Eve Online Mining: Drifter battleships in the belt

My usual six-man fleet was mining in a .9 system when Apollo and Artemis Tyrannos paid us a visit in their Drifter battleships. Was interesting to watch them scan both asteroids and my ships.

Cooperate or compete?

I've been asked how I deal with the issue of mining etiquette, which means how do I react to other miners at a belt or anom. Some argue that "proper" mining etiquette dictates that whoever's there first should be allowed to mine undisturbed and the late comer should move along.

I disagree. We compete for resources so the question is simply, what's more efficient resource harvesting, competing or cooperating, and I'll do what seems more efficient. For example, I land at a belt with my six pilots and find a lone Mackinaw or Retriever. I'll scan the belt and if the belt is still rich enough, I'll mine it. The single miner that was already there can compete or move, his call. He'll have very little impact on my Hulks. If I want to send him a message, I can view his ship, see what roids he's working, and mine them from under him, but I rarely do that unless I'm trying to encourage that pilot to find a new system.

On the other hand, if a mining fleet similar to mine is at a belt, I move on because butting heads with that group simply wouldn't be efficient - unless I want to discourage them from working that particular system. In general, it's best not to feel too possessive about roids, belts or systems, but sometimes you do need to fight for what you consider valuable resources or situations.

Eve Online Mining: What's a miner to do?

Change is a fact of life in New Eden. Serious miners do much more than warp to a belt or anom, target, and F1 rocks or ice. We are keenly aware of the state of politics in all security space and how those politics and changes to the mechanics of New Eden affect the market place for ores, minerals, ice or ice products. How we react to change varies, but most of us position ourselves so that we are able to enjoy the benefits and avoid the pitfalls that changes bring.

That's not to say we run around chasing daily market fluctuations, though some might. What we do is try to insure that we're not so deeply committed to a single place or method that we find ourselves left behind.

Since the summer of 2014, the industrial way of life has become much more potentially nomadic, mostly the result of POS and array changes. We're now free to throw a small POS and the arrays we need into the Orca or freighter and hit the road. For our more extensive industrial/BPO activities, the changes to station services and the freeing up of their facilities has made it easy to establish as many industrial outposts as needed wherever needed in highsec, lowsec or NPC null.

Teams and Jump Clones

I operate six industry oriented accounts. That's a total of 18 characters. Eve is a long game. I've been playing for years, and every one of my 18 characters has been trained to a useful degree with useful skills. But, more to the point of this post, what I've done is divide my characters into three teams of six. Each team is a well trained, independent mining unit - four maxed miners (Hulks and Skiffs), a maxed Orca pilot and a freighter pilot. Each team also has four or more characters trained to manipulate blueprints, that can manufacture, that can light cynos, and two pilots that have excellent trading skills.

The three teams were based in different areas of highsec, but I will soon move one team to nullsec. However, a team can cover a large number of different systems using jump clones. You can have up to 10 jump clones per character, though I max them out at nine. So, not only are you fairly mobile in general (four exhumers, an Orca and a freighter), you can establish a base in up to nine systems for each team. That's a lot of coverage.

The main focus of where I establish a base is what ores or ice is available, whether a system offers Level 4 mining agents and where the stations with which I have jump clone standings are located.

However, even though you could have up to nine bases per team using jump clones, that doesn't mean you would want to fully maintain that many, especially if that meant having all the necessary ships and fittings at each base. Also, I tend to implant my characters with helpful aids - some of which are a necessity to me, such as the Mining Foreman Mindlink for the Orca pilot,  the Yeti ice or ore implant for yield, and the Beancounter implant for each team's reprocessor.

I have one team that focuses on Caldari space and one for Amarr. Those two teams further focus their jump clone bases on ore and ice - different systems offer different asteroid compositions or ice security level and competition, etc. For ore, I tend not to mine ore in highsec unless I can do it with Hulks, which in turn means .9 or 1.0 sec status systems, so I usually have to find systems with that sec status, a good number of belts, and a decent amount of Scordite and Pyroxeres in those belts. Sometimes the market tips toward Kernite, but I'm usually still better off mining Scord and Pyro in Hulks as opposed to Kernite in Skiffs. Ice is done exclusively in Skiffs.

I have lived in nullsec before, but not as an industrialist, so I'm looking forward to that. Actually, I have other accounts with characters already living in null, but as PvPers and not industrialists. CCP has gone out of its way to make null more attractive to industry, so it seems that with the recent ore shakeup the time has come to find a nullsec industry home. That is proving easier said than done though. Finding a nullsec sov group (looking for upgraded systems) isn't hard, but finding one with stability and likely sustainability takes some homework. Odds are I'll end up using a team that has a strong mix of PvP/Industry capable pilots as most null groups expect you to bring some warfare goodies to the table. I'd prefer to bring resource harvesting and buyback usage or even possibly renting, and have the PvP purely optional, but we'll see.

