Requirements (for beginners)

Quite a bit of skills, but since most of them don’t take too long and most of them are essential anyway it’s not too much of a hassle.

Speed
Train Microwarp Drive. This way you can evade missiles and turret fire. In a frigate you can take down opponents much larger than yourself if you can rely on a speed advantage. This leads to…
High Speed Maneuvering I
Navigation IV
Afterburner IV
Interrupts
Warp Scrambler (the -2 scramble is more likely to stop a target with a warp core stabiliser opposed to a Warp Disruptor), meaning…
Propulsion Jamming I
Navigation II
Electronics III
Capacitor Power Relays (since a Microwarp Drive and Warp Scramber are quite a drain…), which means:
Energy Grid Upgrades II
Science I
Engineering II
Slow Downs (optional)
Stasis Webfilter (no additional requirements for this one), though not necessary in asteroid belts, near planets, etc.
A ship (.. surprise!)
Kestrel or Rifter. They allow lockdowns combined with decent speeds and fire power.
The Kestrel should be outfitted with rockets or standard missiles, depending on your personal preference
The same goes with guns and missiles for the Rifter
The Amarr and Gallente versions of those ships are a little more difficult to master and are inferior in regards to ship design

Hunting Locations

In general 0.4 space and below. Look around less busy areas since those are the ones where the miners are usually hiding and keep your eyes open in local.
Use your scanner to look for haulers and mining cruisers
Once you found one either use the scanner to narrow him down (recommended - takes some practice but much faster once you got the hang of it), or skim the belts manually

Fighting

Orbit your prey at your optimal range and engage your warp scrambler and weapons
Convo him once you got him down to structure to ask for a ransom. Base your request on the value of his ships, modules and the overall amount he would lose if he went down.
Don’t pod-kill your target as the security status hit will prevent you from going into high security space again

There are 8 important mission templates in the game at the moment. About 5 or so of them can be expected to work for any given agent, although some agents may have a couple more or less. Thus you have about a one in 5 chance per important mission that it will be an implant mission. Statistics do NOT say that this means 100% after 5 important missions. But it does say that if you haven’t done about 10 important missions, you really shouldn’t expect to have had an implant even if somebody else is on a winning streak, and thus shouldn’t be screaming bloody murder on the forums.

Important missions are dished out at random intervals. Until you’ve had an important mission with a given agent, you can expect one with that agent any time in the first 20 missions. Could even be the first mission you get. Once you’ve had an important mission, you’ll be getting them again about every 4 to (20-your personal standings with that agent) missions.

Thus if you have 0 personal standings and stick to the same agent, it would take about 168 normal + 14 important = 182 missions before you could except to have had a 95% chance of getting an implant, given a 1/5 chance of an implant mission. With 10 in personal standings, it would take about 98 normal + 14 important = 112 missions before you’d have a 95% chance.

At 1/8 odds, if your agent happens to have all 8 important missions at his disposal, the total numbers would be about 276 normal + 23 important = 299 missions at 0 standings, or 161 normal + 23 important = 184 missions at 10 standings.

So if you’re going to be really serious about it, you’ll have to try to find out what important missions your agent does have at his disposal. The fewer the better, assuming that he does indeed have the implant mission at his disposal. The pirate factions don’t, and only level 3 agents do. The only other criteria that may burn you is that the mission requires a courier destination in a station in a neighbouring constellation. If there exists at least one station in a solar system in a neighbouring constellation which has a security rating similar to that of your agent’s, you’re safe on that one. You’ll want to stick to a single agent if possible.

Another factor to keep in mind is that missions and missions are not the same. Some missions have an average time of perhaps 30 minutes, while others have an average time of 7. Kill missions are generally quicker, but they give less standings and less agent rewards, although the loot and bounty can make up for some of that. The type of missions dished out by a given agent varies by corporation type and by division. You can also get a little further by having a ship type that suggests something about the mission you’re up to. A battleship is more likely to get kill missions f. ex.

