Market Discussions

I'm mining to build up a war chest before heading out into low-sec. Which ores should I be mining right now to help with that effort?

I've been focusing on Veldspar the past couple days, but would scordite be better?

I think searching out a Mining Permit would be the best thing of all.

Try mining tears. That's what all cool pilots do.

Mining by yourself is actually a very slow way to make isk, and to be honest, very boring. Mining is the Eve version of a "minimum wage" job. Shoot space rocks with mining lasers, unload your ore, shoot more space rocks, unload your ore, repeat until you are utterly bored to tears. Eve needs mining, don't get me wrong on that, the players who make the ships you buy and fly don't make them from thin air, they need the minerals from mining, but mining will not make you lots of isk in a short amount of time.

The players who make significant amounts of isk from hisec mining are the players who can collect a LOT of ore per hour, which usually means mining in a group so they can collect ore in large amounts and sell it in bulk.

The game does have small belts of lowsec ore spawn in hisec, so it is possible to find higher value ore in hisec, but the belts are small and are not permanent. It's not uncommon to find these beltts completely mined out because other players got there before you.

A variation of this is mining in wormholes. Wormholes are a little bit like the gates that connect systems together, except wormholes connect to a different type of space. Not all wormholes are permanent, some collapse after a certain amount of mass has travelled through the hole, and the rats inside wormholes are some of the toughest in the entire game. On the other hand, the types of gas and ore that can spawn in wormholes can be very profitable to sell in highsec, IF you can collect enough of it and IF you can get it back to hisec space in one piece. Some players have set up their own private stations inside wormhole space and may not treat you kindly if they find you snooping around inside "their" hole. It's also easy to get badly lost inside wormhole space. Wormhole space has the potential to earn significant levels of profit, but includes significant levels of risk. You might want to find a wormhole player corp who can help you learn how to survive and earn isk in wormhole space, if being an Eve hobbit (living inside a hole in space) interests you.

An important detail about wormhole space. There is no Concord "space police" in wormhole space, even in hisec wormholes. You can be attacked by other players inside any wormhole, and Concord will not do a single thing to stop that happening. The only thing that will save you inside a wormhole is yourself.

Having said that, ore isn't the only item that can be mined in highsec. Gas can be harvested from some anomaly sites. It's used to make "boosters" which are in-game drugs which boost your character's abilities for a limited amount of time. You'll need special skills just to find the anomaly sites that have gas as well as more special skills and equipment to harvest the gas. From the discussions I've seen about hisec gas harvesting, the profit margins for hisec gas are slim.

Another mining option is ice. Player owned space stations need fuel to keep them running, and ice is a main ingredient to make that fuel. There are several different types of ice, some types are only found in hisec, some in losec and some in nullsec. Ice belts aren't hard to find, but they generally don't last very long because players who already know where the ice will spawn are ready and waiting for it.

Mining isn't the only way to make isk. Exploration/hacking can earn you isk as well. Some specialised skills and equipment are needed, but all four of the main races have a frigate with special bonuses for exploration/hacking which are not expensive and don't take a long time to train up the required skills. Just like every other isk earning activity, other players are doing this as well and depending on which locations you hang out in most of the time, other players in the same area may clean out the hacking sites before you, but just like ice and asteroid belts, hacking sites do respawn regularly. Hacking sites can spawn in wormhole space as well

Another way to make isk is "planetary interaction" where you set up a processing base on a planet and use that base to collect and process certain types of materials that can't be found in space. It is possible to earn a good income from this, depending on the type of planet you put your base on and the types of materials you process.

Some links.
Ore, Ice and gas prices: http://ore.cerlestes.de/index.html#site:ore
Eve Uni's beginners guide to wormholes. http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Living_in_Wormhole_Space#Mining
Eve Uni's beginners guide to exploration and hacking. http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Hacking#Relic_Sites_and_Data_Sites:_Hacking
Eve Uni's beginners guide to planetary interaction: http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Planetary_Interaction

Those are processed minerals, not the raw ores found in ore belts.

OP, there was one more link I should have included in my previous post.

Even in hisec, not all ores are found equally in all areas. Some types of ore are more common in Amarr and Caldari hisec. Other types of ore are more common in Gallente and Minmatar hisec. http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Asteroids_and_Ore

Veldspar and Scordite are found in all hisec areas. Omber, Plagioclase, Kernite and Pyroxeres all pay better than Veld or Scord, but are concentrated in different hisec empires. Basing yourself near the border between Amarr/Minmatar or the border between Caldari/Gallente will give you more options for the type of ore to mine with less travel time to get to the systems with the higher value ore belts.

I also advise you to keep the probe scanner window open when you are travelling through systems. That window will show you if there are any spawns of rarer ore belts in a system. You don't need to carry a probe launcher or probes, if the rare belts are there, you will be able to warp to them straight away when you enter a system, but the probe scanner window is the window you need to use to see if any rare belts have spawned. The probe scanner window will also tell you what types of ore are in the rare belt without you needing to warp to that belt.

One more point to consider. Is it better to sell the raw ore, or reprocess it and sell the processed minerals yourself? That depends on several factors.

1: You will never get all of the individual minerals out of the ore you mine, there is always some loss when you reprocess the ore. Reprocessing ore at an NPC station in hisec has the highest losses. There are skills you can train to reduce this loss, but your faction standings also effect reprocessing efficiency in hisec. NPC stations are owned by NPC corporations, so if you reprocess ore in a hisec NPC station, your standing with the NPC corp that owns that station also makes a difference to your reprocessing efficiency. Ore reprocessing in a player owned hisec station has lower losses, but right now you will need to be in a Player corp that owns a station to use it.

Because of these efficiency limitations, you will not get all of the useable minerals from the ore when you reprocess it. Depending on the type of ore you are mining, you should check if you will earn more isk by selling the raw ore or processing it and selling the processed minerals. If you can get your processing efficiency high enough, you'll make more isk by selling the processed minerals, but until then, you might be better off selling the raw ore. You'll need to know what your reprocessing efficiency is, how much of each type of mineral you can get from each load of ore when you reprocess it, and what you can sell the processed minerals for, compared to selling the raw ore.

There are big changes happening to player owned stations in the next major game update (latei April) which have the potential for some types of player owned stations to be accessible by players who are not in the same corp as the station owner, but right now I do not know if these new stations will give better reprocessing efficiency compared to NPC stations.

2: Reprocessed minerals cannot be carried in the ore hold of a mining ship, only unprocessed ore can be carried in the ore hold.
If you reprocess the ore you mined in station A, then want to move the processed minerals to station B to sell them, you're going to need a ship with a lot of cargo space. Processed minerals are carried in cargo holds, not in ore holds. If you want to sell the processed minerals, you're better off bringing the unprocessed ore to the station you want to sell at and processing the ore at that station (and dealing with the reprocessing efficiency losses at the station where you sell it).