EVE: Intro, Tools, Mining & Agents
I recently came across several tools that I have found to be completely invaluable. The first is EVEMon. EVEMon allows you to monitor your character's skill advancement progress, and alerts you when a skill has finished training. It synchs up to the EVE server hourly to stay up to date. But it also lets you set up a skill plan. You tell it what skills you want, to what level you want them trained, and it'll automatically fill in pre-requisites. But what's more, it will also tell you if you can shorten the training time by training the various learning skills, and in which order to train them. Absolutely invaluable.
Another fun tool is the EVE Ship Fitter (direct link!). This can take your character's XML data (say, from EVEMon), and then will let you try out various ship fitting arrangements. I use it usually to see A) if a certain loadout will fit on a given ship (accounting for powergrid and CPU usage) and B) how fast that loadout will drain the capacitor. Quite useful.
Recently, I started a new character whose focus is to be mining and construction. Mining, as most people who play EVE for about an hour will know, is entirely mind-numbing and repetitive work. It's not very hard, particularly if you set up instas, but it's not very exciting. Further, if your skills don't really support being able to take on someone trying to kick the shit out of you, you're going to find yourself restricted to high-sec space, which doesn't have the more profitable asteroids to mine.
So, all this in mind, I got a bit bored with the mining last night and decided to run some agent missions instead. I picked 'Federation Administration' (this particular character is Gallente, so Gallente Federation) and headed out to he nearest agent.
The first mission I got was a kill mission. Not at all what I was expecting. It was also a rather difficult kill mission for my highly-not-combat-oriented character (a mission that I would have, sadly, waltzed through as my other character) that ended up taking about two and a half hours to complete (hit and fade attacks). The total reward for this mission was 89,000.
I got to thinking: how much and how fast do I make money when mining? Given the aforementioned, I've been staying in high-sec space. As such, the best type of ore I've found to mine is condensed scordite. Given my itty-bitty frigate's cargo hold, I can only hold around 1600 units of scordite at any given time. Once refined, this translates into about ISK 12,600. But I can do a mining circuit in about 4 minutes.
ISK 89,000 / 2.5 hours = ISK 35,600 / hour
ISK 12,600 / 4 minutes = ISK 189,000 / hour
So, mining may be boring and repetitive...but it's also a helluva lot safer and more profitable than running agent missions.
Another fun tool is the EVE Ship Fitter (direct link!). This can take your character's XML data (say, from EVEMon), and then will let you try out various ship fitting arrangements. I use it usually to see A) if a certain loadout will fit on a given ship (accounting for powergrid and CPU usage) and B) how fast that loadout will drain the capacitor. Quite useful.
Recently, I started a new character whose focus is to be mining and construction. Mining, as most people who play EVE for about an hour will know, is entirely mind-numbing and repetitive work. It's not very hard, particularly if you set up instas, but it's not very exciting. Further, if your skills don't really support being able to take on someone trying to kick the shit out of you, you're going to find yourself restricted to high-sec space, which doesn't have the more profitable asteroids to mine.
So, all this in mind, I got a bit bored with the mining last night and decided to run some agent missions instead. I picked 'Federation Administration' (this particular character is Gallente, so Gallente Federation) and headed out to he nearest agent.
The first mission I got was a kill mission. Not at all what I was expecting. It was also a rather difficult kill mission for my highly-not-combat-oriented character (a mission that I would have, sadly, waltzed through as my other character) that ended up taking about two and a half hours to complete (hit and fade attacks). The total reward for this mission was 89,000.
I got to thinking: how much and how fast do I make money when mining? Given the aforementioned, I've been staying in high-sec space. As such, the best type of ore I've found to mine is condensed scordite. Given my itty-bitty frigate's cargo hold, I can only hold around 1600 units of scordite at any given time. Once refined, this translates into about ISK 12,600. But I can do a mining circuit in about 4 minutes.
ISK 89,000 / 2.5 hours = ISK 35,600 / hour
ISK 12,600 / 4 minutes = ISK 189,000 / hour
So, mining may be boring and repetitive...but it's also a helluva lot safer and more profitable than running agent missions.