If you’re really seriously trying to hunt for implants, try to pick an agent that gives you an insane amount of kill missions. That way 100 missions may take you 12 hours as opposed to 50 hours of long courier jobs. You may even want to try to find a station where there are multiple level 3 homicidal agents, as that way you can really improve your mission time by reducing the travel time to and from the agent’s station. Fit your ship for as much speed as you can to reduce your mission time as well, as a very significant part of your mission time is travel.

To tjeck at what FPS your Eve is running press “CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-M” - This will pop up a small windows showing FPS, it can also show other usefull stuff.

Turn of “Sun is occluded by ships” in the ESC menu under generic - This should boost your FPS a little while in-space[Newly added since i forgot to add this the first time]

Turn off sound card or just do a CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-F12 in-game (EVERYTIME you start Eve!) - Eve seems to have problems with most sound cards so changing this should free some resources. Remember to tjeck the FPS counter with this option though, you might just be one of the lucky with a sound card that Eve works with.

Put in advancedDevice=1 (notice the lowercase a and upper case D) in your prefs.ini now some new settings have appeared in the graphics options in the ESC menu, change the “present interval” to intervel immediate - This one boosted my FPS alot! “Interval immediate” means “no vsync”. “Interval one” means wait for vsync. “Interval default” is probably vsync on, depending on your display setup. For the full explanation see D3DPRESENT_PARAMETERS in the DXSDK. <-- Thank you to Mark A for the info about what it does.

Change desktopHeight and desktopWidth to match thoes of your desktop in the prefs.ini - If your running your windows in 1600 x 1200 then change the settings to match those.

Change buffersize to half of what RAM you may have in the prefs.ini - So if you have 512MB RAM then you change it to 256MB

Disable any secondary display - This will give your GFX card less work to do but unless CPU is not your bottleneck this should not help much.

If posible upgrade your machine to 1024MB RAM or more - Eve uses alot of memory so upgrading to 1024MB or more should help quite a bit.

If sound card enabled try and turn off any hardware acc on it in "dxdiag" - Look at the other bit where i explained sound cards.

When in-game press CTRL-Tab to get rid of the UI (only if you can live without the scanner) - Eve seems to have some issues with the transparentcy in the UI, using this removes most of the UI and frees a lot of resources.

Close every program posible in Windows since Eve is VERY CPU demanding - Even stopping stuff like Winamp and mIRC will help, so close everything you don't need!

Run the game in full screen - This seems to boost the FPS for some reason but probely just Windows alocating more resources to Eve.

Change the eve.exe process priority in WinXP and Win2k by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, finding eve.exe in the Processes list, right clicking on it, and setting it to High - Thanks to Drakworlf for this one, note that this setting will make Windows give Eve most if not all resources, so don't do this if you have something important running in the background.

If running Eve on a laptop with a ATI card in it then this link might help also http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/, in there you can find a program to modify the normal cat drivers to work on mobility cards - USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! The Cat are not made to run on mobility chips so using this might cause harm to your system, im using this my self on my laptop without any problem but it does not mean that you wont have problems!

REQUIREMENTS

For a low SP character

Many new characters may think themselves useless as pvpers; but this is most definately not the case. In a frigate you can take down, or immobilise, an opponent much larger than yourself. They key to not dieing while yo do it is speed.

Therefore it is alost essential for all new characters to train for a microwarp drive

This will help you to evade missiles (and take less damage from them in the upcoming patch) and evade turret fire.

Thus a new pilot should invest in the following skills:

High speed maneuvering I

Navigation IV

Afterburner IV

This is probably the most time consuming of the skills that you will need.

Next, you will need to be able to use a warp disruptor or warp scrambler, to stop your prey from warping away.

Both of these have their benefeits, however i recommend using a warp scrambler as a lot of your targets may carry a warp core stabiliser, and the -2 scramble on this item is more likely to stop them from warping. Secondly, a warp disruptor uses too much capacitor to be run easily on a frigate.

To use this module you will need to train:

Propulsion jamming I

Navigation II (you should lready have this at IV)

Electronics III

Since you now have the two main essentials: you may also want to fit a stasis webbifier (which has the same requirements for skills as the warp scrambler) to slow down your prey. However this may not be necessary if you are in an asteroid belt or at a planet etc as your target has nowhere to run.

