Mackinaw for a solo hi sec miner

Mackinaw costs 272.000.000 ISK in Hi-Sec. So find a peaceful Hi-Sec system with good mining anomaly and no pilots in space or with only few pilots in space. Check those pilots on zKillboard that they are not gankers. When you warpin to anomaly, go mining as far as you can from warpin point. So that gankers needs to move towards you to kill you. Then go mining, don’t go AFK, be aligned to warp out as soon as you see new pilots in system. Or constantly do D-Scan to see if someone approaches you and then warp away. You should be able to earn back your investment pretty fast.
PS. And yeah, be ready to lose that 272 million + fit right on first day out :wink:

Nothing says ‘please pvp me’ like an expensive Exhumer without tank.

Maybe you can find a less-traveled area where your Exhumer doesn’t draw attention, but don’t be surprised when it transforms into an explosion. Mining in a fleet may be safer, as well as mining in a cheap replacable Mining Barge.

I’m going to give you the best mining advice of your life (I just made over 630 million in a single hour ACTIVE mining Mercixcot in a Hulk under max rorq boosts):

The safest place to AFK mine is in null sec in a large noob friendly corp/alliance in a public mining op.

Use a Retriever. 2-3 Retriever ore hold loads pay for the retriever. Actively mine the best ore while ALERT for those 2-3 loads. Haul these 2-3 loads back to the nearby moon drill.

After this it’s all profit, so you can pure afk mine and jetcan when you’re full and even be paid 80-90% the value of the ore if you’re willing for someone else to haul and keep it.

Eventually your Retriever will die, but in my experience you average 30-40x the value of the afk Retriever before you get fragged in a null sec mining operation.

Don’t mine in high sec. It’s actually RISKIER and WAY LESS PROFITABLE.


If you want to pull whack numbers (300mil+ ISK/hour), you’ll need a n ACTIVE Hulk for mining ops fit with max boost Rorqual leading the mining operation.

Fit a Mercoxit Yield Rig and a Higgs Rig to the Hulk. Drop a bookmark 300km+ behind the mining location in line with your warpout. Warp to the bookmark, then warp to the rock of your choice at 15km and start mining while perma aligned to the warpout.

With a Higgs rig you’ll move so slowly you’ll get off 40-60 mining cycles before you move out of range of the rock…all while being perma aligned for instant warp. Watch local and watch for awoxers in these noob friendly null sec corps (look for characters less than 1 month old and use D-scan to see if they’re warping to/near you in a tackle frig, such as a Rifter, treat very young blue characters as red in local).

Hope this advice helps.

Fly safe!


P.S. I really meant it.

Most people lose money afk mining in high sec because the gank frequency on both T1 and T2 barges outweighs the usual return.

If you afk mine in a Procurer (you will be ganked in a skiff, so don’t bother) you’re losing “opportunity money” because you could honestly do any other afk activity and make more ISK (such as managing P1/P2 planetary interaction materials, High Sec AFK Ishtar PvE, auto pilot speculative hauling/etc).

My Jita alt makes 70-80mil a day simply doing 50mil cargo afk autopiloting speculative hauling between Amarr and Jita lol. This alt is only used to checking prices in Jita and Amarr and his only trained skill is Gallente Inustrial IV (and a few corresponding level 1/2/3’s for fitting/rigging the indys and level 3 PI skills).

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I want to share my perspective as a ganker as well:

One reason why not so many Skiffs are ganked is that those gankers who do not have the resources available to kill a Skiff do not scan their fits at all and just ignore them. At least that is what I did in previous times. Once I had the required resources (i.e. 4 Catalyst pilots) available, I began scanning them and realized that a lot of them are fitted just like poeple fit their Hulks, e.g. full Mining Laser Upgrades or even Drone Damage Amplifiers in Low Slots and no Damage Control or Drone Mining or Mercoxit rigs [sic] instead of Shield Rigs. Some fits also had empty mid slots (what are they good for, there is nothing to fit which increases yield) or a 10-digit value. I also saw a lot of active shield tanks and passive regen fits.

Whenver I see a decently tanked Skiff that has no more than a T2 fit I just move on, even in 0.5 systems, since I would lose money on a kill.

