EVE New Citizens Q&A

Yay, I finished the intro tutorial. Pursuant to instructions, I decided to complete the first part of "Mountains to Molehills," since I already have a Venture and a couple of Miner Is.

The first 50 units went easily enough, and I returned to base and dropped them off. But now, though I can warp to the beacon and the "Mountains to Molehills" icon, I can't seem to get through to the asteroid and finish up. So now what I am doing wrong, he wonders.

As before, Rookie chat ignores my question, so I'm asking here where some kind soul might respond.

-- Mal

Well, when I was doing the mining it told me my ship was full, so I dumped the Veldspar in the station and went back to the location to fill 'er up again. There was no asteroid there.

For "units" read Cubic Meters. The mission told me my hold would only ah, "hold" 50 m3.

Fortunately, a passing Samaritan dropped a mil on me and I could by the rest of the Veldspar.

But I'm still puzzled where the asteroid went. The next mission will call for me to "find an asteroid belt" and mine more to refine, but when I go to the local Belt, there's nothing there. Will a rock spawn when I accept the mission? (I was going to mine the stuff before I accepted the mission)

-- Mal

You're encountering multiple issues:

1. Venture has a 5000 m3 ORE bay, and a 50 m3 general cargo bay. The career agents have old code that tells them to check a ship's cargo bay; they don't realize that when you mine with the Venture the ore will go into the ore bay. Thus you get a warning that there's no space for ore, when in fact there is.

2. The first mission location had 1 asteroid, and it had just enough Veldspar in it to fill up your Venture. If you mine all the ore from an asteroid, it just disappears. You filled up the Venture, asteroid disappeared because it was empty, thus when you go back it's no longer there. You should buy a Survey Scanner module from the market, it tells you how much ore is left in the asteroids in the belt, so you can see / pick the biggest one to mine. The physical size of the asteroid doesn't match how much ore is in it, actually.

3. The second mission sends you to "any asteroid belt" to mine ore. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of newbies just like you, all trying to mine that ore, and only 4 asteroid belts in your location. It's all mined out, basically. Solutions are:

3a. Go to nearby star systems and check the asteroid belts there, you should be able to find an asteroid belt with some non-empty asteroids in it with Veldspar, as long as you move away from where all the newbie crowds are. Open the map and look around, right-click the stars and show info, and set a destination to one that looks good.

3b. Forget about mining and just buy the Veldspar from the market; despite the text, the agent doesn't really care where you get it from, for that second mission.

In the future and just as a general rule: in Eve if in doubt right click. You should get used to exploring right-click menus on everything just to see what is there.

I know that game seems like a lot in the beginning but if you stick it out, it does get easier. Don't get me wrong you might still feel like a newbie 5 years from now like me. You just won't feel lost anymore.

Tip for the rest of the career agent missions: as you arrive at each mission location, check the Mining tab in the overview briefly, to see what asteroids are there.

Some of the combat missions, for example, send you to have a fight / kill a pirate, in a location that's full of asteroids. Omber, Kernite, higher end stuff. Mission pays you 100k to complete, and 100k as a bonus if you complete it within 5 hours, but if you rush, you lose out on 10 million ISK worth of ore that you could have mined with the Venture.

So, in that situation, go kill the pirate, rescue the damsel, bring her to station, but don't report success to the agent. Pretend you still have pirates to kill, and go back to the site with the Venture, to mine out the high end ore. Will take a while, you'll probably miss the "bonus" deadline, but the monetary gain is higher.

If you finish all other career paths before beginning Industrial you will have alot of 'junk' modules that can be reprocessed to extract a pretty large amount of minerals that will make the Industrial Missions a breeze to complete.

If you find mining rewarding/fun you should obviously mine at every opprtunity since it does provide quite alot of ISK for a brand new player but if you don´t feel like it using the technique above will provide most minerals you need to complete the Industrial path without actually mining much yourself.