Of course you need a ship to fit these to, and i recommend either the KESTREL or the RIFTER as both have the ability to lock down a target, while staying reasonably fast and dealing some good damage. For the kestrel, the choice between rockets or standard missiles is one best left to you. Rockets are better for close range combat as they have a better damage/time. For the rifter, experiment with the guns/missiles, and find out which suits your style best.

At this point i would not recommend training gunnery skills too much.

(If you are not caldari or minmatar, don’t worry, learning the skills to fly either a kestrel or a rifter take very little time at all, and are worth it: as in my opinion they are the best pirating ships. The amarr and gallente equivilents require more gunnery skills and have “inferior” ship loadouts)

Now, running a microwarpdrive and a warp disruptor, along with whatever else you wish to fit, is a drain on your capacitor. Capacitor power relays in the lowslots can help you to sustain the modules.

These require:

Energy grid upgrades II

Science I

Engineering II

(dont worry about all this training: it doesnt take very long, and many of the skills are essential later on anyway)

The rest of the slots on your ship if you have any free) is really up to you.

WHERE DO I HUNT?

By now you are thinking; “Great I’m ready, where do i go to kill!”

Unfortunately it isnt that easy. To find targets, you need to go in 0.4 and below systems. These are often sparsely populated, but now and again you cn find something to kill.

Try to look in the less busy low security systems, as this is where miners are more likely to be hiding. Fly around these until you see a possible target in local.

Then you use your scanner to see what ships are in space. (see “using the scanner” near the end of the tutorial)
If the scanner shows a prime target, such as a hauler or a mining cruiser; off you go. To find him you can either

Browse the belts

Use the scanner and narrow him down

using the scanner like this is difficult at firs, but often quicker than going through the belts, and well worth getting used to.

Once you have your prey in your sights: its tme for

THE ATTACK

Orbit your prey at your optimal range and engage your warp scrambler and weapons. If all goes well and you get him to structure, convo him (if you wish to ransom and not just destroy the ship) and ask for a toll. Choose this yourself, judging the value of his ship and modules and thinking how much he would lose if he went boom.

I advise you not to pod kill your target, as the security status hit for this is very heavy, meaning you wont be able to go into high security space.

There is only one type of module that can upgrade your CPU, a CPU co-processor, for the powergrid there are 3:
- Reactor Control Units
- Auxillary Powercores (require Energy Management skill lvl 4 to use and useful on frigates or indies)
- Power Diagnostics

2. Capacitor and Cap Recharge
Every ship has a capacitor and cap recharge time. This is the energy in the middle of the ship control panel in space. Your capacitor is used to determine how far you can warp and how much energy is availible for any module that must be activated which has an Activation Cost.
Every time you activate a module, or everytime it begins another cycle (if on autorepeat) it will consume energy until you run out and there is no energy left in your capacitor. You can see the Activation Cost again in the items show info. You must bear the activation cost in mind always when choosing and activating amodule to ensure you never run out else you may be doomed as you have nothing left to protect your ship in terms of shield boosters or afterburners or enough energy to go to warp and flee.
You can determine the natural cap recharge of your ship from the fitting screen and the
Total Cap avaible / cap recharge time = cap regained per sec
Note: capacitors in eve behave the same as in real life. The cap recharge rate varies from this ‘average’ when the capacitor is charged at different levels. When it is almost full, the recharge rate will be very low for eg.
A ship can recharge *lots* more than that, when the cap is at about 30-40%. It’s like a real capacitor (IRL), 0-5% recharges really slow and so does 90-100%. Around 35% it recharges way more than cap/recharge time.
If you have 3 modules fitted then you need to see their cycle time and activation cost to work out when activated, how much energy they collectively consume per second. When weighed against your cap recharge, you can see how long your capacitor will last before it runs out which in the heat of combat when most modules are active, you will consume cap quickly.
There are a number of modules which increase your total capacitor size and also your cap recharge time.

