EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello to all the fresh pilots of new eden!
I'm Verdis, your guide to a simple way to make isk with a scan frigate and minimal risk.

What you will need:
Any scanning frig (magnate, probe, heron, imicus)
Expanded probe launcher
Combat probes
2 gravity capacitor upgrade rigs (optional, but it helps)
Free cargo space
Microwarpdrive

What you do:
Scoop abandoned drones in mission systems. A set of T2 light drones sell for around 500k each, so if you scoop 1 flight, that's an easy 2.5 million isk for very little effort. So break out the scanner, let's get some free money!

How you do it:
Open the star map, and look for systems with lots of NPC kills near your home. Its a setting under filters you check and reload the map. Find a good high sec system and head there.

Once in system, warp to the sun or an out of the way spot, deploy probes and open the filter dropdown list, then select probes and drones.

Open the scanning map and do a wide range scan of the system. Then calm down at the resulting list. It'll be huge. Look for hits away from planets and moons. Those locations will be anomalies and complexes. You want missions that people have left drones in, and those are usually out in space away from planets.

Pull your probes to tight scan and focus on your best hits. When you get a warpable hit, switch the filter to ships. If there is a ship there, he's using them and you can't scoop it. Make a bookmark to check later, and move on to the next red ball.

If you find one with no ship, engage warp, fly there, and get close to the drones. Right click each one and select scoop to cargobay/dronebay depending on where you have room. If you got lucky, you might be sitting on 5 T2 or faction sentry drones. Enjoy the 15 mil you just made!

A word on values. If you scan enough to see type of drone, and its T1, just ignore the hits for them. They aren't worth the time. Any faction or T2 is though. Make those top priority, and scoop til you can't hold any more! I have done this and made more off of it than I have missioning when I was low sp. Even with 36mil sp and wormhole grade scanning skills, I still do it when I'm looking for quiet relaxing profits.

Don't hesitate to mail me in game if you want help or just to say thank you, I'll write back as soon as I can.

*helpful wormholer signing off*

Alternatively...

I give out small jobs to new capsuleers and pay greatly,
way more than you would receive from pity missions.

Or you contact me and ask me for a job!

Yeah, FW cruising is a great way as well. As is nullsec vulturing in areas where lots of Ishtars died. After CFC and MOA went at it, I snagged about 3 Tengufuls of faction sentries at one battlefield.

The catch is that a nub in a T1 frig would never make it to a battlefield in null, and would have a bad time in low. But I got adventurous my first week in eve, so for a new player wanting idk, Faction Warfare systems can make you lots of cash...downside is everyone will shoot at you if they can.

I find it hard to imagine that mission runners would be so careless as to leave their drones behind on a regular basis. Then again, I have never tried this myself so maybe I'm overestimating the average mission runner's resourcefulness.

There are many abandoned drones in and around missioning systems. Many pilots end up in scenarios where they've been inattentive, or overconfident, and had to warp out from a mission space before they could recall their drones. In some cases they've deliberately used their drones to distract the NPCs warp scrambling their mission boat as it drops into deep structure.

Of course the effort of probing these drones down is better put into more productive pursuits such as hunting data sites in hi sec, relic sites in lowsec, or entering mission spaces and stealing mission objectives (to then ransom back to the mission-runner).

With basic exploration and salvaging skills the new pilot could try ninja salvaging, though they'd be financially better off using those salvaging skills through a contract salvaging franchise such as Pro Synergy.

The young explorer would be far better off heading to low sec to plunder relic sites, IMHO.

running a set of missions can be quite mind-numbing.

^ scanning down abandoned drones takes a bit of effort. It can be made a bit easier if you know that mission deadspace sites are always with 4AU of a planet, so you can use dscan to narrow down which planet they are nearest to and set your combat probes to 4AU. It could be good practice for using dscan and it's better isk than running L1 or L2 missions but does require some upfront investment in training scanning skills.

It's not possible to directly probe down wrecks :p.
It is, however, possible probe down ships and structures. Such as MTUs. If you're looking to salvage people's sites, you can do it while they're there (not that I recommend that because of the rats), but some people will drop MTUs in the missions which you can probe down and warp to to salvage.

Glad it helped. As I see it from living in a wormhole full time, and null sec previously, the scanning game is a major part of eve. If you learn how to play it in empire, while profiting at the same time, you're closer to a fast track to holes or null. No one turns down a good scout. Ever. Anywhere. So go and make some cash, train covops, and then you know how to play in the profitable areas.

And yes, low/null relic and data sites can net you some major isk. This just gets a fresh pilot the cash and skills to get out and make it.

*guide who replies to mail signing off*