Mining missions are another subcategory of missions, which ask you to mine a certain amount of ore from a specific site in a system close to your mining agent of choice. The ores you need to mine, are not the standard ores you can find in asteroid belts and mining anomalies, but unique mining mission ores. These cannot be sold or bought on the market. To complete a mission, you have to go there yourself and mine whatever amount is needed. The mission sites always contain the exact amount the agent is asking for and you need to drop it at your agent’s home station in order to complete the mission. Similar to other missions, you are rewarded in ISK and loyalty points (LP) for your services and gain standings to the agent and his corporation.
Mining agents also come in four levels and you will need sufficient standings to the corporation in order to get access to the agent. To learn more about agents and standings, check this previous post.
Mining sites may contain a few hostile NPCs and you will need to bring a flight of combat drones on your mining boat to deal with them. These NPCs are very weak regardless of the mission level and no special combat ship is needed to clear them.
Most mining missions are at the most one jump away from the agent, very often even in the same system.
Mining missions require you to mostly mine ore, but in the higher levels (3+) you might be asked to mine also ice or gas.
I don’t want to go over each level separately, but will summarize the amount of ore and the required time I needed to finish a mission in the following table:
| Level | Volume in m3 | avg. Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1K - 2K | 6 min |
| 2 | 1.8K - 6K | 10 min |
| 3 | 4K - 10K | 11 min |
| 4 | 20K - 45K | 53 min |
As you can see, the amount of ore is getting bigger with each level, as does the rewards and the time to finish it. The completion times pretty much depend on the amount of ore you can mine per second and were measured with my quite average mining skills and the fits below.
In the lower level missions, the asteroids in the sites are quite far away from the warp-in point of the mission and you will need to fly closer to get into mining laser range. These missions are better done in a ship that moves relatively fast to minimize the time required for the mission.
My character had most social skills trained to level four to increase the base payout, but no Mining Connections skill was trained.
The Ships
For level one mission and some of the level two mission with low ore volume, you can use a pretty standard mining Venture fit.
If you want to know more about the different modules and skills to improve mining yield, just check this post about mining equipment.
This is basically a T2 fit, with maximum mining yield and some shield tank in the mid and rig slots. To fight hostile NPCs, it comes with two light scout drones. It has an afterburner fit, which gives you some speed tank against hostile NPCs and lets you get into mining laser range faster. With maxed out skills it pulls 8.52 m3 (2*4.26) of ore per second , which is the maximum amount for a solo venture. If your mining skills are not perfect and if you have to use T1 lasers and mining upgrades instead of T2, your amount will be lower. My pilot reached 7.2 m3 per second, which is not great but also not too bad.
The Venture has a ore hold that fits 5k m3 of ore, so you can finish the low ore volume missions without going back to station to drop off ore, which saves some time warping around.
For the missions with a larger amount of ore (>5k m3), I used the following Retriever fit:
This fit is very similar to the Venture, with Strip Miner Is instead of the frigate sized mining lasers, more Mining Laser Upgrades and more drones. The tank and drones are more than enough to fight the NPCs in the higher level missions. This fit pulls 16.86 m3 ore per second, which is a big upgrade to the Venture. The ore hold of the Retriever fits 28k m3 of ore, which allows you to finish most missions in one go. Only some level 4 missions with high volumes will require you to drop ore in station in between. This fit is slow as a turtle and not doing great in level one and two missions, because traveling times within the sites are too high. In level three and four missions the rocks are mostly within mining laser range of the Retriever.
For ice mining missions, I refitted my Retriever to an ice mining fit with spare modules that I always kept in my cargo bay:
This fit almost pulls the same volume of ice as the ore fit and all modules you need to swap easily fit into your cargo hold. I had no ice mining rigs fitted, since I wanted to use the same ship for both types of missions. You will get Ice mining missions from level three and four agents. The ice cubes are pretty close to each other, so no propulsion module is required for these missions.
I did not run any of the gas mining mission, but declined these when I got one, because gas mining cannot be done in a barge and I would had to bring a second Venture to run these. However, I only got two gas mining mission within several days and these were safely declined without standing loss. These are also only given out by level three and four agents.
The Payout
I ran around a dozen missions of each level to get an idea of the average payout per level. The amount of ISK and LP within each level is pretty much proportional to the amount of ore you need to mine. So for a level 4 mission that requires you to mine 20k m3 of ore, you will get roughly half the payout than for a mission that asks for 40k m3 of ore.
I ran all missions in the above fits and got the following average payout per mission in each level:
| Level | avg. payout (in mill ISK) | avg. LP (in mill ISK) | ISK / hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.05 | 32 (0.05) | 1 |
| 2 | 0.37 | 346 (0.52) | 5.3 |
| 3 | 0.5 | 722 (1.08) | 8.6 |
| 4 | 1.5 | 3325 (5) | 7.35 |
With the average time per mission that I mentioned earlier, you will get the ISK / hour values in the above table. The payout even for level 4 missions is still not great, with level 3 mission strangely having the best payout with 8.6 million per hour. This is caused by the fact that the amount of ore to mine in level four mission raises by more than 1000% in the worst case scenario – 4k m3 ore vs. 45k m3 – compared to level three missions. Additionally, you will sometimes need to drop off ore in station which can take quite a while in a slow aligning and warping Retriever. However, the rewards for level four missions increase by only between 3-4 times compared to level three rewards. This is much lower than the payout by level four distribution mission that was around 15 million per hour for level four missions.
Of course the ISK per hour could be raised by better mining skills and equipment, but even with maxed out skills and an exhumer you will hardly double these values. I think this is actually a very poor payout for quite a lot of skill points you need to invest to fly barges properly and ISK you need to spemd on the equipment. The only real advantage is that you can run many of these missions almost afk with minimal interaction during the mission. Especially level four missions can sometime be run with just activating your lasers twice in 40 minutes. So if you want to make some easy afk ISK, mining missions might be the right thing for you. This also opens up a good opportunity to run several mining missions at the same time with multiple accounts. With this little interaction needed, you can easily run a dozen accounts at the same time running level fours.
Lastly, mining missions are quite an alpha account unfriendly activity because they cannot train into mining barges. With the venture being the only mining ship available to alphas, the higher level missions will take hours to complete for minimal payout.