EVE New Citizens Q&A

Depends on the market. Do the maths, see which one is the best ISK/cargo load (the various ores are different sizes)

You ask which ore is the best for ISK then you say you're not looking for best ISK/hour. Which is it?

Your mining lasers mine a fixed m^3 per minute. Hence it will take the same time to fill your cargohold no matter what ore (ignoring wasted time). Since the ores are not the same volume per unit, you will get different amounts of the different ores in a unit time, but always the same volume.

Not mass, volume. Other than that, pretty much. So to work out the best ore to mine, look at the market value whereever you plan to sell it, look at the volume and work out how much a full cargo hold would be worth of each ore, then compare those values.

I think Elena meant that the roids come in different concentrations, so it is not so much the difference in mass between Veldspar and Scordite, it is the quality of the roids near you.

Calculating opportunity cost is usually done by cargo volume and dividing by the jumps.

I am going to calculate the difference for concentrated and compressed also.



And is there any difference between having 2 lasers on 1 ore and having 2 lasers on 2 different ore?

If you survey scan the asteroids before you start, you'll know how many units of ore are in each asteroid. You will then know when to stop your lasers so you don't waste cycles. For example if you have four rocks each with 150m3 of ore, and your lasers excavate 100m3 each cycle, you can maximise your yield by mining each rock for one cycle.

Of course, I forgot the obligatory link to Cerlestes' Ore Chart: http://ore.cerlestes.de/index.html#site:ore (bookmark it! do it now!)

Make sure you read the tutorial, just like it asks you to in the yellow note right at the top of the page. That chart gives you ore value per cubic metre, so sort by the "ISK" column in descending order and you'll find that (for today, at least) the most valuable hi sec ores are Scordite and Pyroxeres.

https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/ore/ for shameless self promotion.

Skip the Veldspar for now. Cherry pick the more valuable variants of scordite/pyroxeres first. Refining probably isn't worth it until you get closer to 0% waste. You are better off putting your skill time towards a T1 mining barge. I prefer the Procurer when first mining for it's better safety and it's cheaper. Build up your tanking skills & mining yield skills. Then refining skills.

Only go for the T2 mining barge if you really like mining, otherwise you'll have enough isk earning to start other aspects of eve like missions, or PvP, industry, etc.

Mining is not highly regarded in Eve, but the nice thing about mining is you can be learning about Eve in another window while your mining ship is busy making you isk.

Don't be afraid to chat with other miners in local (no trash talking until you can back it up), not everyone is out to get you. Try some ice mining.

Having just gone through this exercise myself a couple days ago - I can tell you that those 3 ores have different volumes but they all will fill your Venture ore hold with the exact same number of cycles from your lasers. In my case, 20 cycles (20 minutes) to fill my venture.

So what you want to see is based on the max ore hold for each ore, whatever has the highest price * units total value is what you want to mine.

if you are selling the ore outright from my calculations a couple days ago I think it was Condensed Pyroxeres and Condensed Scordite were about the same with regular Scordite and regular Pyroxeres just behind in price for a full load. All of the veldspar was was under both of those in either variety. The difference between the top 3 ore options was only about 30k isk per load. Of course, the market does change so check in game and do some quick math.

The volumes are 10 (v), 15 (s), and 30 (p) so you can get these amounts in your ore hold on the venture: (v)50,000, (s)33,333, (p)16,666 - it wont matter what your lasers pull in they will fill your hold in the exact same amount of cycles for these three ores.

for me...

2x lasers @ 248m total / 60 seconds

Ore per cycle: (p) 826, (s) 1653, (v) 2480

Time to fill Venture hold (5000):
(p) 16,666 @ 826 per cycle = 20.1 cycles
(s) 33,333 @ 1653 per cycle = 20.1 cycles
(v) 50,000 @ 2480 per cycle = 20.1 cycles

Make a spreadsheet....

16,666 * Market Price of Pyro = X
33,333 * Market Price of Scor = X
50,000 * Market Price of Veld = X

Whichever X is highest = mine it first.