Science & Industry

just as a little example, I raked up a asteroid belt, that netted me 750,051 m3 of ore

thats

Veldspar 140,658 units 14,065.80 m3
Concentrated Veldspar 719,662 units 71,966.20 m3
Dense Veldspar (+10%) 1,580,576 units 158,057.60 m3
Condensed Scordite (+5%) 293,554 units 44,033.10 m3
Massive Scordite (+10%) 483,593 units 72,538.95 m3
Pyroxeres 119,042 units 35,712.60 m3
Solid Pyroxeres (+5%) 246,965 units 74,089.50 m3
Viscous Pyroxeres (+10%) 395,215 units 118,564.50 m3
Kernite 5,587 units 6,704.40 m3
Luminous Kernite (+5%) 9,164 units 10,996.80 m3
Fiery Kernite (+10%) 119,435 units 143,322.00 m3

based on the following per/unit prices obtained from Domain Regional Market

Tritanium 6.05
Pyerite 12.01
Mexallon 59.10
Isogen 118.48
Nocxium 550.00

Veldspar 17.45
Concentrated Veldspar (+5%) 8.66
Dense Veldspar (+10%) 18.76
Scordite 29.00
Condensed Scordite (+5%) 29.60
Massive Scordite (+10%) 31.00
Pyroxeres 57.22
Solid Pyroxeres (+5%) 56.56
Viscous Pyroxeres (+10%) 58.85
Plagioclase 48.52
Azure Plagioclase (+5%) 49.00
Rich Plagioclase (+10%) 49.00
Omber 110.03
Silvery Omber (+5%) 53.00
Golden Omber (+10%) 70.75
Kernite 240.00
Luminous Kernite (+5%) 234.16
Fiery Kernite (+10%) 247.42

this ore would net me 144,096,850.23 ISK unrefined and Uncompressed
147,109,507.04 ISK unrefined and Compressed
using a POS Refinery and with all skills at 5 and no implant I'm getting 152,075,923.03 ISK for the refined minerals

so the minerals are most valuable but not by a big margin only 3.27% over the compressed ore and 5.25% over the uncompressed ore
usually in my experience, in Amarr space the ore that is most commonly more valuable than it's resultant minerals is the basic Kernite, so thats the ore I always check the prices on, before deciding to refine it, in the above numbers the uncompressed Kernite is 3.78% more valuable than the minerals, and if compressed that number goes up to 4.29%, ofc with only 5,587 units to sell the actual diff in ISK is minute.
If yer refining skills are all at 5, in most cases the mineral yield is more profitable by a small margin, (but I still always check each time I Refine, and go on a selling run), but only if they are all at 5. Using my Excel calculation sheet I set all my refining skills to 4, and using the above numbers, the refined mineral profit dropped to 142,771,911.44 ISK 0.93% lower than the ore uncompressed and 3.04% lower than the ore if compressed.
So in the case of the above numbers, unless ya have perfect refining skills selling the ore Compressed is most profitable.
The market, however, is ever changing, and I always check prices before making the decision to refine

The question: where to refine in a station or POS
the POS refinery has a 2% better efficiency over the station but using the above ore numbers that 2% gives me an extra 5,849,069,38 ISK worth of minerals and that assumes no station standing tax.
So the question becomes, wether the 3,85% increase in mineral profit Having a POS refinery is worth the cost of running the POS.
those numbers I don't have My POS is running on a almost 2year old Stockpile of fuel so I haven't bought any in a long while

Hope this helped in some little way
(and Apologies for spelling, and grammatical errors I usually have some in a post this long)
Indis

First off go to this web site:
http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Mining_102

It is a little out of date for mining but has good refining information including formulas for refining ore to minerals.

This next site is almost a requirement to find the best price for selling or buying everything EVE in game.
https://eve-central.com/home/market.html

Learn how to use it by limiting your search to the regions you want to trade in. Searching all regions will give you info on places that are too far away and/or dangerous to travel too.

You really do have to create spread sheet tracking the prices of ore or minerals you want to sell.
I set my spread sheet up based on the ore hold size of my Miasmos M3 / volume of the ore.
=E3/C3

Next I multiply the result of the above calculation times the market price of the ore. The same can be used for minerals. All minerals have a volume of .01m3.
=G3*J3

I keep track of two locations with the highest prices being offered in the regions I sell in for each ore or mineral. Keep in mind sometimes it is better to take a slightly lower price. If one location is 12 jumps away with the highest buy order and the other is only 4 jumps away for a slightly lower price, well you have to put a value on your time.

Ore vol m3 Hold vol M3 Ore units Price unit Load value
Veldspar 0.1 58,800 588,000.00 Rens 17.80 10,466,400.00

Concentrated Veldspar 0.1 58,800 588,000.00 Rens 17.79 10,460,520.00

Dense Veldspar 0.1 58,800 588,000.00 Rens 18.36 10,795,680.00

Edit: Sorry don't know how to set up a table in the fourm.