Skills that affect cap the most:
- Energy Management Skill (increases cap capacity by 5% per lvl)
- Energy Systems Operation (decreases cap recharge time by 5% per lvl)
- Controlled Bursts (decreases activation cost of a weapon turret by 5% per lvl)
- Afterburner (increases ab cycle time +10% per lvl)
- Acceleration Control (increases velocity by 5% per lvl)
- High Speed manovering (-5% cap needs of mwd)
- Warp Drive Ops (decreases cap use when warping -10% per lvl)

Modules that affect cap size and recharge:
- Med slot batteries - add a % to cap size
- Med slot boosters - inject a chunk of power into your capacitor
- Med slot rechargers - increase cap recharge rate
- Low slot cap relays - increase cap recharge rate
- Power diagnostics - increase cap size/recharge rate
- various others modules - called fluxes and the like mess with cap size and cap recharge rate
- named modules - reduce cap power needs when activated over the standard ones

The above form the basic foundation of ship module selection as well as what you intend to do and what tactic you intend to use all have to be weighed when considering the fitting requirements and energy requirements of each module and your success or simple survival aginst your availible skills to use such ships or modules.
You have to decide whether you want your ship to be offensive, defensive or fast or have large cargo capacity, in deciding what modules to select in the whole decision making process aginst the objects of your ultimate goals. Your can go to an extreme such as ‘tanking’ as it is called in being defensive or totally offensive - getting in close with weaker shield and speed to use short range very fast damaging turrets or a balance between the two.

3. Weapon Selection
There are general rules of thumb which apply to many situations when it come to selecting which weapon type and turret to use.
A. The ship bonus - you get a bonus to your ship modules eg. 5% per ship skill lvl to small weapon sturret damage/optimal range or Rate of Fire for eg. This is an extra bonus and it is important to consider this when choosing your turret type.
B. The type of turret slot - either turret or launcher (fires missles)

The range of the weapon:
Every turret has an Optimal Range (m) and Accuracy falloff (m). When considering your modules, consider the range at which they will be effective. This is shown again on the turret info
The Optimal Range + Accuracy Falloff = max range of your weapon at which you are likely to cause any damage
Between your optimal range and accuracy falloff you have a chance of scoring a successfully higher damaging hit. Right up to your optimal range where you have a very high chance of scoring maximum damage.
Note: wrecking hits have ~3% chance of occuring at whatever range and multiply your damage caused by 3 afak…

Tracking speed of a turret:
is important when fighting fast moving targets. This is measured in radians/sec in a sphere around your turret.
The larger the turret and the longer range the turret then the slower its tracking speed is likely to be. If a fast moving ship is under your optimal range, then tracking speed becomes the prime consideration when trying to hit them alongside the signature radius - size of their ship to a smaller degree.
You have to select at what range your weapons will all be effective at, you may want a selection or you my wnat to go for long range or short range.

Increasing the weapon range/tracking speed:
There are numerous tracking modules out there which increase the range and tracking speed of a weapon and also its damage modifier. They again are important when considering the offensive vs defensive loadout you choose.

3. Ammo and Reloading
Every turret or launcher has a ‘magazine’ size (volume) and indicates how many rounds it can load into the turret at once or missles (lasers require no ammo - only a crystal). Each turret will only load ammunition of the right size (S,M or L) which is indicated on the turret info
In the case of all turrets you must consider the damage type the crystal or ammo selection gives and the range modifier. Choosing this you must consider how shield and armour penetration work;
Shield and armour have a damage resistance which indicates how much of which type of damage they can absorb.
Types of Damage: Explosive, Kinetic, Thermal, Electromagnetic (EMP)
Shields are strong at absorbing Kinetic and Explosive damage while relatively weak at absorbing Thermal and EMP damage.
Armour is strong at absorbing EMP and Thermal damage while weaker at absorbing kinetic and explosive damage (this can be seen on your ship show info screen and also on various sites and with utilities like EveDudePlus).
Your ammo selection must take the above into consideration and also the range modifier which indicates the penalty/modifer when using that ammo against your turret max range and optimal.

4. Missles
Each missle has a flight time and a speed which determines its range. Missles only cause one type of damage.
When fighting missle firing npc’s they will only ever fire one type of missle and since missles cause the most damage it is important when facing that npc to equip modules such as hardners to counter that damage type. Missles only ever hit for full damage (depending in how much of that damage type is absorbed) or miss you if you try to outrun it.

