A Career in Asteroid Mining

The 14 day trial expired on my second EVE Online account so I converted it to a live account with all the rights and benefits thus accorded.

This made me a bit cranky.  I know I am being unreasonable, but it annoys me that you have to pay $19.95 for the first month of EVE Online. 

After all, I did not have to buy the game off the shelf to play, I just downloaded it, so I am ahead in the deal, at least compared to most other MMOs. 

There is just something about that extra “initiation fee” first month price that irks me.  Not enough to stop me from paying it, for the second time.  Just enough for me to whine about it a bit.

With EVE Online though, they might get enough people dropping out after first month that they need the extra $5.00.  Space is vast and pitiless.

On the plus side, I think Brent at VirginWorlds gets a cut, since I used the link from his site to create the trial account… both of my trial accounts, actually.

And I can send myself some money from the other account now.  Go me.

Which was good, because I wanted to buy the new guy that Osprey cruiser for more advanced mining operations.  So Wilhelm, my main, fronted him the money, which he ended up making back rather quickly.

It seems you can actually make money mining.  Not huge money, at least not without a bigger time investment than I want to make at the moment, but decent money.  I had trained up his mining and refining related skills along the way, so his yield is decent at the moment.  It did not take too many runs in a system where I was able to find and mine some plagioclase asteroids to make up the cash invested in the new ship.

It is a bit tedious though. 

Mining doesn’t require enough attention that I can focus only that.

But it requires enough attention that I if I am mining on my laptop and playing LOTRO or EQ2 on my desktop, my ship spends a lot of time waiting for me to look over and take care of the next step.

Undock, warp out to my bookmark, target, start my mining lasers, then do a few fights with my ranger in Steamfont.

Look over, see the cargo bay is full, select the local station I am using, click dock, go back to my ranger.

Glance over again, see that I am in the station, unload my cargo bay, undock, and off I go again. 

There is a bit of excitement.  Once in a while a pair of pirates will spawn and attack me.

All I have for weapons on the Osprey is a standard missile launcher.  In fact, everything I have on it at the moment are items that were drops, so my investment is completely in the Osprey hull.

But the Osprey is tough.  One of the items equipped is a small shield recharger.  So as I mine and slowly fire off missiles at the pirates… or rats… pirates in EVE are generally considered to be players, while NPC pirates are called “rats”… I just recharge the shield if it drops below 50%.  It rarely happens though.  The ship has yet to take any damage outside of bringing down the shields a bit.

So back and forth I go, piling up ore to refine.