I have been playing almost 3 months. I have an alt that basically explores in a Probe or Heron and a Venture with a sorta tech II fit for either gas or mining. I enjoy the gas mining more. I am basically doing WHs found within a 12 system range…most high sec and a few low sec. I send in the Probe…go back to home base and then bring the Venture if I find a gas cloud I think I can mine without dying to the rats. I base this decision off the title of the gas site and its associated reference in the wiki.
First question - I understand that as soon as I or anyone else initiate a warp within the WH to a gas site, that a 15 minute timer starts that initiates a spawn of rats. Assuming I am the first to spawn the rat timer, that means I have 15 minutes to clear what are normally, on a barren reservoir, two gas locations. Yet it normally takes me 20 minutes to harvest one 3000 metric load meaning there is no way I get to the larrger 6000 metric location in time. Are there skills that decrease the time it takes me to harvest the location or are there rigs/mid/low modules that will increase the harvest rate of my Gas Cloud II harvesters?
Second question - I have fit a Venture with t2 mining lasers and gas cloud harvesters. The fit is about a 13mill investment. When I die, and it is inevitable either to long range rat guns blapping me out of existence as I approach the gas site (has already happened in a t1 fit) or to pvper, should I just use tech 1 fits for the Venture going forward. In other words, do you really get that much additional benefit for using a T2 fit as a newbro versus a Tech1 fit which is much cheaper.
The only skill to speed up your huffing is the mining frigate skill, if you’re at V and using t2 huffers you’re as fast as it gets.
WH clouds aren’t meant to be cleared solo before the rats show up but if you can kill the rats they won’t respawn. That might be a bit much for a newbro to take on but there are loads of Indy wh corps out there you could join who will clear out the sites to huff them out. You share the site with your corpmates but you get access to much more of them. You’ll get ganked from time to time but you’ll earn much more than you lose.
If you’re committed to flying by yourself you can always bring more alts. Huffing is really cheap to get into and scales really well but you need to be pretty dedicated to justify the extra accounts if huffing is all you’re doing with them.
T2 huffers yield 50% more than t1 which is huge! Also gas huffing is probably the best return on investment in the game. Your t2 venture can pay for itself in 15 minutes. Up to you whether you think that’s worth it but never fly what you can’t afford to lose.
honestly its up to you if you feel the risk is worth running the T2 fit. as for the rats find a buddy, or clear them yourself then bring the venture i remember the lower level gas sites being pretty easy to clear (except the one with the turrets) even in frigates. once the rats are dead they won’t respawn until downtime so you can mine in peace, well as much peace as you can with players lurking.
What Amelie said is completely correct. I’d just like to add on a few things:
Never warp to Ordinary Perimeter Reservoirs. There are sentries there that will alpha your venture.
Always check evemarketer, local markets, and the wiki to figure out which of the two gases in any gas site is more profitable. You’re looking for the best ISK/m3, since that determines how much you huff per harvester cycle.
Deeper into wormholes, in Class 5/6 wormhole space (that rarely spawns connections to k-space), you can find Vital and Instrumental Core Reservoirs that have valuable C320 and C540 gases (C540 has pretty bad ISK/m3, but C320 is great!). You might want to spend some more time probing to find these, but I’d recommend just joining one of the many industry wormhole corps.
On that note, if you like doing this kind of thing, you should join a wormhole industry corp. You can do this basically all day, there are people in the wormhole you can sell your gas directly to, you have protection from people who want to blow up your Venture (like me! :D), you have people to clear the rats from the site so you can huff it clean, you have access to all the sites everyone in the corp scans down, etc.
No, there’s really nothing that reduces the time it takes to huff a cloud other than the Gas Cloud Harvesting skill and the Mining Frigate skill, which are both fairly short trains. There’s no Mining Laser Upgrade equivalent, so the best setup is Mining Frigate and Gas Cloud Harvesting 5 with two T2 Gas Cloud Harvesters on a Venture.
If you’re able to use a T2 fit, you need to weigh your options. A T1 fit huffs slower, but is a lower cost to replace, whereas the T2 huffs faster and is more expensive. You need to decide if the extra profit made from the T2 huffer is worth the more expensive loss when you inevitably lose it, which is up to you to decide.