Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Mining in a C1

In every wormhole system, there are sites to complete. One of them is Gas mining site. I did all the gas sites showing up in my wormhole but the results are disappointing: the total income I gained from this is about 60M over a week. You can't even do it AFK as those nasty rats show up after some time.

Please note that the price of WH gases vary a lot. Some are magnitudes more expensive than others.
  • C320: 72000
  • C540: 55000
  • C32: 11000
  • C72: 4000
  • C50: 3100
  • C28: 2100
  • C70: 550
  • C84: 500
  • C60: 220
You can actively cherry-pick the valuable gases, store it in the tower and let the rest just despawn. You can clear that too if you want the signature gone. If you want to use 3 or more accounts on this activity, make one a fleet booster, you can run mining links below the tower shield. You can fit mining links on a Gnosis if you have no better options. Finishing a gas site is fast if you send a couple of Ventures on it, so the ISK/hour isn't (that) bad and there isn't any risk as the Venture is expendable (assuming you aren't mining in a Slave pod).

There are ore sites in wormhole space, but they suffer from the great EVE ore paradox:
The chart shows the Jita price of 1m3 the various ores in New Eden. Blue line indicates highsec ore. Since the mining beams eat the same volume from all ores in the same time, the chart is practically ISK/effort. Mercoxit, the only source of Morphite shines out of the others. But the rest are in 30% distance of the average, 182, which translates to 20M/hour with OK skills. Mining the most lowly of ores, Veldspar is more than half as effective as mining the best (except the special Mercoxit). So Wormhole mining doesn't seem to be competitive in first glance. Nullsec is much easier due to local chat. If neut shows up, you just safe up. I mean your bot, because I doubt anyone mines in nullsec manually. The N110 anoms contain all kind of ores except Mercoxit, both highsec and nullsec ores:
I did an extensive mining session and couldn't finish a single anomaly with 3 miners + booster, despite I got a freighter-load of ore. OK, my pilots aren't perfect, around 1700m3/min. The activity is highly AFK-able, as the asteroids are large. The ship is clearly Retriever. Use Mackinaw only if you mine fully actively. Procurer/Skiff is worthless as there is no Concord to save you, Covetor/Hulk can be better if you have enough accounts to keep a Miasmos constantly busy.

So WH mining is profitable, but only if you have enough accounts to keep you active and busy. This case it's 20-40% better than highsec. With less accounts just use expendable Retrievers and let them AFK on asteroids. If someone finds you, whelp. Or... don't mine at all. I haven't seen a soul while mining and C1s are generally PvP-free zones. Rats shown up once, but needed a combat ship to deal with. This is the collection of the mining session and I like to stress that there were asteroids left in the anom:

While an N110 C1 is just one jump from highsec, a freighter worth of ores are still 16 jumps with a Miasmos, which isn't too fun activity and its time cost lowers the ISK/hour of the whole op down to highsec levels. You can also see that this one session could fill the corporate hangar. I already mentioned that the most powergrid-efficient POS storage unit is the X-large assembly array.

There is an option though for dedicated miners. You can use that X-large assembly array for assembling a Rorqual. That's the best mining boost ship, increasing your theoretical yield to 2500 with a Mackinaw, which translates to 30M/hour with the better ores. The Rorqual can also compress ore, making it much easier to transport. Important: compressed ores are not competitive with mineral compression, it has less than half compression ratio than 425mm railgun I and similar items, therefore compressed ores have no living market, a few are sold in Jita, so you have to refine it in Jita for sale, needing a properly skilled Jita alt. But that's a large investment that will only come back if you are a busy and dedicated miner who actually likes mining.

All in all, going to a C1 WH is a legitimate choice for a miner. But casual mining isn't a good choice for WH dweller, nor it can be advised for a few-account using casual miner to move to WH.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hauling the ore out of a C1 seems to be fail.
Refining the ore inside the C1 to produce stuff or have less to haul is fail because of max refining < 100%.
Include refining waste in your calculation and I bet you see: mining scordite in highsec with 100% refining > mining ABC ore in a C1.
As expected.

But if you build a Rorqual you make a statement: I'm here to stay as I won't get this fat lady out of this whole

Karak Bol said...

If CCP would just rework the intensive refining array, WH mining could become quiet interesting...
Requiring to build a Rorqual just to get the stuff out without going insane is a bit too much. And then: You do not always have a mining site at hand. So a dedicated miner would have to sit around for quiet some time.

Anonymous said...

Last time I was in a w-space system full time the ore and gas sites only spawned rats once. Once that first spawn was dealt with there were no more to worry about.