Band of Brothers

I apologize for the lack of posts of late, things have been pretty busy.

On the personal front, I’ve been making some good headway in the job hunt. I even have an offer or two, so that is always good! Hopefully now things will start getting back to normal!

In New Eden I’ve taken the big plunge and joined a Corporation! I’ve read in a number of places that EVE Online is truly only experienced once you’ve found a group of people to share your experience with…and by all accounts I think they were right.

The corporation I joined is full of mature, helpful people who want nothing more than to enjoy the game. The first thing that hit me was how much I truly didn’t know or didn’t learn about the game. I’ve spent nearly 6 months flying solo in Empire space and there is a TON of stuff you never run into. Thankfully, as I’ve said, this group of people has been very patient with me and always happy to answer my seemingly endless supply of basic questions.

We are mainly based out of Wormhole space (W-space or just WH space), so coupled with the fact that I know nearly nothing about Corporations, I know even less about Wormholes. Sure I’ve read many a blog on the subject, so I’m not totally clueless, but just about.

The Corporation is also a part of a larger Alliance, all filled with like-minded people interested in exploiting W-space and helping everyone out. So I couldn’t be happier with my time in New Eden right now. There is so much to experience, everything being totally new to me.

I can hopefully blog further on these new experiences. As I write this I am at a Sleeper site (a spawned Combat Site in W-space). I experienced my first one last night, and have now done 3 others. It’s a great way to spend the time. I’ve also done a wee bit of mining at a Gravametric site, though I need to increase my Ore Processing skills so I can use mining crystals to increase my yield.

The move into W-space was a tricky one. I had lots of stuff I wanted to bring in, namely my newly minted mining Hulk, so I had lots of logistical runs across space. I was eventually convinced that I should leave my expensive Hulk in Empire because the dangers in W-space are enormous. Thus I found myself purchasing a new Covetor and outfitting it with Tier 1 Strip Miners. It gets the job done, but not as well as my trusty Hulk. But it’s better to fly something you can replace than be broke and without a ship.

I have to say that the majority of my time is spent scanning. Luckily for me I invested a little time in my Astrometric skills early on, so I’m not totally in the dark as these are by far some of the most important skills to have in W-space. I am even a few days away from the Tier 2 Covert-Ops ship the Buzzard. It is specifically built for scanning, so I can’t wait until I’m up to speed on that ship.

I was just recently granted access to some storage space at our Corporate POS. Up until that point it’s been a little difficult to manage life in W-space, as I have lots of stuff I want to bring in to help, such as ammo and drones. Plus there was no place for me to stash my ore. But that’s all solved now so I think I can really sink my teeth into this whole Wormhole thing.

The funny thing is that I had never even joined a fleet up until I joined our Corporation. I haven’t been in too many since I joined, but it was a comical state of affairs during my first go at it. Lots & lots of questions. At least I’m starting to get the hang of it and am picking up alot of the acronyms. Our Alliance has a wiki which has been invaluable in getting up to speed. I feels great to be a part of something so organized and professional.

I’ll do my best to continue to blog about my new experiences. I just recently finished up my skills for Hacking (I’ve had the skillbook since day 1 of my time in New Eden) but I have yet to find a Radar site to use my newly bought Codebreaker 1. So just a ton of stuff to learn and experience and to anyone out there new to EVE, do yourself a favor and join a Corporation!

New Eden Community College

I finally decided to send Freddy back to school. The easy part of that in EVE is you simply need to buy your skillbooks and inject them into your neural network…and then train for days to raise their skill level, but the setup is still pretty easy.

Recently I’ve noticed quite a few green checkboxes in my Character Pane Skill List. I’ve always meant to pick up a few skillbooks at a time whenever I’m in or near Jita, but I always tend to forget. So finally the other day I decided I’d bite the bullet and get it done with. So I turned on the trusty auto-pilot after setting a course to an Academic Station in a System near Jita. When I finally got there I noticed quite a few scammers trying to sell the skillbooks at huge prices. Skillbooks in general are sold by the NPC station itself for a set amount of ISK, so I was careful enough not to fall for any tricks.

