Hauling Trash

Since my great experiment with production as a means of income in EVE Online, I have let those operations dwindle to almost nothing. Some things, like mining crystals for strip miner IIs, are still worth producing, at least in small numbers, because they do not seem to drop from NPCs.

The market, however, is flooded with ammunition from NPC drops, so if you want to make money in the low end arms market, you are better off buying from the general, mission running public than manufacturing it yourself.

Fortunately, in EVE, this is pretty easy, as long as you have some starter ISK. You open up the market, place a buy order for the item you want, set how far you want that order to extend, and you are set to go.

Of course, there is a downside to such an order, especially if you set the order to extend beyond more than a couple of jumps. Items you buy do not show up in the mail or appear magically in your inventory. No, you have to go pick up the stuff yourself.

You may be surprise at how many systems are within, say, five jumps of your location. Or how many stations there can be in a given system. For example, I had something waiting for me in every station in the Nonni system, which ended up being 22 stations in all. That is a lot of running around just in one system.

And you may also be surprised at how many low security systems end up being within, say, five jumps. I ended up with quite a bit of stuff waiting for me in low security systems. And that got my paranoia going.

Jumping through low security systems does not bother me much. But stopping at stations in low security is a different story, especially since EVE seems to “forget” to dock me about one time in eight. So I am not keen to take my fully fitted and rigged ore hauling Mammoth to low security stations just to pick up 100,000 ISK worth of antimatter charges.

Fortunately, Potshot left a Badger sitting around in the corp storage hanger, so that has become my new trash hauler.

I put a pair of warp core stabilizers on it along with a pair of shield extenders, in the hope that those might give me a few extra seconds to get out of trouble, but otherwise I am banking on simply not being worth the effort.

So far it has been working.

It is not as lucrative as mining, where I could make 10 million ISK an hour, nor mission running, but it does have the advantage of being mostly hands off. The buy orders take care of themselves as do the the sell orders, if you have found the right system.

You just have to go move your inventory to that “right” system and you’re set.