Hello all! I'm said girlfriend. Thank you very much for taking time to help me with this and for all of your advice. And thank you Spitfire for your response. It's cool to see devs take time to respond to posts like this.