A fitting guide for miners

PvE Gameplay Center PvE Ships & Modules
1

Mining is something you learn in the tutorial and pretty much on the first day. It is one of the easiest - but not least dangerous - activity you can do in EVE.

Mining ships have been changed recently and some new ones were added. I will stay at mining barges for this since I don’t fly exhumers but the principles are the same with the major difference, there are only three mining barges.

The Procurer

This mining barge was changed to fit the needs of miners and industrialists who need to gather ore in dangerous places. This barge doesn’t have the ore-bay of the Retriever but it can take some amount of punishment and punch right back.

It has the highest amount of mobility of the mining barges, so don’t align out as soon you see trouble, keep your calm and do your refit first.

The Procurer doesn’t only mine ices and ores but you will also be able to defend yourself against smaller attacking ships.

My recommendation is to never fly without a mobile depot which you need to launch for yourself from your cargohold and one minute later can use as mobile fitting service.
Use your cargohold for a collection of modules you need during your mining operation, be it in a fleet or if you are on your own.
This may sound counter-productive but don’t ever fit mining laser upgrades on a Procurer, you don’t have much lowslots to begin with and what you want your Procurer to do it to refit a drone damage amplifier, a damage-conrol-unit, so you can even forcefully remove smaller ships like interceptors and assault frigates from the field and maybe all of your lowslot with warpcore stabilizers to make an epic escape and bring tears into the eyes of the hunter(s).

The main strength is a generous buffer tank and you should just build on that and increase that buffer with a medium shield extender (a large one won’t fit, don’t try it) and passive shield resistance amplifiers or active hardeners - depending where in New Eden you are when you mine - suited for the NPC’s that roam the asteroid belts and mining anomalies.

The Retriever

This mining barge and little brother of the Mackinaw used to be that ice-mining barge until the changes and it is now the mining barge with the largest ore-bay.
This ore-bay comes at the price of not being able to take much firepower to be destroyed, so you need to ask yourself if it is possible to stay in space for longer durations with the help of a few friends that orbit your ship while you gather the resources to keep them in ships.

As with the Procurer, you want a mobile depot in your cargohold when you undock and launch it as soon as you land in the anomaly or asteroid belt.
This way you can make sure, you can refit quickly from mining-laser upgrades to warp-core stabilizers to get out in a hurry if need arises.

I would just launch the depot and keep the fitting screen open, while you switch your view from cargo to orebay and vice versa.
This needs some practise, so take your time (and your friends) and do some practise exercises with your buddies.

The Covetor

The last of the barges buys it high-yield with a small ore bay and the least amount of ehp and mobility. It is a pure larg(er) fleet-mining ship that is not intended to be in space on it own.
However if you have a lot of friends and are part of a large corporation or alliance even, there will be mining-ops that your corp or alliance needs you to do to keep them in ships and modules.

Those mining ops will have a lot more people in them and around them that the overall ehp of the ship doesn’t matter much and your first and only concern is mining yield, so bring your depot, mining laser upgrades, deep core strip miners and lots of spare crystals and let the protection wing take care of any threads that may come your way.

Before you do mine, consider which of the barges are fitting your needs.

6 Likes
2

Just a point… If you are in hi sec and a ganking squad comes along, your MTU will not save you. Corcord response times are:

0.5: Roughly 19 seconds
0.6: Roughly 14 seconds
0.7 : Roughly 10 seconds
0.8 : Roughly 7 seconds
0.9 and 1.0: Roughly 6 seconds

What this means is that between the first shot and when concord arrives, this much time passes. Gankers want to kill you before concord arrives and jams their ship.

If it takes a minute to anchor and online an MTU, you will be dead before you can switch mods.

Also, if you have a weapons timer… Such as one caused by having your drones aggress another player, you cannot refit until the timer expires. This is 60 seconds. So refit then engage or you may not be able to refit.

2 Likes
3

26s in .5.

they can have an alt shoot a station, which spawns concord at that station and increases the delay anywhere else.

4

I stopped reading right at this moment. I doubt everything else is useless same as this.

Most important thing in ganking is that they can gank anyone in any space. So giving away 18% of yeld for no real defense is just wasting your time. This baby can take all rats with full yeld fit and run from small gankers. You don’t need anything more.

2 Likes
5

Sorry MacGregor I wrote this before the Procurer had two strip hard points. But you can kill destroyers with that if you want.

1 Like
6

Then you’ll want to go over your guide and update it. I’ve grown fond of the procurer for the simple fact that it can’t be easily ganked by some random Joe passing through the system and in dangerous space it gives a chance for a security detachment to respond and kill the pirate. The procurer has a tank equivalent to a battlecruiser and if the user has good drone skills, it’s a real threat to your run-of-them-mill frigate pilot. Add a basic tackle and you got yourself a good bait ship. You already mentioned the possible issue with the covetor and I don’t personally recommend the retriever anymore after some of my corp mates were ganked when using them.

I can’t honestly recommend T2 barges. The price tag compared to the minute edge you get in mining can’t be justified.

3 Likes
7

Then why you post stuff that has nothing to current game?

2 Likes
8

Sorry, I copied my fitting guide from the old forums over and will update it, when I can. On the old forums fomone put cottom ballff in my mouff. I fufpect it waff FEDO!

Fedo: “gnihihihihi”

e2: “Stop it!”

3 Likes
9

One bonus to using the Procurer in hisec, is that if you are in a belt and one or three gankers show up, …you can be pretty confidant they’re going to go after just about any other T1 ship in the belt before they come after you.
In hisec, particularly in some of the busy ice belts, there’s almost always easier prey than a well fit Procurer.
If you are by yourself? Well, it’s always good practice to keep aligned and update dscan regularly. …After all, it’s still Eve.

1 Like
10

My 2-bits about mining and ganking…

Procurer has good mobility and speed. Use it! Orbit your rocks, or if attacked immediately MOVE your ship to gain range and minimise incoming damage. High DPS destroyers have limited range.

Fill that EM hole in your shields. Coercer fleets are cheep and effective against mining barges and exhumers. A DCU will increase the cost to gank your ship at a slight loss to mining yield.

If you get attacked, spam that warp button to a celestial to get your pod out if your ship go boom.

Lastly, getting blown up is part of the game and you should congratulate your attackers in local for their calculated maneuvers and teamwork. It likely wasn’t personal so don’t take it that way. Enjoy the adrenalin you are probably feeling :grin: it can be addictive.

5 Likes
11

Or you can just use an appropriately tanked Skiff and sit back and laugh. You can get upwards of 200k+ EHP vs specific damage types if you know what you are doing. If you get tired of mining and want a quick break, you don’t even have to change your setup. Just head to a combat anomaly, dispatch 5 x light drones, set them to aggressive and focus fire, then orbit any object (bunker, asteroid, etc…) and sit back and watch them wipe out any combat anomaly in 0.5 to 1.0 space, while your Skiff takes near-zero damage…

1 Like
12

I forgot to mention that you can disregard this helping hand entirely since everyone is bot mining in Orcas now anyways.

1 Like
13

:thinking:

1 Like
15

Made it to the front page this week!
Congrats. :+1:

3 Likes