Science & Industry

After the mining barge changes were announced, I decided to prepare my trio of characters for mining. Not serious miners, mind you. I wanted to see if I could make all that free ISK that comes with AFK mining while at work, either from mission asteroids or grav sites. Basically the goal was to just setup 3 miners that I could check in every 15-30 minutes, since my work time is unpredictable.

Spoiler alert… it wasn't worth the effort.

With the new mining changes, I decided to take all my mining skills to the 3-4 range, so it wasn't too much of an investment. My retrievers all had around 15k EHP with resist and shield rigs, and 2x mining laser upgrades and a damage control II in the lows. I only use strip miner I's because I don't care about crystals and was going to be mining a wide range of rocks.

I decided to do 2 days at work, 6 hours a day, trying to put the bare minimum of effort to simulate a standard work day where I never know when I might have to walk away for 30 minutes. Rats were no problem, hobgoblin II's killed everything that bothered me, but the paltry loot even the 4 faction spawns had made them not contribute significantly to my income.

So 3 characters, 6 hours a day each over 2 days. Add in the 3 hours it took to haul everything 5 hops away with an Orca.

I picked a system that was in Amarr .7 space, where I focused on Kernite and Pyroxeres. I was also next door to a Gallente .6 system where I also grabbed some Omber, Scordite, Veld and Plagioclase. With 36 hours worth of mining effort, I managed to pull down 850,000 cubic meters of asteroids worth around 170 million ISK.

You are probably thinking… You made 170 million ISK for AFK mining at work?!?! I'm doing that!

Well, the thing is… it wasn't AFK. The system I chose was backwater, very little traffic. I saw only one other miner, and no gankers. There was also no station in system, and out of principal I didn't jet can so I could take advantage of the huge ore storage space. Still, 80% of the rocks I mined would pop within 2 cycles, meaning each character had to be visited every 5 minutes on average to start on a new rock. When you consider I had 3 miners going at once, that means on average I had to check on my progress every 2 minutes or I would be guaranteed one of them would lose a rock on the cycle.

I had an Orca, but I left it behind in station since boosting 2 retrievers wouldn't really be worth the extra mining I could do. Long story short, with 39 hours worth of effort divided between 3 characters, which intended to be AFK but actually needed constant supervision, my hourly income came out to a little over 4 million ISK per hour.

To put that into perspective, I make around 20 million ISK per hour per character for high sec level 4 missions. And that requires less supervision if I'm taking drone boats.

Yes, I could have optimized this more by going with hulks and boosters, or waiting until I found huge rocks in a grav site or a deadspace pocket, or scanning rocks so I could time them and not waste cycles. But that wasn't my goal. My goal was to see if I could make free ISK while only occasionally checking on my progress as I worked.

So while real miners who can devote all their attention to mining are going to be pleased with the new barge changes, if you think you can jump in with 2 weeks of mining training in your queue and print your own ISK while AFK during the day, I am here to say that is a pipe dream and you are going to be sorely disappointed!

Ok, feel free to poke holes in my logic or flame me, I don't care. I'm going to build a few battleships with the ore I mined and them blow them up for some insurance and then buy all the Quafe I can drink with the proceeds now.

Very true, and I wasn't complaining. I suppose I could have invested a few months to do it right, if I was interested in mining as a career. But it was mostly just an experiment to see if AFK mining was really feasible with the new mining barges and their huge ore bays. It wasn't.

Unless you are a bot, it's a lot more attention and clicking than people think, and is anything but an AFK-friendly profession without very carefully controlled mining environments.

WTH. I can make 4m/hr in an Osprey. ???

I can make another comparison.

I make around 15mil/hour with my Drake doing L4 missions with semi-good skills but I constantly have to be worried about getting killed if I pull to many ships at the same time.
My perfect miner does 24mil/hour mining and I have to check on him once every 180s. I can refine and sell the minerals in the same system that I mine in and infact earn more ISK then if I would haul it to a trade hub for instance (cost of a hauler, time to haul)

well actually that looks like a lot to me. Not because of how much _you_ gained but because if you multiply your number x the 10/20k new afk miners out there I guess the market could be flooded pretty fast.

I don't think that will happen anyway, as you said for you it was not worth the effort and that is exactly what everybody will say. Also because afk mining is not that afk as you guessed.

Conclusion: tons of new miners for a couple of weeks, then the same old story: mining is boring, let's gtfo of these belts and let stupid carebears do the job. Yes please.

I used to mine for years and I wanted to test your theory, it's flawed;

I trained my combat skills to like level 2-3 and still I earn way more with mining then with level 4 missions.
Conclusion: doing missions is not worth it.

*sigh* the OP's point is not how much isk you earn.

Just testing the concept that with the new retrievers you can walk away from your PC for 15-30 minutes and as such earn isk that way.

Basically he's reinforcing that because of the nature of the roids and how much ore each has in it you'll at most get a few cycles before having to find new roids to zap.

I know that if I am busy on my main I switch over to the larger Veld roids as I'll get if i'm lucky 4 cycles with my Strip I's (3000m3 per cycle approx atm) but I never truely am AFK because I have to manage the roids.

EVE Online isn't designed or meant to be played AFK hence your difficulty in trying to attempt to do so. CCP is about to prevent pilots farming complexes AFK with sentry drones. Either play the game or don't play the game.

So you didn't use a survey scanner?

I think I see your problem.

If you're in hisec, don't waste your time with anything other than Veld (or Scord now that Pyerite is so high). Pyroxeres can be okay if you're already in the belt, but don't go chasing them. Listen to Chribba: Veld is almost always the best ore, and trit is almost always the best mineral for ISK/hr in hisec. Scord is great right now, but that may not last.

You also need to max your skills to make ISK as a miner. If you're refining without maxed skills and high sec status with your refinery, you're wasting ISK. Just sell the raw ore instead.

Mining isn't going to make you rich, but then it's hard to find anything in EVE that pays very well these days. But It's not hard to pull down 10-20M ISK/hr in hisec mining, which isn't bad -- it's certainly more lucrative than running missions (until Level 4, anyway). You just need to do it efficiently. It's easy to mine badly, but tricky to mine efficiently. It's way more about logistics than about ship-outfitting, really. You have to pick a good location, do some prep work on the belt(s), get your assets in place (crystals, secure containers, haulers, etc.), and make sure you're watching the markets for ore/mineral prices to make sure you're going after the highest-value ores. If you're in a fleet, make sure you're getting your proper boosts. Use MLUs in your lows and not cargo expanders (if I find anyone in my fleets using cargo expanders or rigs rather than MLUs or tank, they're fired).

In mining more than almost any other activity in the game, time is ISK. The more time you spend lasering roids for ore, the more ISK you make. Any time you spend not lasering roids -- running back and forth to station, running away from rats/gankers, trundling back and forth to target new rocks,e tc. -- means less ISK/hr. Efficiency is all.