Trying out stuff as a new player

New Citizens Q&A
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I want to briefly explain what I experienced so far and what I think of the game. Please correct me or give me tips if have been doing something wrong or stupid.

I play and played a lot of games from all kinds of genres. So far world of warcraft vanilla comes closest to eve in my opinion. While wow is strung along leveling and getting more gear, eve is built around money and your character’s skills.

I started playing a few days ago and did a few of the introduction quests showing different ways to make money.

They were nicely designed in themselves but kind of don’t represent what the rest of the game is or maybe I’m missing something. E.g. I have to get ore from an asteroid, refine it and turn it in at the quest guy but after the quests are done there are no new quest guys. In wow you would pick a quest, collect items for it, and then turn it in which makes the basic progression of the game but in eve I farm asteroids to sell them on the market to other players. It is much more mmo-sandbox which is nice but that is not portrayed by the quests well enough.

Furthermore to make the most money one should not refine the ores because the end product has less value. Which seemed weird to me so I looked more into it.

Looking through wikis and guides while my ship was mining rocks in the background I learned more about the skills and refining only gets good with high enough skills to increase the yield.

So I started to learn more mining skills first and then these golden 14 skills that improve any ship since they are used all the time like shields or maneuvering.

At first, the skill system seems abysmal, requiring days and weeks of waiting but now it makes sense because the game has a slow pace. There would be no value in learning all the skills immediately since one can not afford the gear anyways. And just like wow it gives some nice progression. It takes time to get to the goal, slow and steady progress that is very satisfying and provides new stuff over a long time. The only nitpick I have for it is being time-gated. It makes it less of an accomplishment If I can just plan all the skills and come back in a month to be much better without having done anything.

The combat is very simplistic. It is like a strategy game where you control many different groups of units and direct them on the battlefield to win the fight, but you have only one unit in eve. You press the attack button and watch the bigger unit winning. It is satisfying though to see npcs blow up faster because you got a new weapon and now you’re much bigger than them. Otherwise, I don’t see much appeal. Perhaps later with bigger ships, there is more micromanaging of weapons and modules in a fight.

So far I did not get into a single pvp fight. I’m not sure if it is because I looked at those mining guides which told me to not use too big ships unless needed or if you use them you should outfit them with enough defenses to deter attackers. But it is probably just because my beginning ship is so small nobody would kill themselves to destroy me in a highsec area.

I have been trying more ore mining. I learned some skills and bought a mining enhancer and miner 2 for my venture, which increased the mining pace by a lot. All the small updates over the days come together for a nice, impactful improvement. I don’t know if this is the intended or most optimal thing to do but I looked where ore is bought for the most in the local systems and went there. Then I go out to an asteroid belt and mine ore until I’m full and go to the station to sell it. Before I would always flee when npc enemies arrive or rats as they are called but now I bought drones and they can take care of the rats.

This is where I have some questions about mining and selling the ores.

  1. Why is veldspar or more so dense veldspar the best to sell? As I understand it is the most basic and common ore but since it takes the least space in your cargo per piece it makes the most profit. I went to lowsec areas and even the ore there is not worth it. Should it not be worth more the rarer it gets?
  2. Since it is more profitable to sell refined materials after learning the skills would it not be easy money to buy ore, refine it and sell it again? At most you would have to haul the materials or ore from one station to the other.
  3. Are there no other mining ships? From what I can tell there only is the venture and the next biggest thing is mining barges for like 33 million.
  4. Do I want to buy a bigger mining ship like a barge and use one when I have the skills high enough and enough money? I have never seen anybody use one so far other than NPCs.
  5. Is there a good way to look at the prices of the market? The interface is kinda lacking for a game that is about finance and markets. In wow there are popular addons to add metrics like historical price over a few different periods and much more. Is there any way to have an overview of prices across different systems? The addons in wow also add a lot of automation to move wares and create auctions based on rules.

At the moment I make around 550.000 ISK per haul and I mine 366m3 per 60 seconds. In guides, people said that one tactic can be to jetcan ores so you can keep mining and later on change ships to pick them up with a bigger ship to cut down on traveling time. I know it has risks because people can just steal the cans or use them to provoke a fight.

  1. Is this still a recommended tactic because I have not seen anybody doing it and the secure cans are expensive and small which means a lot of micromanagement to move materials to and from all the cans?

  2. Other than mining I’m kind of a bit lost on what to try out. What are other things a beginner can do? Do I just go around and kill other miners to then be blown up by the police? Crafting stuff seems extremely time-consuming and expensive without the best skills and infrastructure.

  3. There seems to be exploration and stuff but I don’t understand what to explore outside of the scenarios given by the quests and how much money does it make?

So far it seems very interesting but the systems feel very shallow. Mining is very simplistic just as combat is. I hope this just stems from me not understanding the full picture and you can teach me more.

