Before I am going to continue my mission running series with mining agents, I want to give you a brief overview of the different ships and modules that are used for mining. Mining missions will require the same equipment and skills as regular mining and agents will ask you to mine the three basic resource types: ore, ice and gas.
Mining Ships
In theory, every ship in Eve that has a turret hardpoint or drone bay can mine. However, there are several hulls that give bonuses to mining gear and have a build in cargo bay to store big volumes of ore, ice or gas.
The smallest hulls to mine are frigate sized and come in one T1 and two T2 versions.There is the Venture, which is the T1 version and has hull bonuses for ore and gas mining. It is one of the most newby friendly hulls in game and every player will get one for free during the tutorial missions. For extra safety it has two build in warp core stabilizers as a hull bonus
The first T2 version is the Prospect, which has the same mining bonuses. Instead of the warp core stabs bonus, it can fit a Covert Ops Cloaking Device II, which allows it to warp cloaked and operate more safely in low sec.
The second T2 version is the Endurance, which has a bonus to ore and ice mining. It also can fit a covert ops cloak and warp cloaked. Here are some other basic stats for the three hulls:
The next step up from mining frigates are mining barges, which also come in several T1 and T2 versions. All mining barge hulls have bonuses to ore and ice mining. There is currently no barge for gas mining, so you need to stick to frigates for this.
The T1 hulls are the Procurer, which has the most slots of all T1 barges and gives you a lot of fitting options for different scenarios. It can also fit the best tank of all T1 hulls. However, the amount of ore you can mine in a Procurer will be lower than in the other two available hulls. The Procurer also has quite a big drone bay, which will allow you to bring mining and combat drones at the same time.
The second T1 hull is the Retriever, which has the biggest ore hold but a very limited slot layout. The amount of mining it can do is in the middle of the three T1 hulls. The drone bay only fits one flight of drones, so you need to pick either mining or combat drones.
The last hull is the Covetor, which has the smallest ore hold, but will mine the largest amount of ore. The slot layout is similar to the Retriever and hence very limited. The Covetor has also a bigger drone bandwidth than the other two and can launch medium drones or a single ice mining drone.
There are also T2 versions of all three T1 mining barge hulls. The basic characteristics in terms of ore hold and mining amount of all three T2 are similar to their T1 counterparts. They all have additional slots to give you a lot more fitting options and most have a bigger drone bay. In general the T2 versions mine a bigger amount than their T1 counterparts and can fit a lot more tank.
The last type of mining ships are Command Ships, which use mining drones to mine but additionally can boost the mining stats of other mining ships in fleet. I don’t want to go into the details of fleet boosting and the other perks of command ships like a fleet hangar and ship maintenance bay, but only show you the basic mining stats.
There are three different command ship hulls, which are the Porpoise, the Orca and the Rorqual. All three require quite some training, with the Porpoise being the easiest, followed by the Orca and then the Rorqual. All three have very big ore holds and bonuses for mining drone yield. The drone bays are big enough to bring various flights of other drones for different purposes. The Rorqual is the only ship that can use Excavator Mining Drones, which can mine insane amounts of ore compared to even the best mining barge. However, you can only use the Rorqual in null security space and it costs around 10 billions ISK including a proper fitting and the excavator drones, so it is kind of the end game for mining. There is a lot more to say about the Rorqual and its mechanics, but I will explain that in another post. Here are some basic stats of the three hulls.
Mining Equipment
First thing you need to fit on your mining ship are mining lasers. These come similar to the ships in two different sizes.
There are the frigate sized mining laser for ore (Miner I / II), gas (Gas Cloud Harvester I/II) and ice (Ice Mining Laser I/II), which all come in a T1 and T2 version. The T2 versions all mine bigger amounts per minute. Ice miners always mine 1 block of ice per cycle, but get smaller cycle times by skills, hulls and other gear, which again results in more ice per minute.
