A lot of NPC ships get destroyed in null security space every day and leave a ton of space trash – aka wrecks – behind.  This opens a great opportunity to make an easy buck for new players: salvaging.

The Basics of Salvaging

Salvaging is the process of using a Salvager I or II  Module on a wreck to turn it into salvage, a raw material used to build rigs. Since there is always a great demand for rigs, there is also a great demand for salvage and you can get a relatively good price for it compared to minerals.

The salvager module has a base activation time of 10 seconds, after which there is chance that the wreck turns into salvage. If the attempt fails, the salvager will keep trying to salvage the wreck until it succeeds or it is turn off. The amount of salvage you will get depends on the size of the wreck (small, medium, large, structure wrecks …) and may result in no salvage at all even after a successful attempt. The unmodified base chance (5%) of a salvager can be increased by the following skills/modules:

Salvaging Skill: This skill increases the base chance by 5% per skill level

Salvage Tackle Rigs I or II: These increase the chance by 10% / 15% per level

Poteque ‘Prospector’ Salvaging SV-905 Implant: Increases the chance by 5%. This is a slot 5 implant that costs around 30 mil isk in Jita and is in my opinion not worth the isk for the bonus it provides.

A wreck needs to be within the 5000m range of the salvager to be salvaged . Since wrecks are mostly scattered over a bigger area after killing NPC ships, it is a good idea to first move the wrecks closer to your ship. There are two modules that can be used for that:

Small Tractor Beam I : A high slot module that pulls wrecks closer to your ship if activated on it. It has a base range of 20km, so you might still use a propulsion module of your ship to get closer to wrecks that are further away.

Mobile Tractor Unit (MTU): A deployable structure that works similar to a tractor beam. The MTU pulls one wreck at a time closer to the MTUs deployed location until the wrecks is within 2500m. It also automatically collects the loot in the wrecks into the MTU if there is any.

There is also a Salvage Drone that can be used to salvage ships. The drone can salvage wrecks within the control range of the drone, which is much higher than the 5000 m range of a salvager.  The base chance of the drone is 3% which is increased by 2% per level of the Salvage Drone Operation skill. The ships rigs do not affect the salvage drones base chance. The other stats of salvage drones are very similar to light combat drones just without the possibility to inflict damage.

Salvaging Ships

So what kind of ship should I use to start a salvaging career? In general a salvager module can be fit to any ship on a high slot, but there are two kinds of ships that generally work best as salvaging boats:

Destroyers: All destroyers have 8 high slots, which is great to fit plenty of Salvagers or Tractor Beams. The rig slots should be filled with Small Salvage Tackle rigs. In the mid slots you usually fit a Medium Capacitor Battery for sufficient capacitor to run your salvagers permanently and a 5 mn Microwarpdrive to burn closer to wrecks that are too far away for your tractor beams. In the low slots you can fit Expanded Cargo Holds to increase cargo capacity or fitting modules if needed. The salvage itself has a very low volume but the additional loot from the wrecks can be quite big. The basic idea of the fit will work for any T1 destroyer.  How many salvager vs tractor beams you should fit in the high slots depends very much on the way the wrecks are distributed in space, but two tractor beams are usually good enough.

This is an example of a salvaging Thrasher fit:

Noctis: The Noctis is the king of salvage boats. It has a similar slot layout to a destroyer and therefore the fit is almost the same. However, it has bonuses to tractor beam range and velocity and a reduced cycle time for salvagers. Both hull bonuses significantly speed up the salvaging process. It has a big cargo hold for salvage and can loot several sites without the need to dock. On the downside, the Noctis hull costs 50-60 mil which is quite a lot of isk compared to a 1 mil destroyer hull. But if you are salvaging a lot, it might be a good investment.

How to find the Wrecks?

Now that we have the basic mechanics and ships sorted out, we just need a decent number of wrecks to salvage.  This is where salvaging becomes a very social activity, because you need to find other players that are willing to let you salvage their wrecks. The best way to do that is to talk to the players in your corp or alliance that do a lot of ratting and ask if you could salvage their wrecks when they are finished with their combat anomalies. Many ratters don’t bother to salvage themselves, so usually it is just a matter of asking them to let you know.

Of course you can just salvage your own finished combat anomalies and I will discuss next If this will be profitable for you or not.

There is also ratting going on in asteroid belts in null sec, however the amount of wrecks is quite small and usually not worth the effort. This might only be an option to fill the time between salvaging combat anomalies.

