Science & Industry

Hi everyone.

I just started playing and I finished the tutorials. I was then sent to more agents that gives different missions (industry, business, combat etc) . I started with Industry and I think I like making things. I am making 2 afterburners right now for the mission and I enjoyed flying around mining the ore, finding a place with space for me to make it.

What next after the missions? I guess I will be spending some days/weeks mining the ore I will need to manufacture. How much money will I need? What skills must I train? Is the venture I got from a mission good for mining? What must I make first that will sell?

Welcome young rookie. Here is some advice. It may not answer the questions you have, but you should hear it regardless.

If you like mining, find a corp with miners and learn from them. They can help you learn stuff so you don't have to learn (as many) things the hard way (which results in some players quitting). Your mining ships will be first the venture, and once you get into barges, the procurer. I would caution you not to overspecialize in mining skills early in your eve career. It is very likely that you will seek to move onto other things as you learn more about the game. You will find that although mining has its benefits, it will not provide you enough minerals to build as much stuff as you may like, should you take an interest in industry. It also provides less income than other activities (mining is dominated by players running multiple accounts). Mining is however a good activity while doing other stuff, and while you mine you will be using your time to learn a lot about the game (talk to people, read guides, look at market prices, look at industry stuff, etc). So I say again, get a venture, get a procurer, but don't go hog-wild on mining skills before re-evaluating your options.

A lot of players enjoy mining, and I have been known to do it on occasion. I don't mean to harp on the topic or put the profession down at all, but a lot of new players fall into the "mining trap" and it causes them to get bored and leave the game, particularly because mining SP is wasted SP for any other activity. I know that I fell into this trap as a new player and it caused me to quit for about a year.

If you like building things, then you should know first and foremost that mining is an entirely separate thing from manufacturing. This game does not provide experience for building things, the way that crafting works in other games. The only reason to build something is because the finished product sells for more than the raw materials. If you want to become a manufacturer, the minerals you can mine will only be a tiny portion of the raw materials you will need. To get raw materials, you need income, this is provided by mining, or by running combat missions, or by any other of the hundreds of activities and means by which you can acquire money or materials. You can even get a loan from other players, or even be gifted starter capital.

If you want to build things you need a few skills. The #1 skill is production efficiency. You should have this at level 4 before bothering to build anything (except as a learning exercise). It needs to be level 5 if you want to avoid losing money on most products. Its an onerous train for a new player. The other skills are mass production and a few trade skills (trade/accounting/broker relations).

Thank you :)

I am not crazy about mining, but I am not dead set against it either. It really is just a means to an end!

Mining and production are very different things. I manufacture multiple billions of isk worth of goods every week, but I haven't sat in a mining barge in years. I find it boring. So I buy my minerals from people who like to mine. Besides, I could mine all week with a fleet of miners and still not get all the minerals I need for my own production.

If you want to be a producer, you need to train Material Efficiency, Industry, and Mass Production. Then you need a lot of trade skills: Accounting, Broker Relations, Retail... I forget what the ones are called that allow you to change your buy and sell orders from a distance. Watch the market. See what sells in large quantities. Notice the locations where players buy things.

You don't need a large wallet to get going. My advice is to start with ammunition. Players will always need bullets. Figure out which types of ammunition are used by the mission runners in your region. Buy a couple pre-researched blueprints from contracts. Build your ammunition and sell it in the mission hub.

I do NOT recommend building ships at the beginning. The blueprints are expensive compared to ammunition, modules, and rigs. Also, ships are the sexy thing that everybody wants to make. So there is a lot of competition in the market, and therefore margins are low.

Diversify. Use the market to determine what players need and deliver it to them. Buy a couple cheap blueprints and fly out to low sec to research them. (Learn now to fly safely, but don't haul more than you can afford to lose.)

I won't tell you specifically what you should build, though. This entire game is PVP, and that includes the marketplace. If you start building the same things I am making, then you will become my competition and my profits will be decreased.

If mining isnt neccesary then I dont really want to do it. From googling and reading some guides I just got the impression that mining is one of the easier ways to make money in the beginning. My plan was to use mining as a way to get money then move into other avenues, like production. And if I didnt it for a while and I didnt enjoy it I would use the money to invest into my next learning experience.

