Market Discussions

corestwo is partially correct: part of the price pressure on Pyerite is due to supply: I head out into the mining belts and people are mining Kernite (because Kernite is what they've mined forever), Pyroxeres (because Pyrox has Nocxium) or other ores in preference to the one which yields the highest ISK/hr. Thus one of the basic assumptions of economics has been violated: miners are not “rational players”.

I look forward to Aryth and corestwo revealing their latest multi-trillion ISK market manipulation effort once this bubble bursts. Their careful analysis and pinpointing of Pyerite as a choke point has no doubt paid off in spades :)

Interestingly enough, there were trades yesterday for 5.52 ISK and 98.53 ISK in the Sinq Laison market. Someone's trying to play silly games with the various market sites out there.

Could you post the m3 of each ore after cleaning out an entire belt in high sec?


It would be nice to get some real numbers as a function of region.

when i do break out my miners im far far far to lazy to go belt to belt and cherry pick it I mostly i mostly keep a eye on local eat food bs on TS the last thing i wana do is move a handful accounts around cheery picking ill sit in a belt till its dry then move over. so i wonder though how many miners actually mine for isk/h and not just to mine for the sake of it. if only a small percent of miners are going for pyrite that would further the bottleneck

There just isn't enough ore in high sec asteroids to be picky. You strip the whole belt and then move on.

My corp mined out an entire belt in .8 space last night.
I do not recall the total M3, but it yielded about 127m in isk.

I expect the biggest reason scrodite has risen so much is due to the fact that most common drone minerals had large amounts of pyrite. With drone minerals now pretty much gone,(still drop from some drone structures but makes a very small supply) combine with the fact that scrodite was fro so long the second least valuable ore with many miners skipped over. Pyrite supplies are quickly dwidling. The massive market speculation before the drone POO nerf created massive stockpiles which are just now running dry.

I believe scordite is the new pyroxeres and due to the high demand of pyrite and low supply of scrodite compared to veldaspar it will stay as a valuable ore.
The drone POO/module loot nerf was meant to increase the need for miners by reducing the availability of minerals from refining drone POO and meta 0 loot drops. It worked well, unlike many other idea's CCP has tried in game (unified inventory) . But combine this with the GOONS war on high sec miners and the increase in actively hunting and banning bots, the number of miners has not increased enough to maintain a supply of high sec minerals to meet the mineral demand.

The prices are high and will continue to climb until the supply exceeds the demand and then they will level off and maybe drop. that time will not be soon as the market manipulations are still on going.

The best idea I can come up with to level things out a bit without turning high sec mining into an easy afk cash cow is the modify the composition of some of the low null sec ores to drastically increase the supply of trit and pyrite in low and null. Now before you get worked up I am thinking of one ore in particular. The mighty SPOD. The yield of this ore is so messed up it is totally not worth mining currently. Yes it yields a small amount of megacyte 0.03 per unit which is fine. but it yields and equally small amount of pyrite and only slightly more trit.

I chose SPOD because one of the recent buffs to null sec grav belts was the addition of massive SPOD rocks, but they are useless due to the yield per m3. I believe this was meant to be the primary source of trit and pyrite in null but someone messed up the math. Maybe I am wrong but lets look at what can and could be done with SPOD.

Acording to Cerlestes.de SPOD is curently worth 88 isk per m3 while Veldspar is worth 218 isk/m3 and Scordite is worth 234 isk/m3. Arkonor is only worth 289 isk /m3 while Omber the worst high sec ore is 113 isk/m3. If the difference between 218 and 234 can make scrodite the second most valuable ore 88isk/m3 is a very low number. 25isk/m3 (32%) less than the worst high sec ore. This is where the problem lies with supply of low end ores in null sec.

