Hey, any recommendations for a way to earn isk? I’m trying to gather up enough isk for a month’s plex. had a kind player send me some isk but still short on quite a bit. I’m trying out industry, mainly small ammo and light drones primarily & in progress of moving to amarr space from jita
Kill other players, take their stuff, sell it.
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as the tags showed, pve and new player so can’t pvp
New players can PvP.
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not interested in pvp
Oh, it’s a PvP game, so good luck I guess.
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i did state pve, players can pvp if they want to and that’s their thing, personaly i play in a pve way, pvo personally doesn’t interest me
I thought you wanted to make isk like me, my bad.
Enjoy mining!
Not that I’ve exactly became a multi-billionaire, but my personal breakthrough came through grinding abyssals with frigates. The Triglavian Surveydata that you get there will be bought by NPC Traders for a fixed price of 100.000 ISK. Once you have a good frigate, you can run the lower tier abyssals pretty quickly, and if you don’t mind a bit of repetition, make your way to a very straight-forward first billion.
There may be better, faster ways out there. This is the one that you can do everywhere, anytime and is not very demanding. If you happen to have some interested fleet members, homefronts are an excellent, excellent alternative to smoothly earn a good handful of ISK! Try them out, see if you like it.
With tax-free regards
-James Fuchs
Paying your sub via ISK is a fast track to burnout. If it’s possible, save up for a month sub (IRL job) and play the game without turning it into a virtual job affecting your RL.
It’ll also make you more tolerant to losses in Eve — which will happen. Prepare to accept loss as its step 4 in the core game loop:
- Research and plan
- Prepare
- Execute
- Fail (eventually)
- Learn
- Go to step 1 with new learnings
Note this says nothing about PvP nor PvE, it applies to both.
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that doesn’t address the question on earning isk, it instead sounds like something that would be said on reddit
Ok, look, it’s simple. You say you want to grind for isk, if you get a Retriever you can make roughly 5 million isk an hour. To PLEX your account you need like 2.4 billion isk, so you can divide 2.4 billion by 5 million = 476 hours divided by roughly 30 days a month = 16 hours a day. So if you get busy and work hard you can do it.
Good luck and have fun!
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My recommendation is:
Exploration, relic sites specifically. Gets you into low, null, j space. Teaches you how to flee, gain a sense of when you’re being hunted, D-Scan. Teaches behaviors for great survivability, relic sites can sometimes have 50M ISK in a single site. Bonus points: fitting your heron for combat and blowing up other explorers — if they have Sisters Core Probe Launcher (many do when it’s completely unnecessary) and it drops that’s like 27M instantly.
I’m a hi-sec manufacturer working out of Amarr space. Buy, manufacturer, sell. Value add is my profit.
You can grind enough to earn the 2.5bn ISK or so a month you’ll need - I can do that in a good month one one character: I’m not highly optimised or spending hours: It’s a Game. Or you can just pay with real life currency and enjoy a more relaxed experience.
For an Alpha clone it will be harder - the specialisations that you need for capacity or to access some parts of industry are Omega only (for good reasons). With a lot of basics items - T1 drones, ammunition and ships - you are in competition with those who don’t value their time (“what I mine is free”!) but profits can be found.
Bootstrapping is hard and requires a substantial investment in time/capital.
Consider mixing PLEX when you can with some RL spend. But don’t turn Eve into a pointless low pay (pennies per hour) job.
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Low level Abbysals (I dont do them so not sure how lucrative)
Exploration (low, null and WH space for best rewards)
Gas Huffing in WHs, although the Gas Harvesting skill is expensive you can make that back in one site
I agree with other folks in this thread. Buying your game time by playing the game is just not worth the time invested until your character is actually capable of making that kind of isk and even then it isnt very much fun.
Instead I would suggest going the abyssal filament route. Instead of trying to buy game time, shoot for a well fit Gila cruiser. That ship is a literal money printer even doing Agitated level sites. One of those is more than enough to fund whatever else you decide to do.
Industry can be ok if you are sensible with what you manufacture, but it won’t make the ISK you want on its own. Having it working away in the background can help though. You can also look at PI as a source of background isk as it doesn’t require constant attention.
If you have some original blueprints you can make copies to sell through contracts - fully researched BPCs can again be a background profit.
As others on here have already said, abyssals can be lucrative even at lower levels as some of the loot has a guaranteed value.
Personally I run missions, combat sites and escalations - get enough of them and the isk can roll in, especially with some good fortune.
Whatever you do, have fun though, EVE shouldn’t be about the grind 
Are you married to high sec?
I ask because I make reasonable ISK ratting belts in 0.0 systems.
I find a system with around 15-20 belts and just go from one to the next killing the rats and selectively looting the wrecks.
An average ‘pod’ of rats is 3-5 ships, a combination of sizes up to BSs. Frigs are only worth about 25k isk in bounty, the cruisers between 80k and 300k and BC/BS between 600k and 1.1m
I’ll average around 12m every 20 minutes in bounty (the bounty cycle is every 20 mins)
Now factor in the bounty multiplier in some systems; my system pays bounties at 150%, some others like PF pay out 200%.
Then, the loot is often crap, but you’ll get some BS sized scrams/webs worth 1m/4m isk apiece regularly enough and so a decent 20 minute run down the belts should net you 10-20m in loot.
Occasionally a ‘hauler’ spawn will occur and provide somewhere between 50m and 200m in minerals.
Occasionally you’ll find a shadow rat, with a bounty between 5m and 10m and loot that ranges from about 2m (a crappy one) up to around 200m (a really good one!)
When alls said and done, you can reprocess all the crappy loot after you take out select pieces for shitfits and market sales.
You can then haul the minerals off and sell them.
This might not be the most glamorous or lucrative activity, but it’s consistent; you can do it continuously unlike a lot of other activities, and can rely on a baseline level of fundage.
This trumps most mining for me, as the hauling aspect is entirely optional and you can still make isk without hauling, I just take that as an ‘extra’ cherry.
ymmv and you can still get ganked but you’d need to be completely aloof to get caught often.
Join a corp: Joint ratting and mining missions create way more ISK/h than solo, and you have a somewhat safe space to generate additional income by PI and production.
I think the best way to start making isk as a newer pilot starts with picking a side in New Eden HS
Ganker vs Miner
Both have a solid path in generating isk!