PVP activities is most definitely one of the things I want to do, but I understand that it takes lots of money and time to learn to do it properly. I just dont have the money to do it right now if I compare the markets to battleclinic.

So for now I will train to use cruisers (can you recommend a good one?) and while I do that I will mine for a little bit of money.

Thank you :)

Combat missions have more solo isk potential than mining and will be building PvP skill sets. A lot of players head over to the Sisters of Eve arc after the tutorials. It will give you some more training, yields some decent beginner isk, and will give a nice faction standing boost.

Mining is easy isk if you are doing something else on your computer at the same time. Just don't go down the Exhumer/T2 crystal path and it won't require much skill training. You might also find an industry corp that can teach you about manufacturing and provide POS slots (ask if they fight wardecs or go into hiding).

Understanding the market is a requirement for manufacturing because a huge percentage of items can not be manufactured profitably.

For running SoE arc and level 3 missions most cruisers will do the job. generally missiles do a good job with missions but the training for them is wasted for other aspects of the game (incursions and pvp tend to avoid missile use for various reasons)
A good missile cruiser is the caracal (use heavy missiles for missions as you want the range to hit all the rats for PVP people use HAM (dps) or rapid lights (applies damage well to small ships).
If you want a cruiser platform that will easily cross over to pvp then thorax and vexor are both nice ships (rail for missions blasters or rail for pvp) The drone skills will always be useful whatever you fly eventually as will the gunnery skills. These also will upgrade to battlecruisers very nicely (brutix and myrmidon both have armour repair bonuses which helps in missions.)
Pvp is as expensive as you make it.
pretty much every fleet needs tackle (fast frigs that can catch opposing ships and stop them warping off /shut down their microwarp drive /uses webs to slow them) and many t1 frigs are fine for this purpose.
later you can upgrade to interceptors/ assualt frigs and electronic attack frigs that are also cheap.
My alliance is a npc null sec pvp group and we use T2 frigs, faction cruisers, t1 battlecruisers as our main doctrines they are all fairly cheap and easy to replace. i make about 700 mill a week from manufacturing and my losses are nowhere close to that scale.
Do not think you need expensive ships to pvp. You do need people that can help you with fits and tactics but the expensive stuff is just a magnet for everyone in the area to shoot at.
Also avoid battleships for a while even for missions until you can T2 fit it and have decent support skills (capacitor, fitting, nav, gunnery , drone skills).

You're right that mining is probably the easiest, but the ISK doesn't add up very fast. I used to think that even specialized miners didn't make enough to make it worth it, but then I realized that where mining shines, is when you AREN'T playing. You can mine while watching TV, mine while reading a book, some people even mine at work, or, especially for a new player, mining while reading websites about EVE (very important!!!). It doesn't take long to develop the skill to see your screen in your periphery if you're reading a book or watching TV, or if you have your sound on it gives you the friendly "the asteroid is depleted." It doesn't take long at all to get a mining barge at maybe level 3- the only real skill investment is that you you'll do way better if you train up refining, and it will help a lot if you have better standing at whatever station you haul your ore to.

You can make tons of ISK manufacturing, but it takes a fair bit of skill investment (little of which is useful at all in the rest of the game) and quite a bit of time to get set up. If you go down that road it leads to riches, but then once you decide to do something with your money (i.e. get blown up) you won't have any of the skills you need and you'll have to train everything up. To top that off, although you can do a little manufacturing on the side, a proper operation almost chains your character to a certain area. So it's best done on a dedicated alt. Whether it's something you want do to down the road, or you want to start another account today and get started, it's up to you. If you do, definitely find a program called "ISK Per Hour," and learn how to use it. If you search the forums there's a link to download it somewhere on here. If you're just starting out with not a lot of money you want to focus more on your return on your investment, for example turning 1 million into 5 million is more important since you don't have the capital for the big stuff ("junk" rigs like turret rigs, shield resist rigs, the scanning one, the CPU one, etc. are good for this although you won't get rich off them you don't need to research them though as the savings isn't worth it). Once you get rolling you start focusing more on the most ISK for the least work- for example you'd rather make a mere 5% turning your 20 billion into 21 billion if it's the same work as the previous scenario, even though your percentages are terrible you make more money.

