EVE Online: Mining Edition

This time it's about mining.

One of the things I've tried after starting out was mining. In another post I'll probably explain how my main got to be a miner after being an explorer, mission runner and also "reprocessor". (I'm sure I left some obscure profession out, I did a lot of different things back then.)

But for now let's stay on mining. My adventure into the world of mining transformed, after some excitement of searching for the most hidden belts I could find (and some mining-incursions into LowSec with a Venture), into pure tedium pretty soon.

It could be relaxing, mind you, but after a while I felt like being chained to the ground. As a lone wolf and nomad by temperament, nothing I could do would wring enjoyment out of mining. I loved the idea of playing space prospector to bring riches back to civilization, but the actual implementation of mining in EVE doesn't even come close.

At least firing off your mining lasers looks pretty, I guess.

You just lock an asteroid, shoot it with your mining modules (mining lasers or strip miners on the large mining barges) and wait. Now the modules will slowly cycle and periodically deposit mined ore into your ship's ore hold. (Or normal cargo hold if you use a non-mining ship but that would be considered self-harm, please don't do it.)

After a while the asteroid will be used up, rinse and repeat on more space rocks. That's it. Oh, sometimes NPC-pirates will turn up, but in HighSec even the weakest mining ship has enough combat drones to deal with them. LowSec, NullSec and W-Space are completely different: NPCs can actually threaten you and other people can and will shoot you. That last point is important since even in empty LowSec pockets someone will ocasionally drop by at least once an hour. And mining takes a lot of time, so good luck with mining that juicy belt in Rancer.

Imagine this, with your ship as the asteroid.

Nowadays I sometimes let my industry-alt slip into a wormhole with her super-stealthy Prospect for old time's sake, but I can only endure this because after twenty minutes super-NPCs will show up to ruin my day, so I'll never be there long enough to get bored with mining.

It's a bad sign for a miner if he starts fantasizing about his barge broadsiding other ships.

So now my main is settled with 1,5 million skill points he will never use again and I ended up training a lot of the same skills yet again on my alt. Just so she can easier and faster dip into mega dangerous space to get some morphite or megacyte every time I'm feeling too lazy to make a trade hub run.

Hey, it's not like occasionally building a T2-cruiser needs a lot of that expensive stuff, so 1-2 trips into W-Space are normally enough.

The only thing I'll be missing: Giant mining laser beams.

In the end, mining wasn't for me and I went on to do other stuff. The End.