I’ve played eve on and off for a years. I want to start a mining corp in WH. I think it is the best place to make ISK and Plex my accounts?
Do you have any good recommendation for resources or guides to get started in a wormehole and be safe as possible? Just looking for some fun and adventure without going too crazy. Also would liek to learn from people who have some experience here.
Not sure how new you are to wormholes, so don’t be insulted if I treat you like a total noob. Better I cover as much as I can think of, and you nod along, than I assume you know something you don’t, and you needlessly lose a ship, even a cheap Venture. I am going to assume you know basic mechanics, however. If you don’t, wormholes aren’t the place to learn them.
I semi-live in wormholes. I have a locust fleet, a fleet of alts geared towards stripping every site in a wormhole of its loot before I move onto the next one. Based around a pair of DSTs who are usually safe logged at a safe spot, the rest of the alts are a prober/hacker, T3C alt that can solo up to C4 combat sites, gas compressing Porpoise, Outrider and 4 Ventures. It was 5 Ventures, but one got put into an Outrider so the more expensive and stationary Porpoise can stay at the safe spot. I was debating an Odysseus, but I don’t need it. Only the T3C needs to refit, and it carries a mobile depot. Only thing I’d use it for is to swap the prober to another Venture, and I don’t need to do that. That’s an expensive ship just for that.
I’m not going to go into how I exactly run that operation, but it’s not complicated. If you’re smart you’ll figure it out with a little experience, if not by the end of this post. I’ll gear my advice towards you playing with a single account, based in Highsec and day-tripping through wormholes you probe down while exploring. Everything can be scaled up to the point where I’m at without invalidating any of this advice, but I’m aiming at entry level.
Start with huffing gas that can only be gotten in wormholes. Anything else you can mine in wormholes can be gotten with less anxiety in K-space. You can make plenty of isk to PLEX your account as a day tripper in a Venture. Expand later if your corp takes off, but if you utilize wormholes, not just Anoikis, to their fullest, you have access to all the resources the game has to offer, in the cheapest mining ship possible. Combine wormholes and filaments, and all of New Eden is open to you, provided your okay with the destination being semi-random.
Here’s a handy reference sheet for easy hunting. Know what’s there before you warp into the site.
As a Venture miner, only one part of that matters, and that’s isk/m3. When you land on grid, you start a 20 minute timer until the Sleepers spawn, so unless you have someone to clear those rats, you have that long to get as much isk as possible before you have to bail. They only spawn once, so after they’re cleared you can mine out the site without worrying about them respawning. These are low threat compared to the regular combat sites in the same class wormhole, so anything that can solo the regular sites there or lower will handle it easily. If you’ve got a combat ship nearby that can clear it, and you’re willing to risk it, it may be worth going to swap ships, clearing the rats, then swaping back
Wormhole mining is not for people who want to be AFK, you cannot spam d-scan enough. If there’s a break between cycles, you’re not hitting it enough. Or don’t, you’re in a Venture after all. They pay for themselves rather quickly when using them to ninja mine expensive stuff.
Before mining, take the time to probe the whole chain as far out as you’re comfortable. You don’t want to find out you’re mining in the middle of a wormhole route from nullsec to highsec, a lot of cargo passes between them through wormholes, and most of those haulers have friends who will happily hunt you if they see you. Also, if you scan the whole chain and find yourself some unoccupied C5-C6 wormholes with C320 gas, why would you ninja mine anything else?
Speaking of “unoccupied” systems, learn to figure out if a system is unoccupied. When you’re deciding on which wormhole reference sire to use from what the Google search gave you, pick the one that gives you activity information in a format you understand. Lived in wormholes stand out from the rest.
There’s a lot more to it, but I’m sure others will fill in any gaps I left. You have the attitude we like to encourage.
Lastly, starting a mining corp is a challenge anywhere, starting one in a wormhole is nearly impossible. Wormholes are a different place. Moving an established mining corp into a wormhole can be done without a lot of pain, if they’re prepared, but a new corp without a lot of alts will struggle. Gas is the only thing in them worth mining that doesn’t make you a sitting duck when you get no warning they’re in system before they land on grid, so most mining is risky unless you’ve got enough people on to put scouts on the entries. Safer to ninja mine in nullsec if you’re mining anything but that. Low skilled players joining you will struggle with the most basic content, unless your living in one that’s such low class your vets won’t be happy with the income.
My suggestion, if you must start your own corp, would be to start yourself a mining corp focused on diving through wormholes in packs of Ventures to grab whatever they can find before the rats/locals drive them off.
Wow. This is very informative and helpful. I will continue to refer to this.
It sounds like th eonly worthwhile mining is gas. Do you use a venture to clear the rats? or do you have a war alt that does that? seems like it would be hard to use a venture to mine and fight off the rats. Do you have a station in your wh that you use?
I have 10 alts operating as a unit, one of them is a combat alt in a Strategic Cruiser to run all the combat sites and clear the rats out of the other sites so the non-combat alts only have to worry about other players. I call it a Locust Fleet because I leave no sites behind me, just empty systems waiting for new sites to spawn, the group can do them all.
I don’t stay in one wormhole for long. My usual method is to find a good wormhole with a lot of sites, clear those sites in a day or two, then find another wormhole with a lot of sites. The way site spawn mechanics work, sigs like hacking sites and gas sites tend to gather in systems people don’t often visit, so if you have half a dozen or more non-wormhole sigs in a system, odds are good no one lives there.
Keep in mind, I’ve been playing this game a long time and I have a lot of high skill alts operating here. More than half the fleet is in T2 ships, everything not a Venture in fact.
The way I run this little op, a station or POS would only bring attention to me. The core of this group is a pair of Deep Space Transports, T2 Haulers with Fleet accessible cargo bays. Both these alts have Transports 5, so each DST carries 62,500m3 in the fleet hangar. These two haulers spend 99.99% of the time logged out of the game at a separate safe spot. The ammo I need to operate at a steady combat pace for several days gets split between the DSTs before I depart highsec, and as I gather loot, I log on a DST as needed to store it.