EVE General Discussion

I have seen a lot of debat on the cost of mining and since I am in manufacturing I wante to come up with a formula for determining actual cost.

So I got to thinking of costs and I couldn't come up with anything. Your ship/mining lasers I don't count as you can resell for almost of not all your ISK back and there is no reoccurring charges to use them for mining. At last I came up with travel being your only down fall. So I came up with my formula to determine cost of travel. Now this is great for knowing your cost of travel or what you should pay someone doing the hauling for you.

*note these are just numbers to show how the formula works an not 100% accurate.

A I'm new to mining I only have a venture with 2 miner II's. in 18 minutes I can mine 50,000 veldspar. With a market rate of 14.5 that's 725,000 ISK in 18 min. Since veldspar sells everywhere travel time is short, 3 min. Breaking down 725k into minutes = 40,277. That x 3 is 120,833 ISK in travel time. Subtract your gross by travel cost and that leaves you with 604,167 ISK as net profit every 21 minutes of mining. (I'm sure you can do simple multiplication to find out how much per hr) sp for every veldspar you sell, 12.08 is profit and 2.42 is cost in travel. And there you have your actual cost of mining ore.

As for if someone is hauling for you it's the same travel time so for every 18 min or trip of said 50,000 veldspar, the hauler would get 120,833 ISK.

Hopefully this helps miners figure costs and net profit! Please feel free to leave a comment to tell me what you think?

You forgot the cost of the mining permit!

I haven't seen debat on anything...

As for the cost/earnings of mining, here is the formula I use:

ISK/hr = (% time mining per hour - % travel time per hour) * yield per hour in ISK including taxes + (belt rat bounty per hour - (belt rat bounty per hour * corporate tax rate)) - (chance of gank per hour * (cost of ship + cost of fittings + hull insurance cost - hull insurance payout)) - hauler fees if any

At an absolute bare minimum...

...with a whole lot of unusual assumptions:
- neglecting mineral transport time ("my time is sort of free")
- neglecting the effort and/or attention required to do the actual mining ("my time is really free"),
- neglecting initial investments and mining crystal costs ("I never lose a barge and I recycle my crystals for nearly full return")
- neglecting refining losses ("I have perfect refine and no refine tax")
- neglecting broker fees and sales taxes ("I exchange my minerals directly with my buyers")
- neglecting any mining-permit-like costs ("I don't mine in no stinkin' deep blue 0.0 to pay protection fees")

...you're still left with the NEED to have an active account, otherwise, how the heck could you be mining (and trial account mining doesn't really count).
Basically, that's two things to consider :
(a) time you spend on average mining per 30-day period
and
(b) the market value of 1x PLEX

Therefore, even at a bare minimum with all unusual condition above mentioned met, the "cost" of mining varies from person to person, depending on how much they can mine.

So, given, say, a nice round 100 hours of mining per month (4++ hours of mining per working day, so "half a job", which is a fairly generous average - in reality, the average is probably much lower than that), and rounding down the current cost of one PLEX to just 500 mil, it comes out to :
"mining right now actually costs somewhere around at least 5 mil ISK per hour for most people".

And, again, that's with all of those OTHER not-always-reasonable cost-cutting assumptions in place.


...

If you can't make noticeably more than that per hour, you're better off just selling PLEX for ISK instead.

My view is to run missions on this one while I have a miner stuck in 0.9 mining rocks and check on it when i get a asteroid depleted.

Yuppers. 3 years on and I just rather not worry about "maximizing" and all that. I make all my PI and with 3 hours of Ice Mining, it becomes 68,000,000 an hour when making Fuel Blocks.

Second?! Who said anything about second?!

EVE is my ONLY job.

If you mine your own minerals, you can build modules/ships for free which will allow you to undercut the market sell orders.

The great thing about mining is that you can do both.

So much trolling, so little sense.

My time is not free. Minerals I mine don't cost me any ISK, but it's time I could be using doing something more productive. Or, at least, more useful or enjoyable.
That's why I don't mine. My mining boats just sit there unused. My Hulk sat there for so long, I had to pull the rigs off and sell it on the market. My Orca was bought for mining ops, but spends most of it's time doing haulage.
Other people do the mining, I just set up market orders.