I probably just rambled too much, so I apologise!

You are not going to get rich from solo mining in high-sec. I would recommend you do some PI as well, you can modify your planets while you are out mining, and then go and pick your stuff up every few days. It may also help if you can move the goods yourself (i.e. with freighter) or find someone willing to buy all of those minerals at your location. As freighting services will cut into your profits as well (although only slightly). If you only mine scordite, get scordite processing to 4 so you can use the T2 Mining Crystals in your T2 Strip Miner. Are you using T2 Strip Miners? Because T2 Strip Miners are worse than T1 if you are not using the Mining Crystals (which you haven't trained for yet). Other than that, move up to Exhumer when you can and look into doing PI.

While the profits are low, you are also not risking much of your assets. If you stick to retrievers you can purchase a new one with only a few hours of mining. If you do PI as well that will net you another 200mil a month with minimal effort. You can continue on this path, training whatever else you want to do in the game until you get more time, with quite the nest egg built up. While solo mining in a Retriever I would not expect more than 10-15 mil per hour profit. But with 6-9 hours a week and with 200 mil per month in PI you can still bring in 400 - 600 mil a month. If you train Ice Harvesting, and find an Ice Belt you can make much more mining it than Ore. The Ice Belts don't last very long however, and there are far less Ice Belts than Ore Belts. Also you can train drone skills and Mining Drones to increase your yield.

And after Mining, Refining and PI comes probably using your own minerals to produce stuff to make even more money. Then a Trader to sell it in the most efficient way. If making money in Eve is you goal, the sky is the limit :D

I considered Ice but assumed from reading up on it that unless you were prepared to be there when they refresh it wasn't worth the effort as they disapear quickly. As for drones I started out mining with drones but dropped them once I was able to use the strip miners. My drone hold now holds defence drones to protect me from rats, it does mean I can semi-AFK whilst mining. Was that a poor choice?

I considered Ice but assumed from reading up on it that unless you were prepared to be there when they refresh it wasn't worth the effort as they disapear quickly.

The 5 Bill ISK I made from it (and making Fuel Blocks) this past month highly disagrees.

I am comparing the ammounts of isk I would be getting from selling a hold load of unprocessed Ore to refining it and selling it and there doesn't seem to be that much difference. To do this I have been comparing the best closest buyers price to the price I would get if I nipped off to sell at my local trade hub

When you're talking about 30,000M3 worth of ore then no there is a very minor difference in price after refining. But once you get into fleets, start getting mining boosts, have higher skills, etc. the difference is pretty considerable. It might take you 45 minutes to fill 30,000M3 of ore but players who play multipule accounts, have boosts, T2 crystals, maxed skills can mine far greater volumes of ore, so refining becomes very important (I can mine something like 24,000M3 of ore every 2 minutes roughly for example).

I recommend getting enough to purchase a Mackinaw because it has 35,000m3 orehold. It is really aimed at ice mining but it is the best solo semi-afk miner out there.

First of all just doing it with a retriver sux. U have to go back and forth a lot. Invest in alts maybe 2 other accounts. 2 hulks 1 orca. Also get to training bonuses and mindlink with max skills u can rip veld and scordite in 2 cycles. So it will keep u switching targets every few mins..also train individual refineing skills as they r useful for t2 mining crystals. Once your up there in skills ripping a whole belt clean with 3 mining toons and a hauler will only take about 1-2 hours.

[quote=Rita Torres]



EDIT : Mining missions are terrible terrible isk per hour.

Wrong, I made 4.5 bill in one month using two accounts to do mining missions. I even had to start at level ones and grind my way up to lvl 4's.

If you enjoy mining, don't have a lot of time to play per week, then I would recommend mining missions. I chose agents based on whether their corp has level 4 R&D agents. Some are very quick, some take forever (such as the ones where you have to slow boat 40km to your rock). There are a mix of gas, ice and asteroid mining. By the time you do level 3 mining missions, I recommend T2 drones.

You get your own pocket of space to mine in, with special asteroids (you could use mining crystals on them, but I don't think they're worth it). Some missions have specific rats that appear. You can get normal belt rats for the system. If your mission spawns drones, I recommend salvaging the wrecks. Armor plates have gone up in price (the new capital sized rigs need about 5x more than large rigs, and armor tanked capitals are the standard).

No, it's not sellable, well you can on contract, but there won't be much demand.

So is the profit from Mining missions simply from the isk reward for doing the mission and it's bonus?

I have to admit this wasn't an area I had considered. How does this work? Obviously to get my standing up for refining I did a heap load of mining missions but I recall the stuff I was mining for the mission wasn't sell-able. Or have I got the wrong idea?

So is the profit from Mining missions simply from the isk reward for doing the mission and it's bonus?

I have found most often as a rule of thumb that their is a 10% markup, (if your relevant skills are maxed) to go along each stage
of the game. From ore to refined minerals for example should get you an additional 10% markup.

Some people for example just buy ore and refine it and sell the minerals. Who would do that for free? There is your markup.

Next level is to take the minerals and produce stuff to sell. Here you run into additional costs of buying blueprints and refining them. But again if you max out the skills you should see at least a 10% markup from the price of the minerals required to build the item to the finished product.

Now of course you run into a shiping problem getting ore to a refinery gettting minerals to a industry center and getting finished product to a sales location. Again more skills to max out trading skills freighting skills remote market skills.

This path just keeps going then on to T2 production. More skills to max out. Also exploration becomes part of T2 production.
More skills to max out.

All the way along this path you can opt to buy stuff that you can not do yourself because of lack of time,skills etc but buying always adds to your cost basis and makes it more difficult to compete in the end market with your product. PVP in the market place.

this is great in theory ... but all those "MIMAF" people kinda gut the T1 market ... not to mention all the ships needing extra materials these days (and competing with pre-patch built stuff).

So is the profit from Mining missions simply from the isk reward for doing the mission and it's bonus?

Big thank you for all the above advise.

I think I definately now have some form of direction to work towards. I is good to know that currently I've not done too much incorrectly and that the fiscal returns I'm seeing are quite normal.

I will now work on filling in a few gaps in the form of specific Ore Processing/mining skills and also T2 strip miners with crystals. I will also consider a long term project of investigating PI set ups. And finally work towards a hauler ship for moving all this stuff about and then maybe a larger mining vessel.

Fully skilled t2 mining drones will bring in a additional 312 m3 per min

the retriever can run 2 sets of light drones so you can use mining drones between rats
you can also set mining laser upgrades 2 in all low slots once your core skills are up the t2 strip miners with the correct cristals are going to help output but also add to micro management if you use t1 crystals remember to pull them before they are destroyed about *95% damage and recycle you will get all the nox it takes to build them back.

it does scale well with multiple accounts but only would recommend that if you have enough mining time to cover your plex cost. if you do go multiple accounts you want 1 character to train for orca and command skills and the rest to move up to hulks with t2 strips and t2 crystals. Getting 4 characters each could specialize in 1 ore and the drones get the ore you are not crystaled for and you should be clearing fields in under 1 hr.