Science & Industry

I was doing some mining last night and it's my observation that even if a roid depletes near the start of a strip miner cycle, it takes until the end of the cycle for the strip miner to shut off but it only pulls in a small amount of ore. In terms of time efficiency that's not great.

Is there a way to avoid this or is this something that no one is really that bothered about?

theres so little ISK in avoiding this problem that its not even worth thinking about.

there are so many other lucrative ways of going about making ISK if thats what your after, then mining is definitely the wrong direction.

you should try Merchanting!

Totally buffed 10 months ago. totally bot free since the beginning of 2012

If you mine in the same area you'll get to know the average daily spawn cycles of the belts. With that and a survey scanner you can dramatically cut down the amount of wasted cycles.

For example in the primary system I mine in I know on average most roids will last about 2.5 cycles. So on the 3rd cycle I just do a 1/2 cycle. In fact 1/2 cycles every 2 - 3 cycles will cut down on the time lost.

This is my process.

1) warp to belt bookmark
2) survey scan (F4)
3) close all roid types I'm not mining
4) sort by amount (lowest). This causes the roids with the least amount of material to be displayed at top.
5) target 5 roids (6th is whatever drones are mining).
a. cycle one dump
b. cycle two dump
c. F1, F2, F3, F4. (strip 1, strip 2, strip 3, survey). If a roid dies, target a new one, if not continue cycles. survey will display how much is left and you can do another 1/2 cycle based on amounts.
6) repeat process.

By using F1 - F4 it'st faster to mash all of these and re-mash as needed.

I do this with 4 miners + orca, with each miner on a different roid type. On average doing this I'm able to save 1/2 a cycle every 3 cycles. This comes out to about 5 additional cycles per hour, per miner, or a total of 20 additional cycles per hour, nearly the amount of material / hour that I would get from adding an additional miner.

I have some alpha grade (bugs/divide by zeros still in the program) made in Visual Basic that does this. There are also other programs like eve online mining timer, evetimer, that one by leo, etc etc.. and functionality varies.

You can also make it yourself with an Excel Spreadsheet along with a separate freeware timer/stopwatch program (I used to do this).

Others will tell you its not worth short cycling your asteroids, well if it is your chosen activity in EvE, and you want to be better at it then these kinds of programs does help increase your efficiency in mining. Personally with my poorly written software, I have learned how to avoid 'bad' asteroid amounts which can wear down your mining crystal faster. My theoretical haul/time has increased by almost 1/3, increasing my income by nearly the same (eg from 633,333 ISK now I make 999,999 ISK) which is significant.

Anyway.. if you're interested in my program (which isn't publicly available yet) drop me an evemail or convo ingame and i'll try to help you get it.