How do defenders and Fof missles work?
This question is asked quite a lot.
Defenders: will destroy another missle and will only launch when a missle is fired at you. They will also only track the nearest missle locked onto you so firing successive defenders will only track the same missle.
FoF’s: will fire at anyone who is causing aggression to you, in this I mean jamming or scrambling you or firing at you. They will not fire if someone has simply locked you. They are good to use only when you are jammed normally.

Example in using heavy drone Ogre:

Take 1 Ogre in an incursus to a gate and have a friend in a dominix or thorax or something take an entire load to the gate drop them in space and go through the gate.

Now send your drone into space and pick up each of the drones your friend dropped off and each time you pick up, release them into space.

This way you can control as many drones as your skills allow without worrying about your Drone Bay size.

Can be very useful in a gate gank setup.

there are 2 different types of mining:
- quantity mining
- quality mining

quantity mining is mining in high sec sectors, where rats (enemy NPCs) are really easy to kill or where there are no rats or any pirates (players) who might kill u and steal ur ore.
there are no rats in 0.9 and 1.0 systems and normal rats are in 0.5 - 0.8 systems. i suggest mining omber in 0.5 and 0.6 systems if u wanna go quantity mining.

if u are a beginner u have to start with quantity mining, cause u arent strong enough to go to low sec, if u are a caldari i suggest u train ur skills until u can get a cormorant (a destroyer) and get 5 mining lasers on it.
and u should get an hauler, an badger mark 2 isnt bad for it and u dont need much skills for that…
if u got this 2 ships and a weapon on the cormorant to defend urself against rats, u fly to an asteroid belt with the cormorant and start mining
there. if u got the first ration of ore, u jettison it into space (rights click on the ore, then jettison). now ur ore is in a can next to u. open the cargo space of the can by right clicking on it and then “open cargo”. from now on u drag n drop all the ore u mine and move it into the can.
but be careful, this cans disappear (implode or explode) after a bit more than 2 hours.
if u got loads of ore in the can, u fly back to the station and take ur hauler, f.ex. the badger and fly to the belt and get the ore out of the can into ur ship and bring it back to the station. repeat that until u got all ur ore in the station.

quality mining is mining in low sec space with security from 0.0 to 0.4
if u havent got a good ship with some weapons and/or drones i wouldnt go there cause else u’ll be killed really fast in there.
but if u have a good ship and some weapons, u may mine there.
theres a bigger risk when mining coz of strong rats and player pirates, that can attack u in low sec space, coz there wont be punished for that as they are punished in high sec systems.
u need to have some weapons and in best case loads of drones to defend urself. get a place to mine far far away from the place, where u are when u warp to the belt, so that u have enough time to react when a pirate comes. put at least one warp core stabilizer in ur ship, that the enemy cannot prevent u from warping out that fast.

so, this tips have been for solo mining. if u go group mining, there are some things changed…
u have to be an hauler or a miner (or a defender against rats)
the miners mine ore and put it into a can, the hauler gets it back to the station and the defender destroys rats and pirates.

mining lasers are one thing u need to mine in eve. be carefully when choosing urs. ill give u some tips here to find a right one for u.
the XeCl Mining Laser is an expensive but good laser beam for mining in high sec. it has not that much cpu need and mines 47 ore units per minute.
the miner 2 mines 60 units per minute but also has an higher cpu need.
if u wanna go quality mining i would use deep core mining lasers to mine mercoxit or some other deep core ore.
if ure running a mining barge u should use strip miners, which are really fast in mining but mining barges are not that good for low sec, coz they cant defend themselves that good.

if u wanna mine successful u have to train ur mining skills, too.
they increase the amount of the ore u mine really well.

The scanner tool is a huge time savor and it could save your life. With the exception of fitting one could make an argument the scanner is the most useful single tool available in the game. This is not an exaggeration or a sales pitch. Learn it. Love it. Time is ISK and information is priceless. We will begin with a foundation and handle some of the big concepts right up front, then we’ll work back to how to use the features and conclude with application.

