EVE New Citizens Q&A

considering the ores are basically the same, there's very little reason to mine in those systems unless your current system has run out of asteroids.

also, two t1 drones with poor skills are more than enough to deal with belt rats in 0.7.

retriever can make you 10-20M per hour,so if you plan to make money this way its a good choice - it will pay for itself in like 5 or 6 hours of mining

check this site to make an informed decision http://ore.cerlestes.de/index.html#site:ore

The only problem with the Retriever is that it's a little squishy, for that reason I'd recommend the Procuror over it, especially with the perchant that other players have for making barges and exhumers explode, the yield is a little less but it's a damn sight harder to kill.

You've gotten some great advice on the mining aspect of your question so I wanted to check in on your first line.

You are mining while waiting for skills to reach... the marks? What marks?

You can effectively do exploration within 1 day of play time in an exploration frigate in highsec.

You don't have to wait for skills. In fact, you should get that thought out of your mind now otherwise you'll be spending an awful lot of your time 'waiting' for skills instead of playing. When you get a skill to 1 you can start using whatever module or ships that skill enables. Yes, you won't be very efficient at it but you can use it.

At skill level 3 you are going to be okay with a skill. A skill level 4 you are good at a skill. At skill level 5 you are super awesome elite with a skill. For the most part, you don't need to have skills at level 4 let alone level 5 unless they are prerequisites. Yes, they do make you more effective at whatever the skill enables but you don't -have- to train them up before using them. In time, you'll want to bring up the skills that you use all the time to level 5 but when you're starting out don't get caught up on that.

Now, if you find mining to be enjoyable then, by all means, mine away but if you are doing it and think it's boring or sucks then please do yourself a favour and stop mining - start exploring.

The scanning frigate for minmatar is the probe. You can already fly it. So, if exploration interests you then explore. You can make a fair bit of ISK in highsec exploration (if you are lucky you can make a lot of ISK with highsec exploration) with a day's worth of training under your belt. You do not have to wait.

You got exactly to my pain point. I have tried exploring with a probe in high sec. But it's sooo hard to find a unclaimed profession site in high sec and frigates aren't really good in clearing combat sites. It's not rewarding and no fun exploring in high sec with a Probe--at least for myself.

So here is my plan:
1. Skill up to Arbitrator with "Okay" drones and tanking skills
2. At the mean time, mining with Venture to save up money for a Arb and relevant fits
3. Once my Arbitrator and skills are ready, I'll try to do some tougher combat sites and maybe wander into low sec. But that might or will cost my new ship, there comes the next plan
4. When playing with my new Arbitrator, switch my skill training to Mining barges
5. Hopefully my Arbitrator will last long enough till I can fly a mining barge. By then I will be able to mine a lot more to buy more ships to play around

Sounds viable?

Totally viable if you enjoy mining.

If you don't, you can skip the mining training aspect and work on exploration in high sec. High sec is a busy place for explorers so that means two things. First, there are a lot of other people looking for sites. Second, the sites respawn very quickly.

If you can find a small loop of systems (say four systems that connect to one another with the fourth site linking back to the first) you can do that small circle quickly and check for sites.

Basically,

Jump into a system
Drop probes
Begin warping to the next one
While in warp do your basic scan to check for signatures
If there are signatures start probing them down
Record what they are
If there are sites that interest you finish scanning them down and do them
If none of the sites interest you collect probes and jump systems.

The next time you come to that system you can ignore the known signatures (usually wormholes) and focus in on any new possibilities.

Because highsec sites respawn quickly (there are places in highsec where if you sit in one system and just scan sites will pop up within five minutes) you can keep your search range really small. I like four systems because it gives me a sense of movement but you can really just stay in one system if you wanted.

Once a site shows up, scan it down, and run it. So long as you are in a relatively quiet system you should be able to beat anyone else to the site for completion.