I am just seriously getting into mining and industry in EVE and I’m trying to understand where early investments matter most long-term.
If I mine my own ore and refine it for production, it feels efficient—but I’ve read that without strong refining skills, standings, and proper structures, I might actually lose value compared to just selling the compressed ore and buying materials off the market.
So my question is: At what point (skills, access to structures, or scale) does vertical integration—mining → refining → manufacturing—actually become more profitable than specializing in just one part of the chain?
And as a follow-up: is it generally better for a beginner to focus on maximizing mining yield first, or steer toward improving refining efficiency and production skills?
This is dependent on specific items you manufacture. Even if you’re max skilled and mine, refine, and manufacture all 100% yourself in that production chain, it does not mean you’ll stay in profits. The market is in constant flux and you need to pay more attention to demand/supply of specific items, than line costs.
That’s as much trade secrets as I’m willing to give away.
I have a family member who introduced me to this game. Everything about mining depends greatly on your personal objective. Myself, I mine to make to most ISK to buy cheap vessels for new players. I started by mining kernite in lowsec as they instructed, then I got enough ISK to afford gas mining. Raw kernite is only valuable as an ore, because of a mission where players want a very expensive implant from a high level mission. I don’t know what they do with it, I hope they make a profit.
The drawback to gas mining, is the search in low sec. Sometimes the better or best yield can mean too much to lose when they find you. The very best gas scoop on a cheap venture craft is going to be Syndicate and they run 250 million for the pair. This means your cheap 400K venture just went up to 250M with a big red bullseye on it. Quite the prize, if one or both drop. Obviously I don’t use them. My gas ventures are worth 11M at most.
If you mine to make something, then the ISK should not matter as much as the objective. I have found this is not for solo players as much as the large corporations. This is where a lot of miners, join a corporation to become a cog in their war machine. Unfortunately it can become a multilevel marketing scam for some. They invite you to join and gift you a ship and tell you to mine a particular ore, which they process into the needed materials. The question is what you get in return for your time in their project?
I do happen to know a solo player who makes ammo. I don’t see how it is profitable for him, but he seems to enjoy doing it. I toss him some ores once in while that he might need, but that is just me helping a good friend. As Meridan Night stated above, even if you are max skilled you might not make a profit from manufacturing.
