Mining

While shooting rocks for hours on end isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, it’s a reliable source of ISK and a crucial way to contribute to the alliance — without materials we can’t build all of the ships we need to fly and explode. But it’s also a great time to chill on comms with corpmates, discuss fittings or strategies, and occasionally kill wannabe hotdroppers that poke your bait Procurer if you happen to be mining in nullsec.

Also, it’s not just rocks that can be mined. Ice mining is profitable and contributes to fuel, while gas mining can both find you venturing into wormholes in search of valuable gas clouds, and experimenting with the manufacture of booster drugs, a crucial part of some fits.

Mining can be a bit of broad topic, but in the interest of keeping this introductory, we'll be focusing on the differences between the different mining ships, and the difference between mining Ore and mining Ice.

Mining is an incredibly simple activity. All you need to do is go to whatever you want to mine, lock it up, and activate your mining lasers, strip miners, or mining drones on it. If you're in potentially dangerous space, make sure you're aligned out to a safe structure. (In what situations you warp out depends entirely on what you're mining in and where, and a bit of personal preference.)

There are many different ways to mine in EVE Online, using a variety of different modules and ships.

The Venture is the first dedicated mining ship that most players will get their hands on. It's extremely cheap to produce, has high bonuses to mining, and can make a quick escape if needed. Its disadvantages are that it has a virtually nonexistent tank, and an ore hold so small that you'll find yourself dropping off ore every few minutes. This is a great mining ship for aspiring industrialists to gather the ore they need, but once you get beyond frigates and destroyers you should trade up to one of the more advanced ships.

Alpha clones have heavy restrictions on the ships they can use to mine, and can't even access T1 mining barges. As such, we have to get a bit creative when figuring out what to mine with. If you're an alpha, the optimal mining ship for you is actually going to be a battleship equipped with Miners and Mining Drones. The Praxis is one of the best ships for this, as a proper fit can mine a bit more than a Procurer, and like the Proc can receive mining boosts from an Orca or Rorqual. Unfortunately without a dedicated ore hold, you'll need to either jet-can mine (ejecting the ore into space in a can every time your hold is full) or drop off your ore every few minutes.

Mining barges are the standard mining ship for the vast majority of players in EVE. They're relatively cheap, have high mining bonuses, and come in three different configurations:

• Procurer - A barge dedicated to defense. Has a battlecruiser level of tank and a high bonus to drone damage, but only a moderate mining yield and ore capacity.
• Covetor - A barge dedicated to mining yield. Has a high bonus to mining speed but a nearly nonexistent tank and mediocre ore capacity.
• Retriever - A barge dedicated to ore capacity. Has a 27,500 m3 Ore Hold with max skills, but very low tank and only moderate mining yield.

Exhumers are T2 Mining Barges, and as such share the same basic configurations in upgraded capacities:

• Skiff - An exhumer dedicated to defense. Has a battleship level of tank and a high bonus to drone damage.
• Hulk - An exhumer dedicated to mining yield. Has a high bonus to mining speed but like its counterpart the Covetor can barely fit any tank.
• Mackinaw - An exhumer dedicated to ore capacity. Has a 35,000 m3 Ore Hold with max skills, and can fit a relatively decent tank

The Porpoise and Orca are Industrial Command Ships. They rely on mining drones to gather ore at a slightly lower rate than barges, but have gargantuan ore holds which nearly turn them into a passive source of income. They also have extremely powerful tanks for sub-capitals, dedicated fleet hangars (plus a ship maintenance bay in the case of the Orca), and have a multitude of bonuses to Remote Shield Boosters, Command Bursts, Tractor Beams, and Survey Scanners.

As a solo miner, the porpoise can be left for an hour without having to dump its ore, and the Orca for two hours with max skills. With a fleet of barges or exhumers, the boosts provided by these ships can greatly improve everyone's mining yield, and the massive ore holds can serve as a drop-off point so other pilots don't have to warp back to a citadel to drop off their ore. Do keep in mind, though, that your extremely slow and massive ship makes a juicy target for roaming gangs or hot droppers, so you're best staying in a belt with other fleet members, and keeping a cyno on your ship in case you get caught.

The Rorqual is an industrial command capital ship and is its own beast, and participating in it in Brave requires admission to the Rorqual Group. If you're interested in this ship, please head over to the The Rorqual Group page.

Your output from ore mining is usually based on a variable volume per standard cycle. These cycles can be cancelled part of the way through and you'll receive ore proportional to the time you spent on that cycle.

Ore can be found within mining belts, cosmic anomalies, player-created moon belts, and even within some scannable and mission sites. Each ore only shows up in a certain security level space owned by certain factions. There are even ores that are only found in Triglavian space - Pochven.

There are 16 standard ores and 20 moon ores that can be mined, each with a variety of reprocessing outputs which determine the ore's value. Moon ore contains unique materials that cannot be obtained elsewhere, along with the materials found in normal ore. Each type of standard and moon ore has two accompanying sub-types which offer a +5% and +10% increased reprocessing output; while standard ore also has a +15% variant which can only be obtained from mining moons.

Your output from ice mining is always based on a standard volume (1000 m3) per variable cycle. These cycles must be fully completed to receive any ice.

Ice can only be found in dedicated systems that contain Ice Belts; they are spread all over EVE. As with ore, what type of ice appears in which belt is determined by security status and which faction owns the space.

There are 4 standard ice ores and 4 faction-specific types which will only appear in space controlled by a specific empire or pirate faction. All ice contains some quantity of Heavy Water and Liquid Ozone, Strontium Clathrates, and faction-specific ice contains isotopes specific to the space they're found in. Each faction-specific ice ore also has a variant which is only found in null security space, which contains +50% Heavy Water and Liquid Ozone, and +15% isotopes.

Although you can mine in any system, different security levels lead to different availability of ores or ice. If you want to remain in High Sec, you can simply mine the belts in and around Brave Empire HQ. If Ice mining is more your thing, the agency can direct you to the nearest belt. Open The Agency and click the following → Resource Harvesting → Ice Belts. Always join Brave United Standing fleet and ask where people are mining to snag some mining boosts from your fellow corp members.

Alternatively, you might venture (pun not intended!) into Low Sec, Pochven or even Brave-owned null space, where more ores can be mined.

So what do you do with all this ore or ice that you've mined?

Well, you have several options open to you:

• Sell it, either to a Brave buyback service or on the local market
• Use it to build things - ore is used for T1 ship hulls and modules, while ice can be used to manufacture fuel blocks
• Ship it to nullsec - there are often shortages of certain ore types in null, so finding buyers is not difficult

These links are useful things to be aware of if you're mining:

• Brave Mining Guidelines when mining in Brave's nullsec space (also read the Dojo guide to ore mining in a Venture)
• Cerlestes Ore Mining table
• Cerlestes Ice Mining table
• Cerlestes Moon Mining table
• Market history for all mining-related materials