EVE New Citizens Q&A

Not a big fan of mining, but since Im running wormholes lately I decided to give a try in one of the mining sites found there. My findings were surprising...

When comparing the lowest possible form of mining, veldspar/scordite in ultra highsec 1,0 I see that a full load of a venture takes about 10 minutes and yields near 1mill ISK. This can be done totally afk while playing other game.

When I tried mining Arkonor in a wormhole, the mineral that is described as "The rarest and most sought-after ore in the known universe. A sizable nugget of this can sweep anyone from rags to riches in no time." I found that a full load on the same venture, took exactly the same time, and was worth of... 0,8 mill And this had to be done hitting dscan each 15sec, dealing with the rats, and with the constant risk of losing the ship, the implants and the time.

I am missing something?

a Couple things to understand. First off CCP has made several adjustments over the years to ore and it's been a long time since ark was guaranteed to be the best ore isk / m3 wise.

http://ore.cerlestes.de/#site:ore

That site that I linked can help you determine which ore is currently the most valuable. Just click on the column labeled "isk" and it will sort by isk / m3 value.

Beyond that the other thing that makes null sec valuable is the boosts and the roid size. So if you are mining by your self and docking up each time you have a full load then you won't notice either of those. However if you are in a mining fleet with haulers taking your ore for you and you are measuring profits in isk / minute then they matter.

When you are mining in high sec in a barge with strip miners and you are finishing off asteroids before your mining lazors can complete a cycle in many cases then your actual yield can be 80% of your theoretical yield or less even. If you are paying very close attention and using roid scanners to time cycles properly you'll be doing very well if you can even get 90% in high sec. In null sec however you can often sit on the same asteroid for very long periods of time without cycling your lazors so you can often get 100% yield.

Beyond that the Rorqual which can not be used in high sec has significantly better boosts than the Orca. Off the top of my head I can't recall exactly what it is and haven't had coffee yet so I'm not about to EFT if but just know it's better.

TL;dr
solo mining in a venture measuring isk per volume instead of isk per time frame you won't notice the difference.

Don't mine ore in WH. Get the gas.

Also something nobody has mentioned yet: arkonor is a LOT bigger than veldspar, 1 unit of arkonor is 16m3 whereas veldspar is 0.1m3

obviously that means you can fit 1/160th worth of arkonor in a venture compared to veldspar and thus the price disparity

If you compare arkonor and veldspar unit by unit, arkonor is by far the more valuable, this means fleet mining arkonor when someone is hauling the ore off while you mine is much more profitable than doing veldspar as veldspar will run out far more quickly.

Yeah no.

What matters to a miner is ISK/m3, since mining lasers will pull in a fixed volume of ore per cycle. The number of units of ore is rounded down, which can complicate matters to a slight degree.

The main reason Arkonor is worth less than veldspar is that there is more of it being mined than is actually needed. As for veldspar, it is always in demand due to the sheer volumes of tritanium required for any manufacturing line. Typically, hisec miners will find the best returns on pyroxeres due to the value of nocxium.

The rest of the story comes down to the spreadsheets telling you which ore is actually most valuable per cubic metre, and your willingness to go find it.

Not at all. You only get a certain amount of veldspar per rock until it dies so unless you have 0 competition for veldspar and can mine non-stop, arkonor makes sense if you have it at hand.

Well, we shall see if the current industrialists are willing to take their blueprints to 0.0 outposts that will soon be converted to the new structure system, which will force them to move their blueprints and production chains again. But, ok.

Why would the blueprints be anywhere other than hisec? Sure, copy the blueprint to take the BPC out to nullsec. Then when it gets lost/stolen/exploded, you can tell everyone that it was just the backup copy and you didn't really need it anyway.

You also get more minerals when you refine your ore in nullsec. If you are mining to manufacture things, some minerals are not in hisec ore.

If you don't save your pod in w-space either somebody REALLY wanted that pod kill or you were dumb and didn't set up your bookmarks around your exit route correctly. Someone pulling out a full-on bubble gank at a site is a bit too much of a waste of effort to be all that common.