Give some thought to adding as much flexibility to your New Eden life as possible.

Eve Online Mining: Mosaic Update Deployed

Change is in the wind. Highsec miners have started to feel the affect of the revamped nullsec ore compositions. Between the IPH of nullsec ores due to that revamp and the strength of Rorqual boosts, it's time to put a team in null. On the other hand, the idea of mining in null isn't a revelation and quite likely those ores will be over-mined in the coming months. Also, who can say where the most efficient place(s) to mine will be after the June, 2015, changes to nullsec sov? Nevertheless, I have a team ready to deploy if and when I find an acceptable situation. Until then, my teams will stay focused on high-yield Scordite and Pyroxeres via Hulk mining (though compressing the ore for sale is no longer the way to go - I now compress in system, transport the compressed ore to a trade hub and refine at the trade hub station).

What I have been having fun with is the new ship SKIN system, and the current bug that allows you to skin any ship with any skin you own and have activated. CCP knows about it and it's probably short lived, but my Skiffs and Orca never looked better.

Sarum Skiff - side view (click image for larger version)

Sarum Skiff - top view

Tash-Murkon Skiff

Sukuuvestaa Skiff

Tash-Murkon Orca

Eve Online Mining: Fanfest 2015 mining portents

Drifters weren't the only portents for miners to come out of the recent 2015 Fanfest. Two things are on the horizon on which we should keep an eye: nullsec anomaly ore revamp and the general structure revamp.

According to CCP Fozzie, nullsec ore anomalies are going to be reconfigured in April, 2015, in such a way as to afford enough of the low end ore/minerals to make nullsec self-sufficient from a manufacturing standpoint. This could affect the price of highsec ore/minerals (can't see how it could be good for the compressed ore market since it should reduce the need to import low ends) and affect the viability of conducting mining and industry in nullsec (as in, making it more profitable). This change is right around the corner, so we'll see soon enough.

Last May (2014), I wrote about how the Kronos and Crius releases would usher in the age of nomad mining due to the POS anchoring changes (link). This was a big boost to my mining operation. Now though CCP has announced a revamp of structures, including POSes, which I'm worried could make the POS too large to comfortably fit in the Orca or similar transport vessel, and no word yet on how long it would take to anchor the new structure.

Overall, the new structure concept is exciting, but I hope it doesn't spell the end of the easy mining and light industry nomadic lifestyle.

Edit (March 27, 2015): My concern about the size and deploy-ability ease/speed of the new structures might have been premature. The new structures, at the moment, will come in four sizes: small, medium, large and extra large. While the starbase (current POS) will be large, it could be that the smaller deployables will allow for quick and easy ore compression and at least limited docking/mooring/shield safety, leaving the new POS structure for a more permanent base of operations.

Eve Online Mining: Ominous portents for New Eden

Space travel in New Eden is highly risky business. So risky, most humans avoid it. Instead, it's normally conducted by humanoid clones, both as capsuleer pilot and crew.

Certain events over the last several months indicate that a new threat may be on the horizon in New Eden - Drifters. How this will play out is still a mystery, and frankly, since it seems the Jove were the ones who perfected pod piloting and consciousness transfer, it's hard to imagine why this offshoot of the Jovian race would need to harvest corpses instead of simply growing new specimens, but time will tell.

Eve Online Mining: Capsuleers and Operators

I've received several mails asking for clarification on the recent posts about New Eden Operators and their relationship to pod pilot clones.

"And all the science,  I don't understand. It's just my job five days a week." - Rocket Man

Space travel in New Eden has become very popular. However, no fully functional and sane human being would submit to the rigors and almost certain death sentence it entails (especially since the development of pod piloting, the human-machine interface technique of operating spacecraft). The development of pod piloting and the horrific, albeit efficient, life that results, led to the development of cloning techniques for the use of clones as pod pilots.

Clones were hyped as a way for space pilots to achieve immortality, but that propaganda failed once it became clear that the original subject died at the moment consciousness was transferred to a clone. It also didn't work out to use fully functional (mentally speaking) clones as they were prone to reject the idea of a life sentence of living in a pod. The brevity of life as a pod pilot was also unappealing.

Then, the corporate scientists that developed the cloning techniques, consciousness transfer, and clone-ship interface took things a step further. They realized that two things could be done with the clones that solve the normal human problems - the clones could receive whatever mental level and content the corporation desired and the neural-machine interface could be used to control the clone remotely. Clones could be created and controlled to serve as humanoid-cybernetic servants. They could be completely controlled via a relatively simple computer interface. In other words, they could and did become the space pawns of computer Operators like myself. No muss, no fuss.