How much I can earn?

The amount of salvage and loot you will get from a wreck is quite random. However both rewards will be higher, the bigger the wreck is. I tested both of the above fits in Guristas null sec space and got about 3-5 mil in salvage and 3-7 mil in loot from the two most popular null sec anomalies (Rock Havens and Forsaken Hubs). To completely salvage such a site, you need to salvage about 50 wrecks. A salvage boat in the fits posted above can salvage around 2-3 wrecks per minute. So, with 5 salvagers on your ship it will take less than 5 minutes to completely salvage a site. However, since most of the times the wrecks are spread out you need to tractor them closer to your ship, which can add another 5 minutes to the time to complete it. The Noctis is generally a bit faster with this, because of the greater tractor beam range and shorter salvager cycle time, which will safe a minute or two depending on the site.

If you only salvage sites with all wrecks stacked within 5000m and you have a constant supply of finished sites available from other players in the same system, you could finish up to 10 sites per hour, which comes to 30-50 mil in salvage and possible 30-70 mil isk in loot. This sums up to a theoretical maximum of  60-120 million isk / hour, which is more ISK than running the sites in a VNI. However, these conditions will hardly ever be met. A more conservative scenario would be three sites per hour, with an average time of 10 minutes to finish a site, some warping between system to get to the proper locations, and some idle time while waiting for new sites. This results in a more realistic 18-36 mil isk / hour, which is still a great income for a new player in a 3 million isk Thrasher. This is actually very comparable to run sites in a VNI with around 35 mil ISK/hour.

Even if you just finish the sites by yourself, it is usually worth to bring a salvage boat later to collect the loot and salvage. A good strategy would be to drop an MTU when you start the site and leave it there for around 40 minutes. After that, all wrecks will be stacked around the MTU and you come back to salvage the site in about 5 minutes.  This will add a nice bonus to your VNI ratting income without much effort.

Ratting in Combat Anomalies is by far the most popular ISK-making activity in the game. You can find them in almost any system by just opening the Probe Scanner window (ALT+P) and filter for anomalies.

You can warp to an anomaly directly without scanning it down first and there will never be an acceleration gate to enter it.  Anomalies come in two flavours: combat and mining anomalies. For the rest of this guide only combat anomalies will be considered, since these are the ones used for ratting.

All combat anomalies have a difficulty level, that is not visible in the probe scanner window.  The only way to tell how difficult they are is by using third party info-sites, like Eve University’s combat anomaly overview:

Combat anomalies can be divide into 10 different classes, which again have different difficulty levels inside the class. The easier ones only appear in high security space, the harder ones in low and zero security space and the most difficult ones only in zero security space.

For ratting in null sec, you should best run Forsaken Hubs, Havens and Sanctuaries (Lv 8 to 10), because these spawn the most battleship rats with the highest bounties and are relatively easy to finish in an inexpensive ship.

Of these three, Forsaken Hubs pay out the best ISK/hour when run in a cruiser. However, Havens might unlock a high rated special mission, called an escalation, which offers you access to another even harder combat site in a different system. In these escalations the NPCs might drop very expensive deadspace loot and blueprint copies, which can be worth hundred millions of ISK.  Forsaken Hubs also can result in an escalation. However the ones received by Hubs are a lot less valuable. Havens come in two variations: The Rock Haven  and the Gas Haven. Rock Havens are much easier to finish, because the NPC waves are relatively small, while Gas Havens have big NPC groups that require much more attention and target selection to finish.

So, it is your choice if you rather want the steady income of Forsaken Hubs or the additional random escalation based income, running Havens.

Finally, sometimes you can find so called officer spawns in the last wave of ships of a combat anomaly. These special rats might drop pirate faction modules, which again can highly increase the payout of an anomaly.

The backbone of null sec ratting: The Vexor Navy Issue

By far the most popular ratting ship in null security space is the Vexor Navy Issue aka VNI. This fine ship can run – properly fitted – all difficulty levels of combat anomalies. With good skills you can even run most sites semi-afk, only watching the screen every couple of minutes.

The VNIs best weapon system for ratting are heavy drones. Because the highly rated combat anomalies consist mainly of battleships and battlecruisers, heavy drones apply their damage very well. Drones can also attack the enemy ships without the need to lock them manually or activate the weapon on the target, which means you can finish sites with minimal clicks and attention. Becaues the four different heavy drone types inflict four different damage types (Preator -> EM , Wasp -> kinetic, Ogre -> thermal, Berserker -> explosive), you can pick the drone that deals the correct damage type against the local pirate faction.