I set some guidelines first, such as I would not buy any skills over half a million ISK, even with this stipulation there were quite a few skillbooks I could purchase. When all was said and done I had spent roughly 5 million ISK and purchased over 20 skills. I was amazed at the price of some Science skills, I have probably 10 or more skills that I can learn, but each book costs near 30 million ISK. Perhaps someone can explain that one to me!

After I had injected all of my new skills I trained each one to level 1, just so that I would have basic competency in all the new areas. Granted there may be a few that I hardly ever use (like all the rigging skills?) but now I think I have a much more well-rounded skill exposure. Plus I can fit most things that I previously could not, so I felt it was well worth the trip. Freddy just past 6.9 million Skill Points, so I’m making steady progress.

Aside from the rampant skill training I also bought myself a new toy. I purchased a Heron Frigate for scanning. As I mentioned earlier I really enjoyed scanning, but hadn’t a need to really try it out recently. So, I bought and fully fit a Heron just for that purpose because it has a number of modifiers for increasing scan strength. I’m a week or so away from flying it’s Tech II counterpart, the Buzzard, but for now my Trusty ‘Explorer I’ is doing just fine.

I’ve actually been scanning my home system quite a bit recently. I’ve found all kinds of signature sites, such as hacking sites, salvage sites, Pirate rooms, etc.. One site in particular had me go through 3 or 4 heavily guarded Gurista rooms, and when I was finally through cleansing space of their infestation I received a popup saying I had intercepted their last transmission which was sent to another system. What the heck does that mean? I couldn’t find anything in my log or Journal that would have sent me to another system to track the message, so it must have just been for flavor. Perhaps someone knows what this was about and can fill me in.

I’ve also just finished raising a number of rare ore processing skills to level III, which allows me to fit their corresponding Tech I mining crystals to my Hulk fitted Modulated Strip Miner II’s. I will focus on getting the remaining ore processing skills once I’ve decided to finish up the 2 week training of Refining Efficiency V & Metallurgy IV. But for now I feel my mining skills are up to par for what I can reasonably encounter.

Finally I decided to queue up Electronic Upgrades V. I’ve wanted to do this skill for quite awhile and it was a toss up between that and Survey V. The former takes 8 days to train and the latter 4. However there are quite a few skills that rely on EU V, such as Hacking, Covert-ops, etc., whereas only one that relies on Survey V, Archaeology. I would like to get Hacking and Archaeology and then fit their corresponding Codebreaker and Analyzer modules to my new Heron. I’ve already found a few sites where I could have used both those skills. Ah well, I’ll get there in a couple weeks.

In the mean time I’m going to stick to scanning as that is quite enjoyable. I’m also still mission running & mining. I have quite a bit of work since I’ve spent around 150 million ISK in the last two weeks and my bank account is now hovering near zero. I’m still amazed I was able to purchase so much. Let the good times roll I guess, and kids…stay in school!

To Boldly Go

I apologize for the overused, ‘Star Trek’y saying…but my title creativity seems to have left me for the moment.

During my past week in New Eden I spent the time mostly running missions and, when appropriate, mining those mission rooms containing excessive amounts of Veldspar. It was mostly slow going as my newly minted & fitted Hulk crawls along so slowly. It usually takes me longer to get to the asteroid field than it does to fill up my 180,000 m3 hold, such is the life of the miner I guess. Either way with the generated ISK I’ve been able to buy and fully outfit my Hulk & a new Passive Tank Drake. I’ve been eying a new Drake because I’ve been getting close to level III missions and I need something a little tougher than my trusty Caracal. Well, finally on Friday I passed the needed 4.0 corp standing to enable my level III, quality 0 agent. I was pretty excited and jetted to Jita to make my big Drake purchase. Once that was complete I even outfitted it with a cloaking device…because I could and I had an empty slot.

When I returned to my ‘home’ station my new agent simply ignored me. I asked in local if anyone could help me figure out the problem, since I was clearly above the required standing level. Finally someone said “when in doubt, relog” which I did…and which solved the problem. So for all you out there that might be in the same boat, make a note of that.

