EVE New Citizens Q&A

So far, I've only mined through career agent missions where they have told me where to go.

What's the best way to find something to mine? Do I have to use my probes to do a scan?

In Elite Dangerous you would find a system with an asteroid belt and start there.

Do asteroid belts show up on the map(beta)?

Not all systems have asteroid belts, Jita, XFBE-T and New Eden being three that don't, but most do.

Dotlan is your friend for this sort of thing, you can drill down into any system and get a pretty good set of stats. Here is an example for New Caldari:

http://evemaps.dotlan.net/system/New_Caldari

From this you can see that New Caldari has two asteroid belts as well as 5 planets, 8 moons and 5 stations etc. Note that the Belts/Icebelts label is out of date, Icebelts are no longer fixed, but spawn as anomolies in those systems.

In addition to the fixed asteroid belts, ore belts can spawn as anomolies (like the Ice Belts). These tend to be slightly richer than the fixed belts. You need to use the scanner to see and warp to them, but you don't need to drop probes. Just open up the scanner and make sure that the anomolies filter is on. Then you can warp directly to them from right clicking on the entry in the scan window.

Many combat missions also have ore belts in their rooms and these are the safest belts to mine as people have to actively drop combat probes and scan you down to find you in them. Note that if you complete the mission first, the site and asteroids will despawn if you warp out, but if you keep an alt in the site while you fetch a mining ship, the mission space and any belts will remain.

Finally you get cosmic signatures that can contain ore belts, these do need to be probed down. I can't remember seeing any ore specific cosmic signatures (other than gas sites), but they definitely are a part of combat cosmic signature sites. Such sites are not as safe as your mission spaces, because other people can core probe them down directly and they tend to be ungated, whereas your mission spaces are usually gated and other people can only get to them by combat probing your ship down. Again you must keep someone in a combat site to stop it despawning after all the rats are dead.

By dangerous, I'm talking low, null and WH space and of course the occassional suicide ganker in high sec. But if you are in a Venture in high sec, you shouldn't have a problem.

Worth (re-)mentioning is whenever an asteroid belt is mined out, it will be reseeded after the daily (11:00 eve time/GMT) downtime.

There are systems out there with 30+ asteroid belts, and as mentioned, dotlan is one tool for finding these large mining systems.

That would be funny if Jita system had a bunch of mining belts in it....pure chaos, even funnier if it had decent asteroids as a risk vs reward thing. lol

The Forge can be mined out on bussy days, but most other regions are fine.

http://www.eve-central.com/

is a third-party market site that will show you prices all around the universe. I don't know how often it updates its data, though.


http://www.evepraisal.com/

Is good for checking out prices in the main trade hubs, especially for large quantities of stuff.

I'm sure there are others more specific to mining, but it's not my thing, so that's all I know.

I'm also fairly certain that you will make more selling raw ore than minerals without some reprocessing skills.

This game has region-wide "markets" that function more like stock exchanges but instead of stocks you trade the actual things. It's all player-made (or player-gathered), the only NPC vendors are for skill books and some minor / flavor goods like milk and frozen seeds.

So as a result, "what's best" may change based on supply and demand.

Because the market interface lists pretty much every item or ship in the game, it also functions as an encyclopedia; you simply bring up what you want to look at, and instead of buying or selling, you right-click and choose "show info". You'll see the skills required, what the item is used for, variations / alternatives, and so on.

As an example, the asteroids have different types of ore (the lower the sec. rating of the solar system, the better the ore, with the best being found in null-sec and/or wormhole space). Ore is good for only one thing: you refine it at a station or refinery to produce minerals. Minerals are used to manufacture all sorts of things, from ships to guns to defensive modules to ammo to ... everything. So there should be a universal demand for minerals.

However, without Material Reprocessing skills trained, and without a dedicated industrial citadel, if you refine the ore yourself you'll only get about 50% of the theoretical yield. With max skills trained and so on, veterans can get 60-70%. So, some of them will set up trade offers on the market to buy your ore, pay you a few percent more than what you'd get if you refined to minerals yourself. They buy your ore, refine it with the higher yields that they have, and still make some profit. Others will set up orders for a few percent LESS, to make a profit from the lazy people.

So what you want to do is, once you've mined a bunch, right click on the ore and "view market details" see how much you'd get for it. Remember that you have to transport it to the station where the order is. Some people set up region-wide buy orders, and those will show up highlighted in green because you'll be in range to sell to them even at your home base.

But instead of selling, close the market interface and right-click your ore again and "reprocess". This will open up the refinery interface, so you can see how many minerals you get. For each mineral, "view market details" and add up all the sum totals to see what you'd get if you refine the stuff yourself.

Finally, the Gallente have several types of industrial transport ships; the Nereus is a general purpose transport that you can enhance to about 8,000 m3 of cargo if you fill up the low slots with Expanded Cargohold modules. The Miasmos and Kryos have specialized ore and mineral holds that can carry 45,000-50,000 m3 but only those commodities. Cost for the ships is about the same.

Keep in mind, though, that transport ships are very poorly armored/shielded. They can be destroyed in one shot or a few shots, before Concord (NPC) police even have a chance to come to your aid. The attacker will be killed by Concord, but if you carry 100 million ISK of cargo, it is well worth the trouble to kill you, lose a ship worth 1-2 million ISK, and then loot your cargo and make a profit. This is called suicide-ganking, and it is VERY likely to happen especially close to the market hubs or along the routes between the various empires.

So don't carry too much in your industrial transport. Anything over 10 million ISK will likely result in an attack in high-sec. Install the largest Shield Extender modules that your ship can fit, based on its available power grid, and add EM, Thermal, and maybe even Kinetic shield hardeners to increase the damage resistance profile of your ship. And because the best defense for you is to bug out, try to make your ship agile with inertial stabilizers or nanofibers in the low slots (low slots are used for cargo extenders too, so it's a trade-off, agility vs. transport capacity, for the Nereus).

... and they tend to belong to research corps.

Quite possibly the worst corp for reprocessing being Lai Dai Corporation.

https://tinyurl.com/hhh25n6