Overview

Generally speaking one or two of these three things triggers an “aha” moment when people are getting a hands on lesson. The scanner is not a two dimensional tool, it is a three dimensional tool and can help you to narrow down target location on both the X and Y planes with great accuracy. “Angle” in the tool is the angle of the beam and the beam goes out in the shape of a cone from your ship, out in three dimensional space. Essentially, the tool lets you “see” farther than you can see but it makes you squint if you want to see the details. A player can use the tool to narrow down an object’s location with great accuracy and in a few moments we’ll talk about how to do just that, step by step, from an initial “bubble” scan that has informed the player there is something of note within scanning range. You can not warp to something in a scanner result which is why you must learn to use it to narrow down warpable reference points.

Feature/Functionality

Again, when you launch the scanner tool you are seeing a representation of the current system’s X plane in the top left corner. In the X plane display you can see a representation of the current scan area represented in green. To narrow things down on the Y plane (up and down) you need to use the three dimensional space of the game field. There is no feature functionality available for this but once you get comfortable with the tool you really don’t need anything else. The Y plane used in game is relatively narrow and you get an idea of what five or 15 degrees feels like on the X plane after very little usage. You can take this “feel” and project it on to the Y plane with relative ease. Also, oftentimes object of interest have reference points in the 3d filed of view regardless of your distance to those objects which you can use to aim your scan. The scanner tool defaults to a very short distance. If you type “9” a whole bunch of times, “999999999999999…”, set the angle to 360 on the slider and then click scan the range will pop back to maximum actual capability. We’re going to skip the probe piece for this intro. The bottom right dark space will fill with things that have appeared on scanner after a scan is complete. The wider the angle of a scan, the longer it will take to complete the scan. The more narrow the angle, the greater the distance of the scan (focusing scan power). “Use Overview Settings” can be used to filter the results of a scan.

Aiming the scan beam is made easier with the box, or “reticule”, that pops up when you click your ship once in the 3D view. Think of this as your gun sight. The author also finds it easier to scan when zoomed out from the ship 10km or so. It does not matter what direction your ship is facing for scanning purposes. There is no correlation between the direction your ship is facing and the direction you are facing, as the player, in your monitor. The scanner is scanning the direction you as a player are facing and doesn’t care about what direction the ship model is facing. Also, the longer you play the game the more likely you are to be zoomed away from your ship more of the time. It helps get a bigger picture of your surroundings. If you set angle to 360 and scan you scan in every direction from your ship. If you set to 180 and look at the port side of your ship (I recommend scanning from “level” on the X plane, “broadside view” of your ship/space for starters) you are scanning everything on your starboard side to a width of 180 degrees, or half the X plane as far as scan range will allow, almost like peripheral vision. Then, without moving your ship, if you spin to where you’re looking at the starboard side of your ship you’ll be scanning the other half of space, off the port side, within scan range.

Usage

Vantage points are everything for a scanner. Let us imagine a long “corridor” two planet, two gate system where each planet has 10 belts and everything lines up. It is a short warp from the gates to the nearest planet/belt system and a long way between the two planets.

G1 — P1 ———– P2 — G2
^Looks just like that from atop, aside, below, etc… where the gates are represented by G and the planets are P.

If we come in through G1 and narrow a scan beam across the system we will see everything out as far as our scanner can see. There is no way to pinpoint anything. However, if we warp to P1 we have a whole new set of options available to us. Half the systems belts are now around us like numbers would be around us if we were in the middle of a clock and at least one gate is now isolated. From here we could go rat hunting or we could warp to P2, or a belt around P2 to try and isolate G2 so we could scan it for gate campers. Or we could sit here between the P1 and one of its belts or between a belt and G1 with our beam focused on G1. We might do this if we’re watching the flank of a group in transit and want to know what ships just came in without making ourselves as vulnerable as we would be sitting on the gate. You can see the ship types in the overview and right click/show info for more detail.