I’ve run about 5 level III missions so far, and though they are definitely tougher, the rewards in both ISK, loyalty points, loot & salvage don’t seem to be that much higher than my level II’s. Either way they are much more fun and I’ve even become stuck on my latest mission. The Drake handles & tanks marvelously even with my sub-par shield skills. I’m able to outfit it with mostly Tech II modules, but there are still a few lingering Tech I pieces. The problem mission requires me to kill a battleship with a pretty decent tank. Being that the Drake is a missile boat and my missiles skills are even worse than my tanking skills I just don’t have the DPS to bring her down. I can get the BS into structure, but that’s after about 5 reloads and every time I reload the shields fully recharge and it’s game over. Ah well, at least I know my limits and what to work on next!

Now in terms of boldly going somewhere, I also outfitted my Drake with a core probe launcher. When I first began my adventures in New Eden it was a month or two after Apocrypha and the scanning revamp. Some of my first trained skills had to do with scanning, and my first manufacturing job was to produce 80 core scanning probes. So clearly I’ve always enjoyed scanning, I just never had a huge use for it and thus I haven’t scanned in a long time. I’ll even confess that just this week I discovered the true use and power of the directional scanner. Anyways, I figured I’d give it another try with my Drake.

I started in a neighboring system to “Home” and within about 10 minutes I had found a wormhole that was only going to last another day, but had yet to be disturbed by ship traffic. After a minute or two of convincing myself, I finally jumped through not knowing what I’d find on the other side. Once the WH materialized I promptly bookmarked its location and engaged my new cloaking device. I then started scanning again, but I only found a couple of hits initially. Being that I was pretty nervous, and that this was only the second WH I’d ever been in, I decided to only focus on one site and then get back home. After another 5 minutes I had finally locked down a Gravimetric site, a.k.a – mining site. Again, after a little self pep-talk, I warped to within 25km so see what the site held. To my amazement there were some HUGE asteroids made of minerals I’d never heard of. I have no clue what ‘class’ this WH was, but it didn’t matter I guess, I was having a blast. Being that the WH was apparently empty I half intended to run back and grab my new Hulk to do some WH mining, but then I realized that I didn’t have the requisite ore processing skills to fit my Modulated Strip Miner II’s with the necessary crystals. Ah well, another day then I thought. So I warped back to the WH and jumped home.

So it was a fun week, though slow at times. Flying solo can be rewarding, but I have to make sure and keep myself motivated with goals and new experiences. Some day I’m sure I’ll be able to help a Corporation as I feel that is the way truly experience EVE Online!

Slow Return

Though I am still without employment (not for lack of trying!) I am finding a little more time to return to New Eden. One of the things I’ve always liked about EVE was the fact that even if you cannot log in, your character may advance. Since I have been gone for nearly 2 months I queued up my skills for flying a Hulk, and as of last week they all completed! I have passed over 6.5 million Skill Points, and my lowly clone is only able to handle 4.8 million, so I need to rectify that soon.

The one problem I knew was coming, but I chose to ignore anyways, was funding such a behemoth. When I finally logged in I had just over $50 million ISK, peanuts compared to flying and outfitting a Hulk and it’s skills. So I hit the rocks with my trusty ol’ Retriever and after a week of mining and the few Level II missions I was sitting at around $80 million ISK. I guess I’m not the most efficient money making machine, but I get by. I discovered some dusty implants lying in my hangar, imagine my surprise when I saw that their combined market value was $20 million ISK! I was able to sell them last night and that put me over the top for purchasing my ORE Exhumer.

I’ve been reading alot recently about Hi-Sec Hulk suicide gank fleets. This has made me more than uneasy as once I’ve finished outfitting my hulk I am all but broke. Also, since the Hulk is a Tech II ship the insurance coverage is little to nothing. So I’ve decided that I will stick to mining mission rooms. I’ve found quite a few rather large areas that take a good amount of time for this solo miner to clear. I just wish I had another account (I had to cancel my trial account for obvious reasons) because the Hulk is just so slooooow it takes me forever to navigate around from asteroid cluster to asteroid cluster.

Anyways, here is the fit I went with. I chose a pair of Expanded Cargohold II’s over the MLU’s since I’m acting as my own hauler effectively. The tank isn’t anything to write home about, but I would love any help or suggestions.

