EVE New Citizens Q&A

When you're out ratting, and then salvage your wrecks, you end up with scrap and other damaged components in your cargo bay. I see these listed for sale in trade hubs. Who buys them and why? Do players reprocess scrap? Is it cheaper to do that (assuming you have good reprocessing skills) than getting the minerals in other ways?

Scrap metal (along with many other modules and items) which you loot from wrecks can be reprocessed into it's raw material inputs. The basic reprocessing efficiency is 50% and this can be improved with the scrap metal reprocessing skill.

Along with scrap metal, there are also many other modules and items which are not favored for actual use on ship fittings - and therefore sell for what their scrap value is worth. Some players choose to specialise in buying those items at a price below scrap value, reprocessing them, and then reselling the minerals.

One handy trick, when sorting out the loot in your cargo bay is to drag all of the items into your reprocessing window. Anything with a yellow exclamation mark will sell for a greater ammount than scrap value, and should be removed from the reprocessing window. Everything else can be scrapped (assuming you have no use for the modules). As you will derive more worth selling the minerals instead.

If you spend a lot of time running missions for a particular NPC corporation your standing will eventually be raised to the point where you can do reprocessing at their station without cost. Meaning that after gathering the loot, you can sort it and reprocess it at the same station from which you are doing the missions - without cost.