The biggest advantage of refining is the lower volume size of the minerals, the drawback is the best price for different minerals is usually at different locations so you may have to travel more to sell it. Also sometimes the mineral cargo you are carrying is worth over a billion isk and gankers just love to see a loaded Kryos, it is like having the Blue Light Special light shining on top saying come gank me.

As others have said refining is great if you are manufacturing but may not be worth the hassle if you are not.

Depends on prices.

Sometimes selling is best. Sometimes refining is best.

If you've got decent skills sometimes you can buy other peoples ore, refine it and make a profit.

Awesome thanks for the info and breaking it down for me. Seems like the differences in ISK are so minor is it really worth the extra skill investment or having a POS? Going by your numbers it does not seem worth it other than to just sell the raw ore and keep on mining. Saving a ton of skills and time and isk in the short to medium term, maybe even the longer term.

Seems to me they need to increase the benefit and worth of having a high sec pos for industry and the skill you need to train if it only brings you a very tiny amount more ISK.

Scale has big affect on whether its better to reprocess, sell the ore or compress. As well as how much extra it gets you compared to isk gained from mining more in that time instead.


Unless your mining allot 10s of billions worth ore a month then the fuel costs will equal or exceed the extra sale price you are getting.

If your smaller then your going to have to haul all the ore from a station and back again. So you need to check if your would make more spending that time mining or hauling between your pos. This will only be potentially viable if you have a freighter


If your choosing to sell ore or minerals you need to off local prices and not jita. (unless jita your local hub)
Ore is big and bulky and even a freighter only 200m worth ores can be fitted so if your going a good 15 jumps to get to jita, its at least a hours round trip and most likely its 90 minutes. so if your making 10m an hour and 20m hour you would have made 10%ish and 20% of the freighter cargo value just mining respectively. So unless your making a big mark up its not worth it.

Minerals a bit better as even with a full load of trit you can fit 600m isk into a freighter.


If you have a low refine rate then local ore prices will be best.

More disinformation here. Always sell at Jita prices even if you aren't at Jita. Leave haulage duties to the buyer. Alawys sell your ore in compressed format if possible.

In my humble opinion, the decision to get into something or not should be based on some homework beyond asking people on the forum. It's all theory and opinions till you get some actual numbers to back your choice.

Yes, compression is a bit more valuable and should be since nobody wants to take tens of freighter loads to a POS and compress it into one single load. Regarding reprocessing it's not so clear cut since you need to make some calculations.

Ekaterina is right, you should always take Jita prices as standard. I always imagine these to be universal standard prices and if I would make more selling somewhere, the difference in profit is just a trade profit. If I make enough trade profit than why mine/build whatever in the first place since I can buy of Jita and sell somewhere else. Ofc many more things are taken into account.

[Shameless commercial, avert your eyes]
I am currently developing (and should release within a week) a handy tool for miners. You can:
- check the prices of every asteroid/ice in the 5 main hubs
- compares the price of an asteroid if you sell it / reprocess it / compress it and gives you the best option
- it takes your skills into account, your standing, implants and if you use NPC station or POS

Here is a rough look at a first version (with 5 Reprocessing, 4 Efficiency, 0 Standing, No implant, NPC station)
http://gyazo.com/64a8e221ff7b96e3789131f40b17d9b6

As you can see, **** skills means you are better of compressing. On the other hand, max skills and standings and Intensive Refining changes the picture in favor of refining:
http://gyazo.com/17be1a9c7054243b415347761e25082c
[End of commercial]

In my experience, if yer solo mining in high sec, it's always going to be much faster to just sell the ore. Specifically because, you need full skills and implants and standings to refine well, by the time you attain that as well as all the specializations? You are basically ready for production, not refining. In my experience, if you are trying to maximize profit as a miner there's 3 ways to do that, join a super active mining corp, they will always have an Orca in their system with perfect boost, problem with that is they generally require you to tithe a great deal of your income / ore.
Second is using cheap covetors and retrievers alone in a system where the rats drop good high value dog tags. People will know u r there no matter what tho, and the further away from jita the better.
The third is to train for combat and move on. Mackinaw and hulk are for fleet ops only imo if you are a solo miner, CODE or some other ******* is going to figure out your patterns and exploit you with suicide ganks. Ice isn't good isk anymore. A good way to make passive income as a miner is to run ore anomalies in high sec, the pirates don't check these as readily as the belts, and remember to start at the bottom of the list of belts not the top? Lazy ******* pirates always start at the top of the list and move down.
Ps Don't make enemies and don't talk in local chat, it totally provides predators with recon. Don't ***** about getting suicide ganks just fly cheap insured barges, that way you break even. Don't fly what you cannot afford to lose.

Are your calculations taking in the 4% refining implant as well?




Yes. Orca is fine where it is. If you can afford an orca, you can most definitely afford a POS and array (even if you're only fueling it for the hour or two it takes to refine a week's worth of minerals).

Do it in remote high sec. Fly out to some random spot in the system and drop it. Go get ore, refine, put in station. Refine millions of m3 into thousands in a few minutes.

Sell compressed ore for a lot more and a lot less trips to Jita or fees to courier.

zzzz....