Next on my skill queue are the prerequisites of Hacking and Archeology, I’m about 8 total days away from them, then hopefully I can try my hand at that. PvP is still a bit of a gray area for me, so hopefully I’ll get to that at some point to.

When (not if!) I am re-employed I’m sure I’ll have much more to report! Thank you again for all the support, the outreach has been tremendous!

Reality Bites

I apologize for the lack of posts of late. Unfortunately real life issues have forced me out of my virtual reality for the moment. The software start-up I’ve been at for the past 5 years was forced to close its doors thus I’ve been trying to find work ever since. The belts had to be tightened and most things unnecessary had to be cut back. If anyone happens to know of some openings for Software Developers please send them my way, here’s my LinkedIn profile just in case.

With all the doom & gloom I’ve still found a little time to keeps things at least progressing in EVE Online. Freddy finished up all the neccessary skills for flying a Hulk the other day and I’m almost done with the prerequisites for a Stealth Bomber. I guess that’s one of the reasons I like EVE’s character advancement system. Even if you can’t log in, you can still advance. That’s not to say I will know what I’m doing when I finally dust off my old account, but at least I still feel like I’ve accomplished something.

I’ve also found a small amount of time to get back into World of Warcraft. I’ve found that with my very limited play time running my Alts is the most rewarding. I can get on, do a quest or two and be done. I can’t say I’m an Alt-o-halic, but I’m getting there I guess. Once this economy and my personal situation turn around I’m sure I’ll have much more stories to share. Thank you for sticking with me!

How to start an Alt in EVE Online

Well it seems my Alt-itus has gotten the better of me. I’ve decided that Freddy needs a good buddy to help him out in New Eden and to allow myself a little more flexibility in the training department.

I’ve read that nearly every veteran player has at least 2 accounts, some with upwards of 8 or more, crazy! I think the need and help of another Capsuleer in space, plus the enjoyment of playing two characters simultaneously, is too great for me not to try, especially since I am currently only a solo player.

I’m worried that having an Alt sounds like a good thing for now, but then their usefulness fades and you’re left with another account that your paying for each month with no real need. I’ve followed Wilhelm’s account of his Alt Reynaldo Fabulous over on The Ancient Gaming Noob and unfortunately Reynaldo didn’t end up making the cut in the end for that very reason. I guess I’ll just have to try it out for myself.

My main motivation is to help Freddy as he mines away in space. I would love a hauler so that I don’t have to continually swap out my Retriever for my Badger II every 30 minutes or so. This is by far the biggest efficiency killer of my current setup. It would also be nice to have a salvager right there along side me as I run missions without having to go back to base and pick up my Destroyer for salvage duty. This would greatly speed things up in that aspect as well.

So as I began looking at how to properly setup a new EVE Alt I figured I’d write down what I discovered. Hopefully this will help anyone else who might also be interested and highlight the issues I expereienced.

1) If you currently have a paid subscription you can get a pretty good deal by using the EVE Bring in a Buddy program. You do this by logging into your account on the EVE Onling website and then emailing yourself a link for a 21-day free trial (the standard trial is only 14 days long). If you eventually subscribe with this trial account, your original account gets 30 days of free play time.
Using the 21 days is a great way to get your learning and core skillsets up to par. The problem is that you cannot play a trial account and a paid account at the same time on the same computer. Add that to the fact that trial accounts cannot use contracts, it becomes difficult to set up your Alt with all the necessary skillbooks and ISK from your main character without getting another player involved or having to use two computers.

2) Read this great guide for getting a new Alts’ Learning and Core skills up to par so that they have basic competency in a good number of areas. There is also this good article which offers the best Learning skill training schedule. It will take about 7 to 10 days to get everything in the acceptable range, but it’s time well spent.

3) Hauling skills cannot be trained on trial accounts. My first thought was to spend the few hours necessary to get my Alt trained in Caldari Industrial I so he could immediately begin hauling for me, but as I discovered you cannot train this skill on trial accounts, so just FYI. There are a few other skills out there with the same restrictions, but I don’t remember what they are off the top of my head.

