Mining is boring
28th April 2009 – 10.23 amI have moved my operations from the station with the low quality level two Core Complexion, Inc. manufacturing agent one system across to take advantage of the high quality level two Core Complexion, Inc. manufacturing agent. Moving can be stressful and change can be difficult to deal with but this move unsurprisingly goes smoothly. I'm not sure even I can run in to a gate camp moving one system in high-sec space.
However, meeting new people is not my forte and I appear to have got off on the wrong foot with the new agent. Despite working like my previous agent in the manufacturing division this new agent must bear some sort of grudge towards me. Instead of a slew of courier missions with the occasional encounter and mining mission to keep me on my toes the new agent is sending me mining all the time. I can't say I am a fan of mining, in fact finding it fairly tedious mostly.
To make the mining missions more bearable I have even done some research. Surely, I thought, mining cannot be this dull and have so many people spend hours shooting rocks, I must be doing something wrong. Sadly, having read through a few mining guides it seems that I am doing everything pretty much as expected, just perhaps a little inefficiently because of a lack of skills or modules. I am currently on a dedicated training plan to learn how to scrap modules, so I am not about to spend a couple of days learning how to increase my yield by a few percent. I always like going shopping, though.
Even though gaining a few extra cubic metres of ore per mining laser cycle doesn't seem like much, I am willing to spend under a million ISK to buy three new lasers to offer a 17% increase in yield. Anything to speed up the process. It's just a shame that mining lasers have a cycle of one minute, because unless your yield increases significantly, or you encounter space rocks with only marginally more ore than a standard mining laser can pull in one cycle, the likelihood is that you will still have to wait for that extra minute-long cycle to complete to mine the last dozen units of ore from a rock. This may not matter much when mining for fun out in space, as you can switch to a different rock that your scanner shows is full of mineral goodness to maximise yield per cycle, but when a mission requires a certain amount of ore to be collected you can guarantee that you need to mine every available asteroid, rock and pebble in the pocket of deadspace.
Still, the missions are easy enough to complete and my wallet is happier with the higher quality agent. I think my standings are seeing bigger gains per mission too, but maybe that's more a result of the lack of courier missions so far, I'm not sure. And even if this new agent insists on continuing to send me on mining missions it won't be for long, as I already have found another agent for Core Complexion, Inc. sitting a few systems away, this one a low quality level three agent. I need an effective standing of 3.30 to work with this level three agent, which looks like it will only require completing half a dozen more missions to reach. Mind you, the level three agent is also in the manufacturing division and I wonder what mining missions he will send me on.
2 Responses to “Mining is boring”
You can interrupt a mining laser cycle, and it will give you the ore mined up to that point in the cycle. From your entry, I am not sure if you realise that.
Mining is not the most interesting thing in the world, though there can be something satisfying at solo-mining out an entire belt in a hulk. As with so many other EVE activities, the company you keep whilst mining can make it enjoyable.
I didn't realise the mining cycle can be interrupted like that, thanks for the tip!
I was also mostly going for the pun in the title, but I know that I need to get involved with other capsuleers more. It's something I have to work on.