Greedy Goblin

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Business Thursday: Blitzing mining missions

I wrote about mission mining, probably the most profitable way of highsec mining: no travel, no refining, no gankers, no rock switching. Now I finished polishing this method, reaching 25-30M/hour/pilot while being practically AFK in a cheap ship.

Mission blitzing means cherry-picking the best missions from the agent and finishing them fast. This is what we do here: accept only two kind of mining missions, the gas mining and the ice mining. This was made profitable by the ice harvester speed doubling. Both missions pay very good ISK and LP for relatively little time. But the point is that there is no redock and retarget like with the ores. Please note that I now checked for the perfect setup, this isn't newbie income, I had an Orca with T2 cycle time, T2 beam range and T2 shield harmonizing links and mining mindlink. Let's see the two missions:

The ice mission throws you out from 10-15km of a single ice asteroid containing 20 units of ice. Just start the harvesters (beam range increase link needed), launch the drones and orbit the ice 10km. Not much closer or you bump into debris. The ship to be used:

[Retriever, Ice Mission]
Pseudoelectron Containment Field I
Ice Harvester Upgrade II
Ice Harvester Upgrade II

Limited Adaptive Invulnerability Field I

Ice Harvester II
Ice Harvester II

Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Ice Harvester Accelerator I

Hobgoblin II x5

With IH-1003 implant you can cycle the beams under 1 min, mining all ice out in 10 minutes. The reward is about 1.5M ISK and 3.5-4.5K LP. The LP/ISK conversion of industrial NPC corps are around 1000, so you get 5-6M ISK for this nil work. The rats are disposed fast so they can't put a serious dent into your shield. I strongly discourage you from using Mackinaws, someone might bother to scan you down. I also discourage using 3x Ice Harvester Upgrade II, the CPU requirements will remove all tank, making you an easy mark for a single Catalyst. While you are in a mission deadspace area, you shouldn't ask for being ganked.

The gas mission is done by a Venture. You arrive 25km from the 450 units of gas, get there fast with AB, orbit at 500M with AB on and that's it. You need the harvester range upgrade link on the Orca as the high speed makes the Venture actually orbit at 1000-2000M. Use this fit:

[Venture, Gas Mission]
Damage Control II

Medium Shield Extender II
1MN Afterburner II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II

Gas Cloud Harvester II
Gas Cloud Harvester II
[empty high slot]

Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I

Hobgoblin II x2

How to tank the incoming rat or ganker damage?

With perfect skills and GH-803 implants you can mine it out in 19 minutes. The reward is 2-2.5M ISK and 5.5-6K LP.

After running more than 60 such missions my corp standing is still positive, so there is no need for extreme amount of storyline missioning. Still having a covops hauler to do the storyline distribution missions is handy. As you run missions in 0.5 systems for maximum LP, you'll be often sent to lowsec with the storylines. If the mining missions sends you out of the system, just decline.

Obviously, running a single miner pilot with an Orca is dumb. The point is to have a multi-pilot farm with one Orca. As there is no more interaction with the pilots than dock, get mission, undock, activate modules, send out drones. You can run it with large pilot numbers without multiboxing software. Since the perfect miner pilot is complete in 3 months, the accounts can be used to train your main pilots. Since they do nothing that is secret or even interesting, you can give out their full API without hesitation. If you have more miner pilots than main accounts, just train supercapital pilot alts for sale on the accounts.

Usual security measures apply: do not mine while having an expensive clone (+4 primary learning, +3 secondary, IH-1003, GH-803), do not use Mackinaw, tank your Orca to the teeth and keep it next to a station, don't fleet up with strangers, every pilot should be in his solo corp, Orca in the NPC corp.

You can use this method while running mining missions in lowsec/nullsec. Your income can be even higher if you use a Rorqual for boosting. Warning: soon you can't boost from under a POS shield, so you'll need to place your Orca/Rorqual next to a deathstar POS. In null that probably means Orca as Rorquals can be drive-by Doomsdayed.

One more tip: do not mission in Caldari space, Guristas rats ECM you.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is another style of L4 ice mining mission that gets you 2 separate chunks, and the chunks are separated by 15 or 20km.

I never declined any because my goals were standing with the corp in order to unlock R&D agents and set up jump clones.

The drone bunkers in the gas missions were the last sites in the game that dropped drone poo (I have a few gleaming and precious alloys from these sites) until the loot tables were cleaned up for Odyssey.

For folks who are skilling up for these missions, my recommendation is to be able to use T2 drones before you do the gas harvesting ones as the drones spawned will chew up your Venture faster than you can knock them down. In the Odyssey changes, the drone bunker in gas missions is now non-destroyable, so you couldn't come in with a more powerful ship (say a destroyer) and blow the bunker before mission rats spawn.

Mission descriptions for mining missions at:
http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=MissionReportsMining

Anonymous said...

Have done this for a while with Skiff (fast) / Venture.

It's a pretty fast way to push (faction)-standing for a certain character, if you can setup your own little mining fleet (4 miner).

No hauling before the mission is finished(4x 15k m³), and since the drones switch targets the Ventures have less trouble with the rats.

Anonymous said...

Actually, the changes to offgrid boosting in 1.1 will EXCLUDE Orcas and Rorquals. So it will not be soon but inly after they changed (read added to) Orcaand rorqual tank and/or maneuverability

Anonymous said...

Actually mining links are excluded from the "no links in POS" change.