Incidentally, you can use this to check NPC bounties without flying out there if you’re out ratting. This will save you the time of jumping belt to belt, instead you can jump planet to planet and only check the “one off” belts (1 belt/1planet systems) of empty systems by warping to them or “by hand”. If it is an occupied system and there are questionables around but you want to rat anyway then you can still warp to the planet to check the belt for rats and bad guys to make sure it is safe to attack without warping in there. This method also works well in rookie rat packs because you wan warp gang to a planet, scan and then attack from planet. If the rookie rat pack has people that need to come in at different ranges the scanner can call out a belt number and the tank can go in first knowing everyone else is a very short warp away.

Technique

The author suggests starting your learning and practice the long way, with “Use Overview Settings” ticked on and setting your overview to display asteroid belts, enemies and NPC rats only… and cargo containers, if you start thinking “Is this thing even working?!”… because cargo containers are the cigarette butts of the Eve universe and you’re sure to find those things anywhere! (end soap box) You can do this a few times or stick with it forever if you like. The advantage is that it teaches you to narrow things down which is a nice skill to have if you know the bad guys stopped between two objects out there. You can scan the range between the objects and then narrow it until you’ve pinpointed them this way.

So assuming you’re practicing the long way and you’re practicing on rats on an empty system you’d do the following. Warp to planet. Scan 360. Now you have a list of all the rats and asteroid belts in the system. You can check bounties and see if anything is worthwhile. You find one belt worthwhile. So you set angle to 180 and scan the “top half” or everything north of the 3 o’ clock to 9 o’ clock line (you can scan any 180 and spin around, it just helps sometimes to have it neat/reference-able on the X overlay, especially for training and it might come in handy for group ops). Nothing there, so you scan the south 180. Bingo. Narrow to 90. Scan 3 o clock to 6 o clock or the SE corner. Nothing. Scan 6-9, bingo. Now you should have the target rats and less asteroid belts on the scanner overview than before as the only belts showing up are within scan range. Then you know those rats are in one of those belts. As you get more narrow the range on the Y plane narrows as well, so check to make sure your horizon is still catching the belts in your cone. Continue to narrow until you have targets acquired in a 5 degree cone that only covers one belt.

The author strongly encourages you to do it that way for at least a half dozen or maybe 12 runs before you try the short way. The short way is best used for increasing ratting efficiency but has limitations which if taught without the long way would hinder the student’s ability to fully understand the scanner.

The short way is made easier by the Bloodlines patch. Pre Bloodlines you had to hold down the Alt key to get belts to pop up as triangles in 3D space. Now they’re always there and the following is possible. With out altering overview settings we can simply warp to planet. Set scan angle to 5. Pick a belt that we can remember a reference point for, maybe the one near the sun. And work clockwise or counter-clock around the belts surrounding a planet. So, warp to IX. Position reticule over IX-1. Scan IX1 at 5 degrees. Clear. Position box over next belt clockwise. Rats. Worth? Mental note. Complete scan of planetary routes. Call to team or go in solo, “Following rats at IX – whatever. Warping in to tank. Will say ready when drawing agro”. In this way you can tear through systems plucking the low hanging fruit with, relative to the belt hopping way, ruthless efficiency. You can also avoid getting in over your head or warping in on top of enemy players.

Closing Remarks

The short way also works best for checking belts for gate campers. Figure out which system is nearest the gate and pick a random spot there. Warp to that spot but at a distance enough to where if there are enemies there too or big rats you still have time to pick another vantage point. Narrow your scan range. Target gate and scan. You can’t always rely on this in big systems because sometimes the closest planet or belt is too far away to scan from… but this doesn’t happen often in the author’s experience. The author has been playing for a month and liked to go out in low sec in his Merlin solo, lower in the Caracal to rat. Using this tool in this way kept him out of a lot of trouble. He expects this technique is very useful in fleet ops as well and furthermore, he expects there is far more to learn than has been explained here. But this is meant to be an introduction and lesson in fundamentals, so we’ll stop here.

1: What is Ice?
Ice is something like ore.
One big difference is the volume of ice:
Every piece of Ice is 1000 m³
You can find it in Ice belts which are in some systems.
There are much less Ice belts than normal asteroid belts.