There are a lot of different fits people use to run combat anomalies. On of the most popular is the following  “shield-buffer-high-speed”-fit, which costs about 100-120 mil ISK in JIta.

High Slots: We only use a single Drone Link Augmentor (T I or II) to increase drone control range.

Mid Slots: Two Large Shield Extender II for a shield buffer tank. A Drone Navigation Computer to increase the speed of our rather slow heavy drones.  Finally, an oversized 100mn Afterburner. This is a module that is normally used by battleships. Fit to a cruiser sized hull it brings you to a speed of over 1000 m/s. The drawback of an oversized afterburner is a highly increased align time (25 seconds+) to get into warp.

Low Slots: lots of Drone Damage Amplifiers to increase damage. I like to use a Damage Control II to further increase my buffer tank and to give me some extra hull tank if I screw up and the NPCs break my shield tank. Finally, we fit a Omnidirectional Tracking Enhancer to increase the tracking of our heavy drones. This will make it easier for our drones to hit smaller targets like NPC frigates, destroyers and cruisers.

Rig Slots: a mix of Medium Screen Reinforcers, which match the two damage types the NPCs mostly deal . In my case this will be Guristas which deal kinetic and thermal damage.

Drones: 5 Heavy Drones of the correct damage type. For Guristas these are Wasps, because they have a weakness against kinetic damage. Use the T2 version if you can. If not, use the faction version, in this case Caldary Navy Wasps. Additionally, bring a set of ECM drones if you get tackled by something big and a set of Warrior II drones to fight small tackle ships.

How to run a combat anomaly

Running sites in a VNI is as easy as it gets. First, you warp to the anomaly at 20-30 km range. When you land on grid, there will be an asteroid or another object close to the center of the site, which you start to orbit at 30km with your afterburner switched on. The VNI will then slowly get up to speed orbiting the object. Don’t orbit an enemy ships because you will stop orbiting when it is destroyed. Your orbit speed should be more than 1000 m/s, which is too fast for the battleships to hit you properly.

You launch your drones, which should be set to aggressive mode and to focus fire.

Finally you can drop a Mobile Tractor Unit (MTU), to collect the loot and bookmark the location of it to come back later when the MTU has finished scooping all the loot.  This bookmark is also great to come back to your site, in case you need to warp off for some reason.

As soon as the NPC ships start to shoot you, your drones will engage a random NPC automatically. However, I recommend to kill the cruisers and battlecruisers first. After that, kill the frigates and finally the battleships. Since the battleships cannot hit you when at full speed orbiting your rock, you can let the drones just kill them in aggressive mode.  Some anomalies, like for example Rock Havens, can almost be run completely afk without killing small ships first.

Eventually, the next wave will spawn – either by finishing off the previous wave or killing a certain trigger ships – and you start to kill cruisers and battlecruisers again. Repeat this, until all waves have been cleared and warp to the next anomaly. If you get into low shield, just warp off, regenerate your shield at a structure and get back into action using your MTU bookmark.

The most dangerous part of this process are enemy players. Whenever a hostile player enters your system while you run a site, you need to warp off to a safe spot or a friendly structure immediately. The VNI fit is not designed for PVP and the enemy player’s ship will be strongly focused on killing VNIs, so there is no point in fighting roaming players. If your alliance or corp has an intel channel, watch it closely for information about enemy players that are close to your system.

If an enemy player should manage to tackle you in a site, don’t panic. If you are in a fleet, report to the fleet that you need help and the system you are in. Maybe somebody is close enough or even in the same system to help you. Secondly, align out to a friendly structure, overheat you afterburner and spam the warp button. Maybe you enemy will lose point and you can just warp off.  Finally, abandon your heavy dones and launch your spare set of ECM drones and send them after your enemy. If you are lucky, they will jam him and you can just warp of.  Alternatively, if you are only tackled by a small ship, you could launch your Warrior II drones and try to simply kill it or at least make it warp off.

My personal experience

With all this good advice I gave myself, I bought a VNI for 110 mil ISK in Jita and shipped it to the Pandemic Horde staging system system, by PH’s courier service. Ratting in the staging system itself is not a great idea, since local chat is very crowded with people and usually also contains some neutral players. So I moved two jumps out to a quieter system and started running sites.