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Truly appreciate your detailed post, but I do have a question.
Is the risk of hauling back the ore to a major hub,let’s say Jita, from nullsec actually worth taking?
Currently I’m mining veldspar in 0.9/1 and even with maxed out skills and 67% reprocessing yield I make little over 6mil per run with my retriever so I understand this is not the best way to do it (although I can easily mine afk and nobody will ever bother me).
I’m just wondering how to actually sell the ore I’d mine in nullsec if I have to go through low sec gate camps in order to sell it.

Oh, my friend…

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just compress it if possible and sell it on a local station.

You pay a service (I pay Karkinos) to haul it back by selling it to them at 90-95% Price.

I haven’t a hauled a single m^3 of ore.

They use Jump Freighter chains and get it done quick.

As the the immediate poster said…use an alliance/corp refinery to compress.

I fit my Miasmos with 3 warp core stabs + 3 medium low friction rigs + 4 medium ancillary shield boosters to fly the ore to a central pickup location in our nullsec space.

Using the constantly updated intel channels I know if there is/isn’t any dictors bubbling any of the gates or in generaly any large noisy gangs in our space. So as long as I got the 3 warp core stabs and the dank tank I can’t die in local transit either. The Jump Freighters take it from there.

Arent you the guy that is trying to get ishtar bot? What are you doing afk mining? Are guritas rats still jamming you?

Apparently an ISD shut down the thread because it was too anti-bot (under the citation of being an unproductive discussion with no merit). So I decided to take their lead and become pro-afk.

Now I’m sharing all the secrets of afk income. Newbros need the knowledge, they need the money the most.

Then it was shut down because it was an unproductive discussion with no merit, and your claim is wrong.

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All good, you should teach new bros how to use guristas response fleet to defend them while afk mining as well lol

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Oh I already did, the title of that thread alone gave them the knowledge they needed.

If for some reason you still really want to use a Mackinaw in Highsec, you’ll have to stay aligned at all time (at 75% speed), preferably with a Higgs anchor rig to reduce your max speed a lot, and glue one eye to your overview.

By order of being easy and profitable to gank, the Mackinaw is only second behind the Hulk for miner ganking in highsec, so basically to a ganker you look like a carrot to a rabbit, whatever your fit is or the security status of the system.

And except for the skiff, a damage control or good shield modules wont save you if you get caught, the mackinaw is about as paper-thin as the Hulk, only being slightly better against NPCs.

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Nah bro, you are are paranoid, Mackinaw is safe - nobody gonna waste their time, why shoot a ship that can’t shoot back, and in highsec? Please.

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FYI Don’t waste your time training skill points into solo mining. Everything you could get is worth less then simply blowing up rats, getting bounties, and making magic ISK appear.

Mining? Nah It’s worthless and the new Chinese overlords that run this game are actively phasing it out because it doesn’t pay them money like whale pvp players do.

Why do industry when you can pew pew and make magic items and isk appear…

The real ISK fountain is simply afk ratting in null.

You want trillions? go afk solo rat in one of the many null sec alliances; that is all they do in their safe blue doughnuts and listen to them talk about high sec like IT’S what killed this game… not a set of completely broken money faucets… nope it’s the incredibly unprofitable high sec mining… apparently that what was was SOOOO wrong with EVE.

(Turns out listening to the people who play the game only one way really managed to kill this entire game for the 9/10’ths that didn’t; but I’m sure that hasn’t been reflected in the playerbase count… oh wait it has)

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Hmm… I wonder who’s alt you are ??

sorry but i disagree
if OP likes mining, then he should go mining. If he likes explo, he should go for explo. OP, don’t focus on ratting if you don’t like it. Eve is not a job, where your main goal is to earn isks. It is a game to have fun. Isks allow you to fund your funny activities, but are not the main goal.
Null sec ratting is a way to earn isks, but to be honest all activities are grossly equivalent in null: mining/ratting/abyssal/explo etc

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BS. Ratting in null provide you with at least 2b/h from day one as alpha. that know everyone!

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i live in null. Ratting with a carrier provides you around 100M/h ish, possibly 150M/H if you bling it and are fully focused on what you are doing, no reds around etc. But you won’t do that more than a few hours, because you will get bored…
But i think you should stop giving wrong informations everywhere on this forum , calling nullseccers botters, etc
If you can’t help trolling, feel free to go back to wow. Eve online is for adults

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