Income to fund the things I *do* enjoy

[Erland_Kanenald]

HI all,

4mill SP/110mill net worth

I have no problem knowing what I want to do when I’m actually playing (actually, that’s not strictly true - I enjoy lots of things, and tiddling around in all of them, but that’s another matter…), but what I want to do is the age-old ‘moon on a stick’ issue of making money for very little without doing much when I’m semi-away from keyboard.

If this sounds a bit unlikely, I’m not a million miles away from it. When I have a spare hour or so, I just leave my Retriever mining Plagiolase in 0.5 sec, which I then just dump at my corp’s processing plant who pay me something like 94% of market value for it, and given it saves me trucking it all over the place, and waiting for it to sell, I think it’s well worth it.

I have the following relevant skills:
Mining V
Astrogeology III (but nearly IV)
Mining Upgrades IV

Mining Barge IV
Mining Frigate IV

No implants or boosters. I don’t mine in a fleet because it’s more about the opportunism of grabbing an hour when I have one.

This results in an income of about 3.8mill per hour. This is ok.

What i want to know is, is there a way to improve this semi-afk, semi-passive approach. PI could run akll the time, of course, but I don’t know how much investment/skill training it would take to get to a similar level.

Also, T2 barges still only have 2 strip miners, right? It’s not really clear to me at the moment that the risk of losing one - given my semi-afk approach - would justify one.

At the moment, I’m not using drones, mainly because I need to defend myself with fighty drones against rats. I’m not against the idea though, and 2 mining drones/3 fighty drones might be enough against hi-sec rats.

Any thoughts on how I can improve this, or any other approaches I haven’t thought of? There are various things, like changing security space, or doing less afk, that don’t really fit what I’m after.

Any thoughts gratefully received.

[Uriel_the_Flame]

Best advice I think is if you can grind an extra workhour or few IRL and spend that on sub and/or PLEX and sell the PLEX for ISK, thus for a few extra hours of grinding you can grant yourself the freedom to do whatever you want ingame without turning it into a second job.

I recognize you ask advice regarding semi-afk time, which I translate as follows: during work or other activities you have spare time that you do can spend in EVE semi-afk, as such my first paragraph is not the answer you are looking for, though that first paragraph may still be a suitable answer so included it just in case.

So if my interpretation is correct regardless if you grind IRL too you still have semi-afk time to spare in EVE which you can utilize to earn a bit on top so in such a case the question in your OP still can be answered by others. I would give advice regarding semi-afk activities myself but am not much into such so only dropped in the first paragraph for your consideration.

Though as far as I know the main afk activities are mining, PvE combat and cloaked camping (which last one is fun but not really producing ISK, unless someone pays you for doing it which might be possible if you do some research) and as far as I know these (afk mining and PvE) are best executed in a nullsec alliance so you might consider joining one. I assume nullsec ores will grant you more ISK and a well established alliance will give opportunities for other types of gameplay when you are active and not just semi-afk so if you want to roam a bit or actively PvE or dive into wh space or whatever you can do that too, though venturing back to hisec in such a case might be difficult so if you want that to be an option too a hisec alt char just for the sake of doing what you want might be useful to have.

[DeMichael_Crimson]

Yeah, gotta agree with @Uriel_the_Flame, buying some PLEX and selling it in-game is definitely the easiest and quickest way to bankroll some ISK.

On a side note, I don’t think it’s wise to say you’re mining semi-afk with a Retriever in 0.5 sec system. You’re basically putting a Bullseye target on yourself.

Course then again maybe you’re just putting out some bait.

[Erland_Kanenald]

Thanks to both for input. I’m trying not to buy money with IRL money, though am not dead set against it. I’m equally not trying to plex per month by farming…

BTW, my mining character is an alt, not my main, but am happy to leave the bait question out there too!

[Do_Little]

It takes roughly 2 weeks to train PI skills to level 4 - odds are you already have some of the skills suggested in the link so you can reduce it a bit. https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Creating_a_Planetary_Interaction_Alt You can reasonably expect to earn 200 million/month with one character trained to this level - train the 2nd & 3rd characters on the account and you earn more but it ceases to be a “passive” activity. There is some effort required to manage your colonies and harvest the product.

I earn a lot of income copying blueprints for capital ships. The kits don’t require a lot of effort to make or sell but the initial investment is huge. That said, it is an investment - the BPO’s will retain their value.

Markets can be low maintenance or high maintenance depending how you play them. I like to study the cycle, position my product in the top half and let the market come to me. It can take a while and my capital is tied up while I wait but it’s low maintenance and the profit margins are excellent. I can’t imagine how people play the .01 game without going insane - but lots of people do and presumably make money or why keep doing it!

The key to these activities is that markets, labs, factories and PI colonies run 24/7 - they don’t care if you’re logged in or not. Characters can multitask - no reason why they can’t be doing research, manufacturing and PI simultaneously while you are sleeping or at work.

[Alaric_Faelen]

If you are serious about mining. Join a sov alliance and go actually make money. It’s that easy. Go fly in massive mining fleets with full boosts and a supercapital defense umbrella the whole time.

Assuming you mean staying in high sec…
If you are an active player, and not running a bunch of accounts, then I don’t think mining is a worthwhile thing to do.
You do not have to start at the bottom rung of production with mining. That is largely wasted skill and time if you are focused on research/building/selling.

There are so many AFK’ers and multiboxing bot fleets out there, and so many newbies just dumping ore onto the market at whatever price pops up when they hit sell…that it is not worth it to try to compete in that market.
If your goal is to make and sell stuff, then start higher up the food chain. It’s ultimately better to just buy the low end stuff you need to make low end products starting out. Training skills to reduce taxes, reduce build time, have more sell orders up, etc…are far better investments.
For an active player, PvE like running missions or anoms is a better return on investment. It is much more engaging content for someone actually watching their screen, and you can melt down and salvage loot for building things for the market. Rigs for example are a good thing to build, especially shield/armor rigs as those are most common on PvP ships- which die all the time and need replaced.
In addition, anoms can sometimes drop very expensive faction modules that can be like hitting the lottery for a new player. And the LP reward store offers more stuff you can build and sell.

So I don’t recommend mining at all. Doing almost anything else is going to be an immediate increase in your income and decrease in boredom. Most players believe that the career path of production and selling stuff requires starting at the bottom with mining. This is not true. Mining is it’s own thing and in high sec it’s dominated by bots, multiboxers, and newbs that devalue the market terribly.

[Keno_Skir]

Market trading.

[Erik_Andresen]

Have you tried exploration? running sites in lowsec using a cov-op or cloaky t1 probing frigate is far more lucrative than mining. It is a bit more hands-on than mining, which can be good or bad. The initial skill Investment to test it is also very low. T1 fit frigate with a t1 cloak and the t1 archaeology/hacking mods will alow you to sample it.