EVE New Citizens Q&A

Growing up and moving into adulthood I can recall several times where something happened in my life where I had learned a lesson and it was at that point that I sometimes recalled something that my father had said years previously which suddenly made sense to me.

Just because somebody doesn't realize what I am telling them now or even if they aren't even aware that they don't understand, it is possible for that stuff to roll around in the subconscious and for you to learn from it and make sense of it later.

Even if you don't consciously have an "aha!" moment you can still be helped by stuff that you don't currently understand. I actually think that sometimes those are the most effective lessons.

I just try to do my best to break down complex ideas from Eve into a couple of paragraphs that hopefully help out a newbie here and there. I am sure that it works sometimes and I am sure that at other times it doesn't. All I can do is try to be helpful.

Another of those oft told lies we find propagated in EvE.
Done properly and for those with the right mind set hauling can be extremely enjoyable. I have never found a way to make ISK in game that takes as little effort or attention to the game as a whole so I have lots of time during those long runs from here to there to do other things like work on a crossword puzzle, play board games with my children or friends, talk to my brothers and sisters or my parents on the phone and the list goes on. No hauling is not for everyone, but that does not mean that it is not or cannot be fun for others.

The whole ISK to PLEX (for new Alpha clones) stuff should be forgotten. It might be doable by veteran players who make an alpha clone alt and try to do it as a challenge, but as a new player you lack the knowledge and experience to do so. You can read as many guides as you want, the experience only comes with time.

Lets take your mining adventure as an example and let me show you how I would've done it with years of experience.

A miner gets to know the system he mines in first. I would go on evemaps.dotlan.net and see if I can find a nice lower-highsec system (0.5-0.6) not too far away from a market hub like Jita or Amarr and relatively quiet. Then when I found one, I would check the killboards for regular ganks and see if any ganking corporations are active there. If not, I continue and fly to the system.

The lower highsec systems have better ore belts but the rats are slightly harder. Really a none issue in high-sec though, just make sure your drones are set to be aggressive. Now they will target rats on their own even if you are lock-jammed. But with a good fit for your venture (use rig slots to get more resistance against the rat type you're facing) you can even tank the highsec rats indefinitely.

Then its to scouting the belts and if I like what I see, thats going to be my mining system. I would make mining bookmarks at ideal positions in the belt, to avoid the problem you had with needing time to preposition yourself.

These days you can use a citadel to compress your ores, so hauling is not much of a problem any more and compressed ores are even more valuable! So you can easily pick a +8 jumps away from trading hubs system that are generally low populated.

As you've seen mining takes more than flying to a random belt and starting your mining lasers.

Also, lets start the calculator. If we want to PLEX our account with mining in a Venture we would have to make 1500 million per month. Now you've already seen that one trip in your Venture makes about 0.9 million. With my current skills I mine 376m3 per minute and thus takes (5000/376=) 13.30 minutes to be full. Let's round that to 15 minutes with warp times included. That is (0.9/15) 0.06 million per minute.

Thus the math becomes 1500/0.06 = 25000 minutes or 416 hours of mining to earn your PLEX. If earning a PLEX was the goal, I wouldn't even have started.

Fly safe and I hope to see you out there!