I cannot say that I do not mine in EVE Online.  I certainly have mined in the past.  There is a whole series of posts from around the 2007-2008 era here on the blog about climbing up the mining track

But on moving to null sec I largely gave it up as an ISK making venture.

That was probably a mistake.  If I had invested in a Rorqual a decade back I would probably own a titan by now.  But mining in null sec is a fraught business.  While it isn’t a dangerous as low sec, you’re still in danger of roving gangs.  And then there are the rules.

Null sec empires create a defense network to moderate dangers, but that means rules about who gets to mine what and what rocks need to be mined first, and that is before we even get into the whole realm of the unwritten rules of mining etiquette.

It isn’t an impossible web to navigate, but unless you’re going to make it your thing it isn’t worth the effort in my book.

When they did the big mining update back in late 2021 as part of the New Dawn quadrant, all part of CCP’s grand effort to make the game more fun by wrecking the economy, I took the skill points refunded from my mining skills and put them into combat skills.  It was a time of peak lunacy from CCP during which many objectively bad ideas were taken seriously.  Again, summed up in my post about the year of disappointment.

So mining is right out… mostly.

I do, however, still mine on a small scale.  There was, of course, the recently finished Winter Nexus event, during which I spent much time in an Endurance expedition frigate mining ice.  That is about my speed these days.  Something small.  No mining modules that require crystals or special skill or that involve the wretched waste/residue mechanic that CCP thought was a brilliant idea back with New Dawn.

But mostly I run mining missions.

This is part of the whole AIR Daily Goals thing, which frequently features a couple of mining related tasks.

Well, the best task is earning 50 LP with an NPC corp, which isn’t just a mining task, but it can be.

A typical task selection

You see, I have an alt, on my alt account, tucked away in a quiet system in a back corner of Amarr space in a station with a level 2 mining agent with a Venture, a Heron, and a Procurer.  His job is to log in, grab a level 2 mining mission, form a fleet with with my main, run the mission, and turn it it.

On turn in, the LP take is split between the two.  Task complete.  It takes very little time most mornings and tends to be quicker than a security mission of the same level.  Also, I don’t have to deal with ammo or lost drones.

Then my main just has to do the three jumps or manufacture an item or some other task… or spend the 2,500 Evermarks to buy a task completion if I’m too lazy… and then he is done.  Do that 12 days during a month and you get 225,000 skill points, plus the 120,000 you get for doing two daily tasks for 12 days.  Not a bad little boost to your skill point training regimen.

As such, over the last year or more, I have run a lot of level 2 mining missions.  I have run enough to have become a bit of an expert on them… not that there was much there to be an expert about.  There were basically three missions.  Two were to mine some small rocks, one set in the well known coral asteroid, used in so many sites and missions, and the other with the rocks arrayed about an annoyingly large yam shaped asteroid.

Those were both missions for the Venture, as the volume being mined was small and both required some maneuvering to get to all of the rocks.

The other was the big rock mission, variations on an asteroid that hit a mining station, which required mining 6,000m3 of ore.  It could be done in a Venture, but since its mining hold only has a capacity of 5,000m3, it required two trips and some patience with the mission tracker, which really hates when you go back to the station mid mission.

For that one out came the Procurer.  For some reason I had a brick tanked Procurer sitting around.  It doesn’t have a scanner or a prop mod or mining rigs, just a shield hardeners and a lot of EHP when they are running.  But for a one rock mining mission that needs 6,000m3 of mining hold space, that was fine.  I didn’t bother to refit it.  All it does is undock, warp to the site, move a few meters, mine the rock, then warp back to dock up.

Doing these missions regularly I learned what nuances there were, which rocks to mine first, how to get them all while moving as little as possible.

But with Catalyst missions got updated.  This is the old familiar asteroid mining station of so many missions.

Always something going wrong here

That has been replaced by an Upwell station.

A new flavor of mission

And it is not always a mining station with a rogue asteroid stuck in it.

A new location for that single asteroid mission

Gone also are the giant asteroid and coral asteroid of old.  Now there is a variety of sites, all visually upgraded from the old routine.

My Venture in there poking at rocks

So the view has gotten a serious upgrade.

Another of the new mining mission sites

Meanwhile, the arrangement of the rocks has been condensed.  If you have 8 to 10 rocks to mine then tend to be in a tighter group that, if you’re paying attention, you can usually get all within range of your Venture so you don’t have to scoot around so much to finish the mission.

All inside my 16km mining beam range

Then there are the faster mining cycles that came with the expansion.

• Mining lasers and strip miners now will have 4x faster cycles, and gas cloud harvesters will have 2x faster cycles. The yield per cycle, capacitor usage, and mining crystal volatility damage has been adjusted proportionally to maintain the same overall mining yield over time.

That it was offset by a reduction in yield, so that you get the about the same amount of ore over time is fine, because on the missions with multiple rocks they tend to be small, so I am less likely to lose as much time only to find that the rock barely had anything left to give.

(I don’t bother to mount a survey scanner, I’m only there for the ten rocks.)

I’m a little less thrilled about the mining crits when running missions.  Those were good for the Winter Nexus event, but the extra you get doesn’t count for the mission so you end up with extra ore that you cannot refine or sell sitting in your mining hold.

Likewise, the new built in survey tool doesn’t do much on missions.  The ore has no value and you need an upgrade to see the yield remaining.  But it was useful during the Winter Nexus, when it did let you see remaining units left.

3 units of volatile ice remaining

I am neither here nor there on the mining hold capacity indicator that floats behind your ship when you activate the new survey.

It is following me!

You were able to set that as your cargo hold indicator in the main HUD previously, so not a big win, but no harm in it either I guess.

And I cannot complain about the fact that they upped the rewards, both ISK and LP, for doing the missions even if that isn’t why I am doing them.

From my extremely limited perspective these updates were pretty good.  My little Venture or not so little Procurer get to see new scenes.

My Venture headed to the next batch of rocks

The rest of the updates didn’t have much of an impact.  I am not going to upgrade my little mining ships with abyssal upgraded mining modules and I haven’t bothered to look for one of the new mining destroyers.  What I have fits my needs already. And the new phased asteroid field thing… well, that is a null sec mining thing.  I don’t mine there.

Finally, there is the new mining focused epic arc mission.  I should send my alt on that some day and see what it is about.

Overall I cannot complain about that aspect of the expansion.  It gave me a few nice perks.

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