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Actually it’s not. Depending on where you want to sell Scordite or Pyrox or Plag probably would sell better. (BTW, the names like “dense” or “concentrated” or “rich” means the greater % of material in the rock compared to ordinary non-prefix named ore, not a different class of ore)

That would depend on your refining skills (your efficiency, how much refined minerals you get from the ore) and the cost to refine it.

You can mine in any ship. I’ve seen Praxis’s mining. But the mining ships have bonuses for mining.

Then you’re probably in the wrong places. The Procurer is probably the most popular mining ship other than the Venture.

There are websites that list all prices for an item across all the EVE markets.

I like evetycoon.com

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the “quests” that you mentioned were just the career agents, to help you get acclimated to the game. when you travel to other stations away from career agents, you’ll start encountering PVP fights and you can visit other stations to get more missions as we call them here, and you can do security, mining, hauling missions, or you can join a corporation to help with exploring if you want to go that route.

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Can flipping as the call it is very much seen as something of the past. If you are in a starter system people that go suspect to provoke a fight tend to get warning from CCP. So that is no longer a thing.

Even outside of these systems it is rarely done. So if you get somebody that might do it once a month to provoke a fight it would be a lot. Even then, I would only do it if you were flying in an ORCA or tech II mining ship. Because I love expensive killmails.

The pricing for stuff and historical data is also there. The problem is the best place to look at buy orders and sell orders for items actual worth is JITA. or… Evepraisal - Price check Eve Online items from Cargo Scans, Contracts, D-Scan, EFT, Inventory, Asset listing, Loot History, PI, Survey Scanner, Killmails, Wallet Transactions, Inventory, Assets’

Here you can check pricing immediately because in some areas as you mentioned, people might put up buy orders for stuff at significantly lower isk than what you might be building it for. Especially in rookie/starter systems because you would not really know any better. Then you load up your badger and go the nearest trade hub to make your iskies.

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Something terribly went wrong concerning that “briefly” :wink:

Money: All you earn as a new player tends to be peanuts.
Mining and PI: Only do it if you like it.
Learning: Join a Corp, they do it for years, you gonna learn much more by doing and asking directly.
Ships: The Rorqual is the max, there’s also Venture, Expedition Frigs, Mining Barges and Exhumers. All of them need skilling, of course.

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Looks like you had a good start. The fun in EvE comes mainly with the unspoken and non-obvious activities emerging from the built in mechanics. And PvP. To explore, have a look at EVE University Wiki and this picture What can you do in this game? - #4 by Nora_Maldoran

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Since i didnt see it mentioned.

Have your discovererd Ore compression yet? This can be done at refinery stations. It allows you reduce the volume of the ore you mine to make it easier to transport to market hubs. It also increases the value a little as being able to move the ore is desirable. Bascially its a way to fit 10 ventures of ore inside one venture :slight_smile:

Game changer for mining

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Beginners can do a few different things to make isk, and without joining a corp:

  1. Missions - there are 3 specialties to choose from (Security, Mining, Distribution)
  2. Mining
  3. Combat sites (similar to security missions in that you shoot NPCs and get Isk/Loot)
  4. Abyssal (shoot NPCs and collect loot in a timed environment). Rewards are better, but high risk of losing your ship.
  5. Scanning/Hacking (also known as exploration) break into containers to collect valuable loot. Loot value is higher in more dangerous space.
  6. Faction warfare (higher chance of PvP doing this, but you can make a good income doing this.
  7. Planetary interaction (can do this as a newbie, but you must be omega)

Joining a corp will open you up to additional isk making activities like salvaging and scouting. There’s also market trading/hauling- but I avoid listing these as you can easily lose Isk if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Pretty much everything I’ve listed can be done in a ship costing less than 2Mil Isk.

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oh, I actually saw that but forgot that I can use it because for some reason stuff is bought for more uncompressed in the local systems where I am.

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where do I find these combat sides or containers to break into? like I kinda get that I can do combat and hack stuff as is shown in the tutorial. But those missions generate like a location that they send you towards.

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Hit Alt P. That opens your probe scanner (and probably your map but you can decouple them) the probe scanner will show you the green and red sites in your current system. The green signals are combat sites you can warp to and kill things. The red ones are signals you have to scan down. The can be combat sites, data sites, relic sites or gas sites.

You can also open the agency and click on the exploration tab. In there you will see combat anomalies (green sigs) and cosmic signatures (red sigs). The agency tells you how many there are in each system so you can head to systems where you get most bang for your buck.

A word of advice is to look up the name of any combat site (especially red ones you scan) as even in high sec those can be tricky for new players. Searching for them on eve wiki will give you an idea of difficulty, let you know how many enemies waves etc and if you are likely to be scrammed and therefore trapped.

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