The issue here is the size of the SPOD ore. 16m3 per unit, that is huge. Yet it only yields 0.7 trit and 0.03 pyrite per unit(16m3) WTF. Mining lasers and strip miners extract a specified m3 per cycle regardless on how many units of ore that is. Veldspar is only 0.1 m3 per unit, so for every unit of SPOD 16m3 you could mine 160 units of Veldspar. Say you are mining in a HULK or even covetor with an average yield of 1500m3 per cycle, not maxed but a good unboosted yield. That's about 94 units of SPOD per cycle @ 1408 isk/unit = $132,352 isk/cycle or 15,000 units of veldspar @ 21.8 isk/unit = $327,000isk/cycle. Why is SPOD only worth about 40% as much as the most common high sec ore that can be mined in 1.0 space in complete safety. While SPOD makes up a large portion of null sec grav sites.

Spod yields 0.7 trit per unit, Veldspar yeilds about 30 trit per unit. this translates to SPOD giving you 0.04 units of trit per m3 or 25 m3 of SPOD to get 1 unit of trit. While Veldspar is giving 300 units of trit per m3 while 25m3 of Veldspar will yield 7500 units of trit. If the amount of trit recieved from SPOD was x10 what is is now it would still only be marginally better.

Now comparing SPOD to Scordite.

SPOD yields 0.035 units of pyrite per unit of 16m3 while scordite yields 8.3 units of pyrite per unit 0.15m3. This translates to SPOD giving you 0.002 units of pyrite/m3 or 7314m3 for 1 unit of pyrite while scordite gives 55 units of pyrite/m3 or 402,285 units of pyrite for the same volume of 7314m3. Again multiplying this yeild by x10 would only marginally change the value of the ore since the yield is so small to begin with.

No let us consider what the value of SPOD would be if the amount of trit and pyrite was changed while leaving the megacyte unchanged. First multiplying the amount of both trit and pyrite by x10. This would raise the value of SPOD from 88isk/m3 to 144isk/m3. It would still be third least valuable ore still far below the value of Veldspar at 218isk/m3. What if we multiplyed the amount of trit and pyrite by x50. Well that is a little to much raising the value of SPOD to 389isk/m3 100isk/m3 more than Arkonor. What about x20. that would give SPOD a value of about 205isk/m3 still slightly lower than Veldspar and still 4th lowest value ore acording to current mineral prices, but making it a decent source of low end minerals in null sec.I think this would be a good point for it to be at. Considering that high sec ores are way higher than they should be right now. common Scordite being the second most valuable ore even over Bistot and Crokite. when the mineral prices of lowend ores drop so will the value of SPOD as we left the megacyte unchanged.

This would not be game breaking, but would make this massive ore actually worth mining in null. Currently nobody bothers with the masive SPOD rocks in null sec grav sites. This would make them a good source of low end minerals, as an alternative to mineral compression currently used to jump the huge amounts of trit and pyrite out of Jita needed to build capital ships.

Should also create a thread called: "the day when 0.0 sec mining became pointless".

Apparently there's so much less risk mining in "everywhere blue" 0.0 than hi sec, that ABC became the new low ends.

With (more or less) perfect Orca boost and Hulk skills each hisec Hulk nets 30-ish M isk/h when raiding a belt/system.
(Based on each Hulk peaking at 3042 m3/m.)

Actual net gains depend a bit on Hulks per Orca and hauling tactics.

My personal experience is that belt/system raiding works best in a +5 (ish) pilot groups, while cherry picking works better with small (or solo) gangs.

The reason being that it takes more overhead and boring fleet coordination to cherry pick with a larger group of miners.

mostly just ark, if i still have time to waste then yeah merc. generally though once i've picked the arkonor clean from the grav sites i log out and do some thing else.

Just cleared out 40M ISK worth of Scordite from belts within 4 jumps of Jita. Earlier today I cleared out about 30M ISK worth of Scordite near Dodixie.

I am in no hurry to educate the miners of New Eden. Not with Pyerite pushing 15 ISK per unit.

Just waiting for corestwo and friends to get bored of playing the market now :)