4) An EVE account must be active for 72 hours before you can request a Limited API key. I originally wanted to create my Alt and get a few good skill path options laid out in EVEMon before decided on ‘The One’, but I then discovered that I had to wait 3 days before I could get access to an API key and thus EVEMon’s functionality. Again, just FYI.

5) Go through all the tutorials and initial career path missions. This is a great way to get some free skillsbooks, gear, ships, ISK and standing, plus it only takes a couple hours at most. This only applies if you need the help of free skills and gear, if your main character can bank roll your Alt, then don’t bother unless you want the small amount of standing the missions offer.

The point that I am not quite clear over is what happens when you decide to purchase your account half way through your trial period. Do you immediately begin paying for your subscription or does CCP let your trial period finish before billing you? If it is the latter, then you can easily avoid nearly all the problems I pointed out above by simply signing up for the trial and them immediately purchasing your new account. If it’s the latter, then I’d simply queue up all the Learning and Core skills you can in 21 days and wait till the very end to subscribe, the more free play time the better.

These thoughts are coming from a very new player himself (me), so please take everything with a grain of salt as I’m sure there are many other better/different ways to go about starting a new Alt in EVE. I simply wanted to write about my experiences as they were so fresh in my mind from creating Chief Gibbs a couple days ago.

Please let me know what you think is important in starting a new EVE Alt and pass along any more good articles covering the subject. Thanks in advance!

Well it finally happened…

For the first time I’ve been killed by another player. Now, I knew this day was coming, I just wish I would have handled the experience better. On the other hand, it was a great way to learn and get accustomed to what lay ahead.

I’m sure many of you veteran players and pirates will laugh yourself silly at my mistake, but it is what it is.

I was happily jet can mining in a 1.0 sec system, a new player system at that, in a lonely belt with only a few asteroids left. I looked away for a second and a red Merlin pilot had appeared and was sitting right next to me. Sure enough, a large stack of Dense Veldspar disappeared and he started moving away, slowly.

Here is where I made my mistake. A stake of Dense Veldspar which I could replace in about 5 minutes, turned into catastrophe. I figured ‘Hey, he’s only in a Merlin, plus I’ve never actually engaged another player before, let’s see what happens.’ Wrong wrong wrong.

I sicked my drones on him and he happily warp scrambled and webbed me, then picked off my drones one by one. I knew I was done for. I was hoping he wouldn’t pop my pod, so I eventually ejected and warped off quickly. Bye bye trusty little mining Retriever.

So that’s no biggie, yes dumb, but nothing compared to what I did next. I had my salvaging destroyer parked at the station so I figured I’d return and see what kind of damage I could do. Why did I do this you ask? Again, I’m a true newb in every sense of the word. Anyhow, I returned and lasted even a shorter amount of time than I had originally.

I was checking out the Battle Clinic loadouts for PvP/Pirate Merlins and found that even though it’s a Frigate class ship, it can still be fit pretty well to handle things like Destroyers and even a few Cruisers.

So I’m happily out around 20 million ISK with all the T2 mining laser, T2 extenders, salvagers and tractor beams . *facepalm* A pretty expensive lesson I guess, but again I knew it was coming. It has to happen to everyone at some point and in the end I’m just glad for the experience.

Lost in Space

I’m sorry I haven’t written much lately. It seemed I had my grand plan all mapped out and was just slowing moving along, happily mining the belts I could and not much else. Well, over the past week things have taken a slight, alright a major, detour.

But let’s back up a little first. So I began the week as usual, just mining away raising my mining and refining skills so that I could better sell my High Sec Veldspar in Jita. I knew that my faction standing affected how much ore I was able to take away from each refining process. Since I haven’t run missions in awhile and not much of them anyways I was sitting at nearly the max 5% tax rate. So I decided I’d try out my new Caracal mission running ship and see how she fared.

I have (had) been trying to joing a very solid corporation and to show my commitment I packed up all my spacely belongings and made the 20+ jumps into Gallente space to be closer to their base of High Sec operations. Now being originally Caldari my Gallente standing was in the negative, even with all my Social skills that I had trained early on. So I only had a single level II, low quality agent to use, and yet no matter how many missions I ran, my Gallente standing didn’t move at all…it even went down! Ugh. So I did a little research and uncovered the COSMOS agents that were released a few years back. These are story-line agents with chained missions and great rewards in both items, blueprints and standing. So I ventured even deeper into Gallente space to seek out these elusive COSMOS individuals. Sure enough, after running through a few chains of level I missions my Gallente standing raised….0.0325%…great. Needless to say this wasn’t quite going as planned.