In total, I spent about 5 hours ratting over a couple of nights and finished 5 combat anomalies (4 Havens, 1 Forsaken Hub and 1 Sanctum). In total, I got 169 mil in bounties + 65 mil ISK in loot, which comes to around 45 mil ISK/hour. Most of the loot came from a single Dread Guristas Stasis Webifier that dropped in one of the Havens. If you exclude this lucky drop from the total, I still made 36 mil ISK/hour. This value includes all travel time to get to the ratting systems, time I spent docked up when a neutral player entered the system and Pandemic Horde’s 10% ratting tax.

Horde’s ratting space is actually very busy and lots of neutral players roam the systems in search of easy targets, so I needed to warp off quite some times and sometimes even had to stay docked for a couple of minutes before the neutral player left the system. The only thing I lost however, was a single MTU that I left in a Haven.

In general, ratting in a VNI is mainly an afk activity. Just watch local for neutral players and manually kill battlecruisers and cruiser if a wave contains too many of them. It only happened once that I needed to warp off to regenerate shields. The number of NPCs in a wave is a little random and occasionally there are big waves, that contain a lot of ships and need manual target selection. 

The loot from the wrecks is only 3-5 mil ISK for each site. So it might not be worth to risk an MTUs for that. However, if you get a random faction NPC spawn and don’t notice it, the MTU will collect your expensive loot automatically (which happened to me btw).

After my first experiences, I had the idea to multibox VNIs with three characters, which turned out to be not too hard. The two new VNIs cost another 230 mil in Jita and I started to run Havens with three ships in the same anomaly. This requires a lot more clicking, because now only the drones of the VNI that is attacked by the NPCs attack automatically. The other two sets of drones need to be controlled manually. Another problem with three ships is to warp them out fast enough when a neutral player enters system. It takes a while to go to all three screens, recall your drones, select a friendly citadel and then hit the warp button. I lost one VNI against a neutral tackle interceptor followed by a cloaky Loki that way.

However, with a little more than 3 hours spent ratting on 3 characters I made 280 mil ISK in bounties and 40 mil ISK in loot (9 Havens in total) .  This comes to 105 mil ISK/hour, so the income scales very nicely with three characters compared to one without faction spawns and escalations. You can finish a Haven in about 15 min if you can do it without interruption.

But on top of that I managed to get two “The Maze”-escalations which were quickly sold to Hord’s escalation running team for an amazing 445 million ISK in total.

If you calculate this into the hourly rate, it goes up to 255 mil ISK / hour.

I want to finish my report with that staggering number. As you can see VNI ratting is a great way to make isk with little investment. Even as an experienced player with multiple accounts, there it still is a good amount of isk to be made relatively safely.

After the last post explained the theory of fitting a ratting ship, I want to give you an example how to put that knowledge into practice and do some belt ratting.

First thing you need to figure out is where you are going to rat. Since the biggest NPC bounties are paid out in null sec, it is highly recommended to find a corporation that occupies some null sec systems to rat in. The easiest choice for this – as far as I know – is to join Pandemic Horde or Karma Fleet, both alliances that accept any new player, no matter how little ISK and skill points you have.

I ratted in Pandemic Horde space for this guide, who currently live in Geminate null sec. A quick Dotlan check shows, that Geminate is inhabited by Gurista NPCs , who mostly deal kinetic and thermal damage and have a low resist against the same damage types.

The Belt Ratting Catalyst

Belt ratting involves a lot of warping around belts, so you want a ship that warps relatively fast and can deal lots of kinetic/thermal damage. Blasters are a good choice to deal these damage types, so the ship of choice could be either a Catalyst or Cormorant. which both have bonuses to small hybrid weapons. I picked the Catalyst for my ratting fit, because it deals more damage than the Cormorant. Another good choice would be the Algos, which  additionally has a drone bay. However, the Algos requires you to skill into a second weapon systems (drones in addition to hybrid turrets) and does less damage than a Catalyst. For beginning players with little skill points the Catalyst might be the better choice, but that is just my personal opinion. I also added a Algos fitting in the end of this post. 

After a quick PYFA session, I came up with the following Catalyst fit:

 

Click here for a text version of the Catalyst fit

 

Highslots:  Lots of Light Ion Blasters. Best if you can use the T2 version, because it does more damage and can use Void S ammo, which deals more damage against battleships, but T1 blasters will work great too.

