Wormholes

This.

I have a lot more appreciation for what it takes to pull off a successful miner/PI runner gank. Learning how to move undetected and track pilots in a system is invaluable, along with all the other skills you acquire honing your craft. Predictability is key sometimes, and you learn to recognize certain behaviors and how to use them to your advantage as a hunter. In turn, you gain that respect for how people game plan against you, and adjust accordingly. For me, the thrill of the hunt is sometimes as fun as the kill.

just for clarification, hostile is if you are out of your pos shields.

Wormhole space emphasizes the importance of having as much Intel at any one time as possible. Your dominance on the field as well as your survival rest on knowing things like where incoming holes are connected to systems in your chain, who lives in each system and how active they are, and what signatures are in the system you are operating in. As someone already suggested, having an alt that can sit on a hole in question is a great solution to knowing if cloakies are in your presence. If you aren't ready to fight then you know It Is Time To GTFO.

Damn you are unlucky OP! Sucks for a first experience... but it's not always that bad. That's just the thing: with an open sandbox like this, there has to be some unlucky sod who's first attempt gets cut short. In this instance, you were that guy. You only truly lose if you back down and never try again.

That being said, Wspace is a high stakes, high gains kind of game. Making ISK through PVE comes with a price: being subject to unrestricted PVP. My advice would be to get some general PVP experience. It allows you to make better PVE risk assesments down the line. It helps a lot to understand how wspace inhabitants think and what options are available to them. And to you.

Venture.

And honestly, I would see about gas mining over ore mining. You should make more isk, your harder to find (as they have to probe out gas sites), and the ships built for it.

But Venture.. Definetly Venture.

Totally. It's how I got started, and it's really decent ISK once you get good at it. Plus very low risk in terms of risk/reward. Sure, you get blown up & podded. Fly a clone with no implants and a Venture... you're in it maybe 5 million with T2 gas harvesters, and can pull out a million a minute from many gas sites!

There are tons and tons of high-class, empty wormholes where you can ninja gas in relative safety for hours on end. It's really helpful to have a hauler cloaked up somewhere in system for dropoff (or a nearby POS), which is part of the motivation for people to "settle" w-space. You're much more likely to get ganked while transiting a wormhole than at any other place in an Anoiki, so if you can keep the number of wormhole transits down, your safety is a bit better. Warp to safe, jettison cargo, decloak hauler, pick up cargo, cloak hauler, warp Venture back to site. With the change to warp speed, the Venture is exceptionally quick for a mining vessel!

Like I said. Invest it wisely. Get yourself some +3 implants for training, replace your hull, and it should pay for your next couple of months worth of skillbooks.

A few rules of thumb. An Int/Perc remap will carry you for your first year, as you'll be training all across the board. If a skill has a x1 multiplier, train it to 5 immediately. Everything else train to 4. Don't get stuck with a skill tree full of III's because you'll get frustrated by being mediocre at everything. I know from personal experience, and it took me a year to fix my skilltree.

Guns are generally superior to missiles in the long run, so train turret supports and small guns. This will offer you the broadest range of hulls to crosstrain into. Frigates are awesome, but stick with one race/weapon type until you have Assault Frigates trained to IV. Don't neglect drone skills either. Assfrigs can do a lot and can punch well above their weight. Your next step after that will be cruisers and medium guns.