Ice Types:
Blue Ice (Gallente)
Clear Icicle (Amarr)
Dark Glitter
Gelidus
Glacial Mass (Minmatar)
Glare Crust
Krystallos
White Glaze (Caldari)

2: For what is it needed?
The refined Ice is needed to run POS (Player Owned Stations)
A POS uses much Ice per day, so there is always Ice needed on the EVE market.

3: What do I need for mining it?
You need at least a Mining Barge (Procurer, Retriever or Covetor)
or an Exhumer (Skiff, Mackinaw or Hulk) (Industry V, Mining IV, Astrogeology IV and the skills for the ship class)
And you need the Skills Ice Harvesting (Mining IV)
and the Ice Harvesters which go for about 2,7m ISK per piece on market.

4: How can I mine it and how can i optimize my efficiency?
Fit your Ice Harvesters on your Mining Barge/Exhumer.
If you can do it, fit Ice Harvester Upgrades.
The Mackinaw has a +100% bonus on the yield of Ice Harvesters, but a -25% duration Penalty.
The penalty is reduced by 5% fo every Exhumers skill level.
So, if you have Exhumer V the Mackinaw has the normal cycle time.
The fact that it gets double yield per cycle makes it the most efficient Ice Harvesting ship available.

But I want to tell you, that Ice Harvesting is it only worth if you have Ice Harvesters II and a Mackinaw with Exhumers V and Ice Harvesting V
With that setup you can earn more money with mining Ice than with mining ore.
That way you get a real good efficiency and you can earn real much money with mining Ice.

Mission running. This is quite simple. The more you kill, the faster you do it, and the lower sec you are in, the more you earn. Generally, the most important thing is to do the missions as fast as possible while still killing the structures/bosses that drop loot and checking their cans. This is learned with experience. Picking up loot from enemies, as far as I have found, is generally a waste of time unless one has time (as in a Blockade mission against BSs) or one is in a small, fast ship. Remember that higher quality, higher level, and also lower security level of the system is extremely important in good payout. A 1.0 agent will give very little in terms of LPs.

Mining. Outside of 0.0 space, its just a matter of getting as many people as possible to suck on a roid for as long as possible with the best skills possible. Not very hard. In 0.0, its a bit more interesting. In a small mining op, tanking the rats is usually the best idea. In a larger one, covetors and the like can mine while a single ship tanks the rats. Mercoxit, by the way, is a great ore, and if you have the skills and time to mine it, it makes loads of money.

The following section is VERY out of date. There are better guides for NPC trading, and since its now viable, I’d avoid the original text here.
NPC trade good trading. I would avoid this like the plague with the current influx of freighters. From what I have seen, it is very hard to make reasonable profits anymore without a freighter, due to freighters crashing the NPC prices. However, one can effectively use sell orders (and buy orders) to make it unecessary to log on just after downtime to sell (or buy) one’s goods. This isn’t hard to figure out, but I will leave it as an exercise to the reader. If you combine using buy/sell orders and finding a good, unspoiled route, you can make pretty good cash even without a freighter. Also, many routes are also very under-run, yielding good profit among the many bad routes. I won’t go into extreme detail about finding these, as there is a guide around here somewhere devoted entirely to this.

Hunting NPCs in belts. The trick here is to do it in as low security space as possible, as fast as possible, and while picking as much of the high end loot as possible. Never let a battleship loot can go unchecked: these drop a lot more than the mission battleships do.

Escrow. If you pay attention to escrow and sell orders forums enough, you’ll get a good idea as to what things are worth. If you sort escrow by time placed and stick to the stop, refreshing it, you can catch items placed that are undervalued, or are even placed for zero ISK. You can make absolute loads, if you are lucky. Its good to do when you’re bored. It requires little thought, but needs a quick analysis of the value of groups of items, before someone else grabs it.

There are other methods of Hourly cash-earning, but they are less common, such as courier agents. I will not comment on piracy as a method for earning cash, as obviously that doesn’t belong in this topic, and belongs more in a thread in Crime and Punishment. In addition, there are many services one can offer to earn money hourly: for example, long-distance freighter couriers. These are out of the scope of this guide, but you can do anything–be creative!