Mid Slots: An 1MN Afterburner to increase speed and mitigate incoming damage from battleship NPCs. I use a meta Medium Shield Extender for a shield buffer tank. Since we deal only with a small number of  NPCs ships in belts, we don’t need a ton of buffer to finish it. A buffer tank is also easier to use for new pilots than an active tank, because it does not need to be activated.

Low Slots: As many Magnetic Field Stabilizer as you can fit, to further increase the damage. If your fitting skills aren’t great, you could fit a Micro Auxiliary Power Core to get more power grid if required.

Rig Slots: Two Small Screen Reinforcers (kinetic and thermal) to increase your resists against Gurista specific damage types and a Polycarbon Engine Housing to increase speed.  If you notice that you haven’t got enough buffer tank to run belts with a lot of cruisers, replace the engine housing with a second kinetic screen reinforcer or a small core defence field extender.

Ammunition: lots of Antimatter Charge S and also Void S, if you can use T2 blasters. Use Void  against the battleships and Antimatter against cruisers and frigates.

This fit results in 400+ dps with Antimatter loaded (550 with Void), goes around 750 m/s and has more than 4k HP against kinetic damage depending on skills. It costs around 17 mil in Jita at the time of writing.  You can easily  replace the T2 modules by T1 meta versions if you don’t have the skills yet or to save some ISK on the fit.

How to fly it

To belt rat in this ship, you will need to check the asteroid belts in your system of choice for NPC rats. Warp from belt to belt and kill all the rats. Battleship wrecks sometimes contain good loot that you should take. The smaller wrecks aren’t usually worth the time looting. When you finished all belts in a system, move to the next system.

If you encounter rats in a belt, the basic idea of the catalyst fit is to close in fast and orbit the NPC ships at 500 meters with your afterburner switched on all the time. Always kill the smaller ships first, before dealing with the battleships. Since you are too fast for the battleships to hit you properly, the only dangerous ships will be the cruisers and battlecruisers, which you should kill first. After these, kill the frigates and finally deal with the battleships. Your buffer tank only needs to hold until all cruisers and battlecruisers are killed. After that, it will slowly regenerate, while killing the battleships and frigates that deal very little damage to you. Very rarely, the frigates in asteroid belts will scram and web your ship. If so, kill these frigates first before moving on to cruisers.

Some of the Gurista ships will use ECM against you, which can seriously slow you down killing them, so it is best to avoid belts with too many jamming ships.

Running belts in Horde space

So, I moved one of my subcap characters into Pandemic Horde staging system and bought myself a T2 fit Catalyst. From there, I mostly checked the belts one or two jumps off Horde’s current home system which is O-WVPB.

Most belts are quite easy to clear if you stick to killing cruisers first and battleships last. There were very few groups of NPCs in some belts, which I could not handle in the above Catalyst fit. The biggest thread are definitely  hostile players, who frequently roam PHs home regions.  

The jamming gurista ships can also be a pain, who can in groups sometimes permanently jam you. I encountered two belts with too many ECM cruisers and battleships to clear them. If you encounter more than two ECM ships in the belt, it might be best to pick another than spending minutes jammed.

So I kept an eye in D-scan for hostile ships and ratted for around seven hours in total.

Now to the important part: What was the total income? During this seven hours I made 71 mil ISK in bounties and 25 mil ISK in loot, which results in around 14 mil ISK per hour. This amount is after Horde’s 10% ratting tax,  includes short times of staying docked when hostile player fleets passed through system, and to bring back loot to my home station and buy new ammunition. I needed about 7k in ammo per hour, so bring plenty. The loot was sold to one of Horde buyback programs, which paid 90% of the Jita buy value for it within a couple of hours. Some of the loot I got from wrecks that were already in the belts when I arrived and I also looted a couple of player wrecks that were less fortunate than me while belt ratting.

This amount of income is not the greatest, but  – as a beginning player – a lot more than you can earn by running low level high sec missions or mine in a venture. I roughly made 100 mil isk after these ratting sessions, which is enough to buy a Vexor Navy Issue (VNI) and start to run cosmic anomalies. So stay tuned for the next  part of this guide and my experiences with anomalies.

Bonus content:

The Algos also has drones, which still fight even when jammed by an NPC. Furthermore I fitted a Sensor Booster with ECCM script against jamming, which works great.  Other than that, this fit is very similar to the Catalyst. However, is does less damage and is slower than the Catalyst.

Algos Fitting