The clones that today serve as pod pilots have no independent life. They are completely under our control apart from a wide variety of automated functions and do nothing important without our having commanded them via our computer interface. When we log off of the interface the clones go dormant until we log on again (dormant except for the ongoing process of acquiring new skills through a neural upload).

It seems harsh to treat clones as so easily disposable, but space is harsh and not for the risk averse. If Operators were not somewhat cavalier about the clones in their ship pods, it's likely very few would undock.

A final note for this post regarding faster than light communications for Operators.

If you saw the interface Operators use to command pod pilot clones, you'd be surprised to know that it's not real-time video. What we see is reconstructed information transmitted by camera drones. Live video is apparently too bulky to transmit, so the information is boiled down to essentials and reconstructed at our terminals. Yes, it looks a bit game-like, but generally does the job. Some find it strange that we don't have a through-the-window POV of the ship we are controlling through our pod clone, but you get used to it quickly.

Eve Online Mining: You have to die if you want to live forever

What a gimmick. Let's clear the air (so to speak) about the nature of pod pilots (capsuleers) in New Eden: they are nothing more than clone-based bio-mechanical tools. They are not you. They are not me. They are the "things" that we command to do our bidding with New Eden space ships.

We are not pod pilots, we are Operators.We sit at computer terminals and command the industrial bred clones that interface with space ships. We operate one or a number of different clones at any one time, but we do so from the comfort and safety of land.

Face it, living in space sucks, big time. Zero gravity does bad things to your body, as do all the god-knows-how-many-and what-type of subatomic particles that constantly pass through matter. A pod pilot is stuck in a pod. No pizza delivery. No beer and pretzels. No Friday nights out on the port. And, the main rub, since the use and control of space is competitive and for all real intents and purposes lawless, your life expectancy in space is laughable, but not funny.

Though New Eden cracked the space travel nut, it wasn't long before the lines for space pilot enlistment dried up as the true nature of the horrific and short-lived lifestyle became apparent.

Enter the human-like clone. Certain corporations offered immortality - let us clone you and your consciousness could live forever. Unfortunately, the reality was that the cloned original would die at the moment consciousness was transferred. In other words, what "lived" forever wasn't you, it was a copy of you. When people figured out that offering yourself up for cloning was a death sentence (it would do you no good that another creature was prancing around with your memories if you're food for worms), the Get Cloned Here lines also dried up.

To make New Eden space travel the thriving enterprise it is today, cloning without the death of a donor had to be perfected. And perfected it was. Corporations are now able to build complete humanoid creatures from basic materials without the need to harvest a living donor.

But, what exactly are these clones? That's a sticky question. It became clear that if they were fully functional human beings we'd be left with the same problem - no thanks, I don't think space is for me. No one in their right mind is going to volunteer to become either a pod pilot or a spaceship crew member. So, what was needed were human-like creatures that could be completely controlled by Operators like me and able to successfully interface with the complex equipment of spaceship systems.

Much of this is kept a secret, to the extent possible. The clones themselves don't have the capacity to strike or revolt, but chances are some segments of the human population would find the way they're used and sacrificed a bit barbaric.

Eve Online Mining: From Kronos to Tiamat

Won't list all the short-cycle updates we've had to Eve since Kronos. Latest was Tiamat. Scylla will hit later this month (March, 2015).

Continuing the 2014 nomad mining theme, I've moved quite a bit over the last 6-8 months, constantly searching for better ore and ice opportunities.

At the moment my week is split like this: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday I mine ore. On Mondays and Fridays I mine ice. The reason is ore spawns contain small asteroids on Mondays and Fridays, so I prefer to mine ice on those days.

For ore, I'm in .9 Amarr space using Hulks and pursuing the +10% high yield Scordite and Pyroxeres ores, which I compress and take to the trade hub in the Amarr system for sale. I am not mining Amarr ice at the moment as that market has tanked. I jump clone my six mining toons to Caldari space on Mondays and Fridays. Caldari ice has fallen, but not nearly as far as the other Faction ice. I reprocess the Caldari ice and sell the ice products in Jita.

A few months ago I did something really stupid and trashed one of my monitors, so I'm now running all six toons on one 22 incher. Here's a screenshot of the four mining toons (in Skiffs working Caldari ice) - the Orca and freighter pilots clients are minimized until needed.

Was an unhappy moment going to one monitor, but the working technique has grown on me.

As usual, a fair amount of grumbling on the forums requesting that CCP make changes to mining. The problem, as I see it, is that mining right now is great for those of us who multibox (no, there is no ISBoxer involved) a crew like mine - 4 miners, an Orca and a freighter - as ice is competitive and Hulk mining forces you to stay engaged when you're harvesting highsec 'roids. However, it's not nearly as engaging for a player running a single toon. That's the rub. My hope is that it can somehow become more engaging for the solo miner without ruining it for us multiboxers.