Only Mining Barges can fit the bigger versions of mining lasers, which are the Strip Miner I for ore and the Ice Harvester I and II for ice. There is a special T2 strip miner version for ore, which is the Modulated Strip MIner II that uses ammunition to increase the mining amount. There is special ammo called mining crystals for all types of ore and if you want to mine a different type, you will have to swap ammunition for that particular ore. A mining crystals last for a couple of hours, so you won’t need new ones very often. With the proper crystal a Modulated Strip Miner II mines a bigger amount per minute than the T1 counterpart. Without a proper crystal it mines less.
Additionally to mining lasers, you can also use mining drones to mine ore and ice. There are various T1, T2 and faction version for ore and ice mining available. They pretty much mine more per minute if they are more expensive. Ice mining drones are quite big in size and need a big drone bandwidth, so not all mining hulls can use them.
There are the two special mining drones for Rorquals, called ‘Excavator’ Mining / Ice Harvesting Drone. A flight of Excavator drones is around 5 billion ISK, which comes on top of the expensive Rorqual hull and fittings. However, with the right Rorqual fitting these mine the largest amount possible in the game and income can be up to 200 million ISK / h.
To further increase the mining amount of your lasers you can use a low slot module called Mining laser Upgrade I / II for ore and Ice Harvester Upgrade I / II for ice. There is no upgrade for gas mining available.
Survey Scanners are another very handy mid slot module used for mining. A survey scanner scans all asteroids , ice blocks and gas clouds around you and displays how much is left in the scanned objects. By this you can time your mining lasers and don’t waste mining cycles on small asteroids. Survey Scanners come in a T1 and T2 and a meta version which have different ranges.
There is a special type of ore called Meroxid which is only found in null security space and that requires special mining equipment. It cannot be mined by regular ore mining lasers. There is several small and barge sized versions of mining lasers for Meroxit available and the T2 versions need Meroxit Mining Crystals to to work properly.
Finally, there is one type of rig that increases ice mining amount in all four sizes. There are no rigs that affect ore or gas mining laser yield, but another one that works for mining drones, which is mostly used on command ships.
If you then still want to increase mining yield, there are also various implants that affect increase ice and ore mining amount and reduce CPU needs for mining upgrades.
Mining skills
To use all these mining stuff you will need the proper skills. There are the skills to use the ships which are:
Mining Frigate, which gives you access to the Venture hull with level 1 and at level 5 to the Prospect and Endurance. The T2 hulls then need Expedition Frigates level 1 to unlock the hull and increase its stats.
Mining Barge, which gives you access to T1 barges with level 1 and at level 5 to the T2 versions. The T2 hulls then need Exhumers level 1 to unlock the hull and increase its stats.
For command ships you will need Industrial Command Ships for the Porpoise and Orca and Industrial Capital Ships for the Rorqual.
To use mining lasers you need to train Mining for all ore related lasers and Ice Harvesting for all ice related lasers. Both skills also increase the mining output of the corresponding lasers by level. Finally, there is Gas Cloud Harvesting to unlock gas mining lasers and increase the mining yield.
To get access to mining drones there are again two separate skills for ice and ore mining drones. These are Mining Drone Operation for ore mining drones and Ice Harvesting Drone Operation for ice mining drones. For both types there is also a specialization skills that unlock the T2 versions and that further increases mining yield of T2s.
One very important skill that is a prerequisite for many hulls and gear is Astrogeology. It increases the mining output of all mining lasers by 5% per level and is required to train into T1 (level 3) and T2 (level 5) barges. This is probably the most important skill to train to 5.
To use the mining laser upgrades, you will need to train Mining Upgrades, which unlocks Ice Harvester and Mining Laser Upgrades I/II.
Finally, if you want to use mining crystal for T2 strip miners, you will need to skill into ore processing skills. Each mining crystal requires you to train the corresponding ore processing skill of the ore the crystal works on, e.g. Arkonor Processing for Arkonor Mining Crystals. There are quite some different ore types, so to use all the mining crystals you will need a lot of training towards ore processing. However, these are skills quite useful to miners if you want to refine your own ore. From there you could also look into T1 production as a career.
That’s my summary of mining ships, gear and skills. It doesn’t cover every little detail about mining equipment, but will give you enough inside to understand the fits in the next post of these series, which will be about running mining missions in high security space.