My Caracal Crusier was suited for level II missions and I wasn’t about to crawl up the Gallente standing ladder gaining a fraction of a percentage for 4 or more missions. Couple that with the fact that my application didn’t quite work out, I am after all a little to green for most established corps, and I was back on the move. I backup up all my junk…again, and headed the 20+ jumps back to more familiar territory.

When I ended up back in ‘The Forge’ I was still itching to try out some level II mission running. My mining had already been on the back burner and I could now actually run some decent missions. It didn’t help the fact that all my queued skills require nearly two weeks to complete, and they are all mining related. Again, I do love mining, but it can certainly be a lonely undertaking. Mission running is much more exciting with its instant gratification and the majority of the blogs I follow offer wonderful accounts of combat, fleet battles and gang warfare…much more ‘Hollywood’ than my poor Retriever Mining Barge could ever offer. So I decided to make a change.

I started training some none-mining, none-week long training time skills, to make my more combat ready. I’ve been ready a great blog about a new player, similar to myself, starting out on a stealth bomber career. He’s documenting his account from the very beginning and he’s doing a bang up job of it too. You can check out his stealth project here. This definitely piqued my interest and I found that I was only about few weeks away from flying a stealth bomber myself. So I queued up several of the requisite skills and off I went.

As I progressed even further down this dark, combat hole I got side-tracked yet again. Being that I was fresh off running some Gallente COSMOS missions, I figured I’d check out the Caldari version of them. They had fairly decent story-lines and it was definitely something new that had far greater standing gains than just normal mission running.

Once I located the system the agent resided in, again using Ombeve’s amazing 2D maps, I started in on the level I offerings. I made it through the majority of them in short order and was onto level II’s. When I got to the second part of a mission chain I was required to use a warp gate that was only suitable for smaller ships, my Cruiser was not allowed. Given my previous success with destroyers on a level II missions I wasn’t feeling that enthusiastic about the whole situation, but I thought hey this time might be different. Ugh.

I promptly returned to the gate in my trusty Cormorant Destroyer the ‘Black Rabbit V’ (The V being how many of that ship type I’ve been through in the past). I hadn’t lost a ship in nearly a month, so I wasn’t quite as sharp as I should have been. As soon as I warped in I lit the cans after aligning to a local space port. I almost made it away…almost. Needless to say I didn’t take my shiny new ‘Black Rabbit VI’ back there to retrieve my stuff.

After sulking around a little bit I ended up in a deadspace room on a different mission path that was the hub for big collection of other mission types, thus it was pretty crowded in there, both in pirates and other players. Somehow I ended up aggro’ing the whole place (I’m still scratching my head on that one) but I was lucky enough to warp out of there with a wee bit of structure left, otherwise I would have been onto number VII after barely getting her off the lot.

When I returned I noticed that the majority of other players were either destroyed or long gone…save one. There was this one capsuleer that had the entirety of the room locked onto him blasting away…and he was just motoring on by like it was a Sunday afternoon drive. Eventually the pirates were dispatched and I was able to pick my jaw up off the floor. The very polite and helpful pilot, sadiest I believe, started a conversation with me to see how I was doing. I told him how amazed I was with his tank clinic he was putting on. He said he was flying his Passive Tanking Drake. He gave me some pointers on what was all involved and even helped me finish up my mission. I thanked him profusely for his help as he was moving on and started my flow simmer on what it would take to fly one of these tanking behemoths myself.

Now, I’d read about the Drake before, but never actually seen it in action. I was immensely impressed and had to see how far off I was from flying one myself. Amazingly I had trained up enough already to be able to fly one, but just as quickly as I was elated I was let down realizing that my shield skills were sorely lacking. Regardless, I was only about 4 days away from flying a fairly decently equipped passive tanking Drake, this says nothing about affording one however. I’m just over half way there now and have started the process of saving up to afford one.

