EVE General Discussion

I am trying to slow the game down for myself and allow myself to enjoy all the parts to eve instead of just focusing on making the most ISK/hr so I decided to create a new character and try to be completely self sufficient.

This means that I'll make everything for myself and I'll acquire materials for production of the modules/ships I use on my own. If I want to fly a new Drake, I'll have to mine or reprocess items looted. The only thing I currently plan on buying from the market or contracts are BPO/BPC's for the things I need.

I realize that I'll have to diversify my skills. If I want any rigs, I'll need to salvage and manufacture them. Certain items for invention may require me to explore high sec for radar sites.

At first, I'll be doing lvl 1 and 2 missions and reprocessing to get some of the rarer minerals in high sec. Later, I'll either venture into low sec to mine or find high sec grav sites with low sec ores.

One concern I had was that it seems like I will reach a plateau especially in the t2 department. I will be able to farm datacores and invent for some bpc's that only require minerals to build the t2 product, but some require moon materials or other difficult to get items. What are some other ways that I may not be able to accomplish my goal or parts of the game that will be locked out.

Watching this topic with great interest. This sounds like a great way to get a deep gaming experience out of EVE by yourself and as someone who is new to the game and currently a solo player I would appreciate any tips you might share along the way.

Here's hoping it doesn't get trolled to death...

Noble idea, but I believe you will fall trap to the jack of all trades master of none problem. You are going to be diversifying your skills so much progress will be extremely slow. I guess if you are willing to put in the time, that is your choice.

Ive always thought a fully self sufficient corp would be fun to be involved in; but that won't help with you trying to experience as much as you can yourself.

Good luck.

Well I know the tutorials give you basic production skillbooks and a free Navitas to mine with, and you should get plenty of minerals from reprocessing all the other ships and modules they give you, so I don't think you'll really need much in the way of extra minerals to produce a ship. I think your biggest expense will be buying blueprint copies to make the ship and it's modules from.

I've been playing for three years and building things that I use myself. Problems you will encouter are:

1. Your skill training will have to be all over the place, rather than focused. You will need skills in mining, manufacturing, research, PI, exploration and combat. This also means you will never be the best at anything.

2. There are some things a solo player just can't get (or can't get enough of) without resorting to the market. With the recent cut in module drops you will have difficulty sourcing enough Morphite, Megacyte and Zyndrine from recycled mods. To build T2 mods you will also need moon stuff.

3. Some things are only available in certain areas of space. e.g. if you want to build lasers (including mining lasres) you will need to go to Amarr space for the blueprints and the datacore research agents. So you will need to watch your faction standings so that you don't become shoot-on-site by any faction. This can be countered by the use of alts.

Good luck with it. I have enjoyed my varied career as a one-man-band exploring, researching, building and selling stuff to others. It can be quite profitable.

Vinni.

Multiple accounts and specialize them. Seriously. Otherwise you are in for a long, frustrating wait. But eventually you'll get tired of growing your wallet as each additional billion becomes less and less significant, and start playing EVE the way it was designed to be played. We'll be waiting for you out here in nullsec, and fun will be had by all.

Why do I say this? Oh I was a high sec industrialist/miner/care-bear for 5 years or so...

Sounds like a cool idea.
Make sure to make a blog and keep us updated!

Self sufficient is quite possible in Eve, on a single toon, and I actually have enough skills to do it solidly up to a point. The trick is to know where that ‘point’ is. For me, I have BPOs researched for all the basic modules, weapons, and ships that I would need to bring me back in to play should things go to hell. For me that means they have an ME of at least 40.It is not a huge list and really not that impressive, but it does work for me.

I have a few different frigates, a destroyer, and a cruiser BPO. A couple different industrial BPOs to move stuff, guns, ammo, probes and probe launchers, drones, etc.. Now then, it is all T1 stuff. Stone cold basic stuff, but more than enough to get going again or to run off and live on my own. The T2 stuff is a much longer train when I was approaching that point CCP nerfed the way datacores worked so I dropped that plan.

Getting materials is a little harder now with the loot nerf (ironically I finished my scrapmetal reprocessing 4 two weeks before the nerf… I’ve had some bad nerf luck) but it is still possible to melt down salvage for the materials you need that you cannot mine in your area.

To get the BPOs I setup a small POS in high-sec and threw up a couple labs on a disposable corp. I only got wardecced once and lost the POS tower to my own stupidity, but I never lost anything of actual value. At the time the cost of running a small POS was about 3 million isk a day. One thing that was a turn off to me on this was the pursuit of mining my own fuel solo. High-sec ice mining was going to take about 22 hours of mining ice a month to fuel the POS(the other components could be made in high-sec/low sec PI). When the interdiction measures by some groups took place the ability to do such things put a nail in that coffin as well. Luckily I had almost all my BPOs up to where I wanted them before I had run out of fuel.

Although I never did research up a BPO for mining barges, I was able to find a couple nice caches of ME 80+ BPCs, enough of them that if I ever run out I will be giving up mining completely. I also have a small cache of BC BPCs.

So yes, I can do it on my own if I really, really wanted to. However, there is a limit to what I can do. If I had a dream of living solo in a large POS and building everything in it so I would never need a station again, it gets messy. A large POS would require about 80 hours of ice mining a month, I would need do PI in deep low-sec or null to get planets good enough for the other parts. That little bit of information means fueling a POS would require about 3 hours a day of just upkeep. This is why you need friends when you reach that point.

I like your idea and kind of did the same thing. I always wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible and thus, I have skills all over the place. When I started, I mined the ore and reprocessed it until I had enough for my own cruiser - a Thorax. I continued this pattern through my whole EVE career. Even though I joined corps, I mostly stayed self-sufficient and minded my own business.

Now the difference between you and me arises: I started in 2003. I have trained for a few years and have over 90m SP (had breaks in between). Still, I am not able to do anything I want in EVE and there are always people with better skills than I have, because they specialized in one area.

If you try this, you will constantly run into problems with the skill training and you will always lose out on things, because you simply cannot do it - or you cannot do it as good as others. Mining, for example, will be very slow for a long while. Once you can mine efficiently, you still will be worse solo than with a mining corp, because you have no Orca support or haulers. In addition, you will lose a lot of minerals to your bad refining skills. Then you lose isk because of low standings with stations etc.

Also, because the skill training will be so important for you, you may be tempted to get +5 implants. That will even make the situation worse, because you will be afraid to go into low sec, 0.0 or wormholes. So you become a high-sec carebear, which is fine for some people, but it's the least exciting experience you can have in EVE.

In conclusion, I would not recommend this to anyone with a new character. It will just be a long lasting drag and you will lose interest. You can either try this with a few characters at once, to split the specialization tasks, or you join a corp which doesn't mind if you cannot be that active and which can provide some support like mining ops and refining.

Myself, I went back to a big alliance. Not because I needed the support, but because it's simply more fun to work together and because I get into situations that I can never experience solo.

You can be self sufficient upto a certain point, but you will not experience all EvE has to offer by going at it solo.