You can make a lot of ISK while fighting if you get into faction warfare, and you don't need expensive ships to do it. It will help a lot if you can get at least some T2 mods in there though. I don't know if you've reset your skill traits (or if you even know about that) but if you want to get into that as fast as you can here's an idea. First train Electronics and Engineering to V (I think they renamed them...). Then get anything else useful other than ships, gunnery, missiles, drones, and navigation to at least III- more if it's something vital (probably hull upgrades for armor ships, shield skills for shield ships). Take a look and see if there's any T2 mods you might need/want that requires more, for instance I think you need engineering upgrades IV for the... I don't know what it's called, the low slot thing that gives you more powergrid. MPAC (or MAPC?) is the acronym I think. Once you think you've got enough memory/intelligence skills for now, switch your skill traits to perception and willpower and start training heavy into gunnery and spaceship command. You can switch your traits once a year; you start with one switch as well as 2 bonus newbie switches, although it's a good idea to be stingy with those bonus switches. Generally, unless it's a trading character, I alternate between memory/intelligence and perception/willpower. Some skill sets, like drones and navigation, have one of each so just do them whenever (although I don't think it's worth it to run a trait set just for them I'm sure there's many that disagree with that though). It's not instant nor perfect, but it will get you flying real competitively fit ships as fast as possible. Especially if you focus on frigs you can have a T2 fit frigate, or even any frigate, in relatively short order. While all this is training you can do whatever you want, but here's what I'd recommend. 1) Read about Eve. You know about Battleclinic; that's awesome. Thankfully there's lots of great online resources like that since it's a very complicated game, and the more you know the better you'll be. You can combo this with some mining while you read if you want a few extra bucks. I wouldn't just sit there and watch your strip miners or you'll go insane, but just mine while you're reading (or doing anything else outside the game if you want). 2) If you want to do something in the game run missions. They get boring and repetitive after awhile, but if you're new they're not so bad. You'll learn a bit as well as make some ISK- probably more per hour than you would mining. If you hate it you can quit, but I'd recommend at least trying it as you'll maybe learn a few basic things from them. 3) Especially if you want to get into faction warfare anyway, you can be one of those douche bags that flies a stab fitted frig and just do plexes. Use your d-scan and run away from everything. For that matter, I don't even really know why stabs are such a big deal as you don't really even need them- just d-scan constantly and run if you see someone coming. It's boring and kinda gay, and everyone will hate you, but you'll potentially get lots of ISK. 4) Even as a new player you can be fairly useful in groups, whether you're in faction warfare or null sec or whatever. Be the suicide warp jamming guy. In 1v1 situations if really helps to at least have decent skills, but in a fleet it doesn't matter AS much so you can still be the one that makes the difference. Good luck!!!

My style at the beginning was to pave my own road, and I didn't really feel the need to learn directly from others until I started to pvp. One thing I've found is that creativity > cookie cutters, particularly in high-sec. If you want a taste at production, skip small on a medium scale and start medium on a small scale. Get your hourly income sorted (mining or missioning) and get a high volume medium rig bpo from contracts. You'll need to train some skills, but within a couple weeks you'll know if you have acquired a taste toward building things. If you do, then use your imagination and don't listen to anyone. I have a user base beta testing a production application which at the moment is beyond you, but the point is I'm inspired by their creativity. Myself, I make far more logged out than I ever did looting victims or grinding isk/hr like a sucker.

Yes, as long as you remember to have fun doing it.
Many plan a bit too much, start to treat it like a job and burn out.


In general terms.
L1 missions are for a frig or dessie.
L2 missions are for a cruiser.
L3 missions are for a battlecruiser or T2/T3 cruiser.

Running missions for standings (which is common for indies/traders) often maxes out running L3 missions in a T3 cruiser, since it tends to provide the fastest standings gain per hour wasted not doing indy stuff ;)

And for the question on who to run missions for you should first read up and decide which faction and NPC corp you want to be BFF with (and why), then find the fastest way to make them your friends.

Remember to watch out for losing too much standings against other empire factions, it's inconvenient for a trader to be labelled 'kill on sight' while just passing through a system for a shopping trip.