Eve Online Mining: Mining preparation

There is a fair amount of preparatory effort that can be made to help your mining run smoother and more efficiently

1. You are at risk

A large red cross hair has been painted on every mining vessel. Ganking and otherwise harassing miners is a popular Eve activity. You should spend time studying the information provided by these links:

Recent Exhumer Kills

Recent Mining Barge Kills

New Order and Minerbumping.com

Belligerent Undesireables

Feyds Blog

Eve-O Crime & Punishment Forum

A good amount of information about systems that interest you or that you frequent is available from the Dotlan website. Here's an example: Azizora.

What should you learn from the above? Essentially, what to fly or not fly and where or where not. Also, fittings that don't work. Look at what the gankers are up to and where. You think it's worth flying a Hulk or Mackinaw in .5-.7 space?

Ganking and third party harassment can be kept to a minimum by matching ship, fit and a system's security status in such a way as to make you less of a target. A miner's worst enemy isn't a ganker, it's the miner's own greed and laziness. Fly smart and make an effort.

2. Bookmarks

For every system in which my fleet mines I have a set of bookmarks that include:

Safe Spots: Prefer them outside of D-Scan range from any celestial. Use these as a rally point for your fleet.

Belt Warp-in: You want a warp-in for each belt in the system that puts you in a good spot to start mining. A good spot is one that is within your strip miner's range to as many asteroids in the belt as possible. With Orca boosts my strip miners can reach out to 25 kilometers. With this range most highsec belts can be covered from a single spot. I use a Cheetah to quickly warp to each belt, find that sweet spot, and bookmark in advance to a mining op. On the op, I have all the vessels meet at the safe spot rally location, I warp the lead miner to the Belt Warp-In, use the UI Overview to confirm positioning when the lead miner lands and a Survey Scan to confirm the belt is worth mining. Once confirmed the lead miner broadcasts an Align to the belt and I warp the Orca to the lead miner while the other vessels are aligning. When the Orca has landed and come to rest, or close to at rest, I begin warping the rest of the fleet to the Orca. This routine results in all ships in position when they land to access the Orca's Fleet Hold and begin mining, or in the case of the freighter, to pull ore from the Orca when it appears.

Belt Tactical: If it's a system I mine frequently, I will make a tactical bookmark for each belt, a bookmark that is 200 - 300 kilometers to the belt. I can warp to this spot, see if anyone's mining there and see how many asteroids are left and their location, then pick a warp-in asteroid if I decide the belt is worth mining.

3. Your OverviewThe importance of the Overview can't be exaggerated. Take time to learn how to master it and all the somewhat hidden features it provides.

I use five Overview Tabs and name them, from left to right, ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE. I know, creative. I name them like this to emphasize that the Tabs themselves are simply neutral placeholders for the Default Profiles or your saved Custom Overview Profiles. What you load in to any particular Tab is not written in stone. I alter what's in a Tab frequently depending on what that ship is up to at the moment.

For general highsec ore mining I have the following Profiles loaded: Tab ONE: Default Profile (a custom default profile); Tab Two: Probes and Ships (including friendlies); Tab THREE: the Mining Profile provided by CCP under the Load Default option in the Overview Settings window - this profile shows all ore types; Tab FOUR: a custom Profile I made that shows only one particular ore type (top level types like Kernite, Pyroxeres, Scordite, Veldspar, etc., you can't specify the sub-variants) - I do this because each miner will be assigned a particular ore type; Tab FIVE: Asteroid Belts. As they mine, the miners will have Tab FOUR active and sorted by distance - I usually have two miners assigned to each ore, one starts with the closest and the other starts with the farthest away.

4. Your User Interface

This is a complex but very important issue. There are some windows that you will want to have open at all times and their placement can be critical. This can be further complicated if you are running several clients simultaneously and interface real estate is condensed. I will prepare and display some screenshots of my UI and discuss the reasoning at a later date.

5. Know What You're Mining - Ore Matters

Simply, some ore is worth more than others. For current information as to ore value, go to this site: Celestes.de then click on the ISK column heading and the page will sort by ore value. Also, understand that each ore comes in three varieties - basic, +5% and +10%, so naturally you'll want to mine the +10%, then +5% then the basic.