I know you’re only supposed to fly something you can afford to lose, and unfortunately if I purchased my Drake today with all its equipment I’d be dead broke. I’ve looked into a number of ways to remedy this. I’ve found some decently cheap blueprints of certain items and rigs that I could save a bundle with, so I may go that route. But again if I lose this baby I’d pretty much be up  crick without a paddle. So I’m back to mining full time now.

It seems I’ve gotten myself stuck in one of my ramblings again so I better quit while I’m ahead, or at least still awake. My skills have gone from mining specific, to all over the board. I’ve settled on shield skills now (resists, upgrades, etc.) and will hopefully move on to stealth bombers next.

I’ll keep you posted!

Keep on truckin’

So it’s been a fairly slow few days for me in Eve. I’ve found a good amount of time to play, but for the most part I spend it sitting in an asteroid belt. It’s a great way to keep the bank account growing as I wait for my Hulk.

Yet I decided I should try running a few missions to increase my standings and security status. Unfortunately for me I’m currently in Gallante space and the majority of my good Agents are back in Caldari space. Regardless I decided to give it a shot.

I just recently purchased my first combat cruiser, a Caracal. I fitted her with a decent loadout found on BattleClinic and headed out to my only level II Agent in the system, quality -17.

My first experience with a level II mission was a great one. It was a simple ’seek & destroy’ type, heavy on the destroy. When all was said and done it had taken me a good part of half an hour to clear the pirates, roughly 40 of them. My Caracal, ‘Hammer I’, performed marvelously! With barely a scratch on her I decided to pick up the pieces and then head back to retrieve my salvaging Destroyer.

The entire experience netted me just shy of 750k ISK, not included the salvage, which was heavy. Pretty good for about an hours worth of work. Nothing compared to what I can generate when I’m solely focused on mining, but still good. Plus it was a helluva lot more fun!

As I’ve been examining my training path (there’s lots to think about while you mine on endlessly) I’ve discovered that I’m roughly 30 days from my mining Hulk.

Mining Hulk Training

I’m also about 30 days away from flying a stealth bomber.

Stealth Bomber Training

Since I’ve been attempting to join a very good Corporation as of late, if they feel I’d be more useful to them flying a bomber than flying a Hulk, it will be easy for me to switch over.

Either way it’s pretty much more of the same. I’ll continue to suck on those asteroids and hopefully get distracted from time to time. Feel free to say Hi if you’re flying by…

My Own Personal Asteroid Belt

I have been in the process of packing up shop and moving out of Jita, in the hopes of joining my first real Corporation! *fingers crossed* So the past couple of nights have been all about logistics and not much else. I was eventually able to pack everything up into my Badger II Hauler and everything I couldn’t fit I sold on the market. Not the best, but considering my destination was 17 jumps away, I didn’t really want to make continued round-trips.

Once I finally arrived I began familiarizing myself with the surrounding constellations. I was looking for a good spot to setup my mining operation. With the help of Ombeve’s amazing 2D EvE Maps I was able to find a great spot in short order. I then realized that I was in Gallante space and my personal standing wasn’t that great, so I decided to pick up two ships to help rectify the situation: a mission running Caracal Cruiser and a salvaging Cormorant Destroyer.

My first mission was easy enough, seek and destroy. It was over in around 5 minutes. As I was warping between rooms I noticed some asteroid belts floating nearby inside each room. Now, I’ve seen these in the past and I’ve read about people mining their missions, but it never really dawned on me before how amazing this setup could be. Since I’ve been mining my arse off the past week I figured I would try mining the asteroid belts before turning in the missions requirements.

Wow!

I was under the impression that these mini-asteroid belts were full of tiny rocks with little substance, boy was I wrong! As the screen shot below will attest, I basically had three of my own private asteroid belts sitting inside my mission rooms.

Personal Asteroid Belt

I spent the next three hours basically AFK mining with little fear of trouble. I realize someone with enough time and patience could rain on my parade, but I doubt that is too much of a problem.

So, even though I had good intentions of running missions all night and improving my Gallante standing, I was inevitably sidetracked by those damned floating space rocks. Now if only I could fly a Hulk!