Making ISK
This is extracted from Akita T's Beginner's Guide to Making ISK post on the forums.
--Mara Rinn 08:21, 11 August 2009 (GMT)
ISK - it's the lifeblood of EVE's economy. Some of us have it, many of us want it, here are some ideas on how to get it.
1. MINING
Mining is one of the simplest activities in the game. You go out in an asteroid belt, you start your mining lasers, you launch your mining drones (if you have any), and you haul the ore you mine in a station to be used later. It's a boring activity which appeals to some people since it leaves you with time to do something else such as chat with corpmates, make strategic plans, or anything else which requires a modicum of concentration.
The optimal progression in ships is to graduate from your racial mining frigate (because you've already got the skills to fly it) to the Retriever mining barge, then to a Hulk directly. You will be able to mine copious quantities of ore, to fund your training into combat ships or whatever path you have chosen for yourself.
Whenever you mine, look at what ore is available in the region, and check the existing mineral buy orders, then at existing mineral sell orders. If you have the choice of what to mine, always pick the ore that gives you the most ISK per cubic metre. If you are able to refine with no losses, you may find that refining the ore and selling the minerals will earn you more ISK (except for Kernite, which is especially valuable in stations housing storyline agents). This is due to the "Materials for War preparations" storyline mission (L3 version asks for basic Omber, L4 version asks for basic Kernite).
There's not much more to be said about mining as a concept, everything else is details. The details are most clearly explained in Halada's Mining Guide.
2. MISSION RUNNING
Right now, there are four main types of missions you can be offered : courier, trade, kill and mining. Mining missions are a relatively recent addition (or return, some might argue).
Agents give you various types of missions, depending on their division (it's in their showinfo). Most agents' divisions are pretty obvious... for instance, Command and Security agents give you mostly kill missions, Storage agents give you mostly courier missions, and so on and so forth. While there are plenty of listings of "types of missions for agent division" floating around, none of them are quite accurate, as they also depend on several other factors AND also a lot of randomness (for instance, while unusual, a Command agent might offer you 10 courier missions in a row). So, in most cases, just go with your gut... worst thing that could happen is you reject a mission.
Once you accept a mission, the wisest course of action is to complete it succesfully: there are penalties (in standings) for failing a mission. Always check the mission info before you accept the mission. Double check the route you have to take to the mission system - unless you're prepared for PvP you really don't want to fly into lowsec.
You might want to reject kill missions if you only have an industrial ship, and you might want to reject a courier that has you going into or through a lowsec system... or, you might want to reject a mining mission if you have lousy mining skills.
The "time bonus" on each mission is optional. Mission expiration date is the important thing (one week from the moment you took the mission, or the first mission in the chain, in case of chained missions). Failing to complete a mission in one week or telling the agent you are unable to finish it will bring a standings penality.
There are some special missions that are part of arcs (a series of chapters), for instance "Enemies Abound (1 of 5)". These are usually a collection of different mission types - typically a combat mission, courier missions, combat mission combination. Failing or rejecting one of them means you're not offered the rest. This isn't particularly important unless you are keen to get to one of the later missions.
Aside from the (severe) penalties for failing a mission, there are drawbacks to rejecting a mission. If you reject a mission, a 4 hour timer for that agent starts. If you reject another mission before the timer expires, you will take a standings hit with the agent, his corp and the faction. While the standings hit is not huge, it's a good idea to avoid it. That's why areas with multiple agents for the same corp or faction are prefered by mission-runners, since you can just ask another agent for a mission while the timer expires on another mission you were offered and you want to reject.
When running missions, you must make yourself aware of derived standings, otherwise you may find yourself Kill-On-Sight in half the Empire space of EVE with no way of recovering your standings with the other empires.
Now about the missions themselves - these fall into the categories of mining, courier, trade, and encounter.
2.1. MINING MISSIONS
The missions are pretty straightforward: you have to go to some location and mine out some "special" ore (one that can't be reprocessed, AFAIK) from some asteroids, and bring the ore back to your agent. It's a good idea to have decent mining skills for this type of mission, obviously. Some mining missions will actually ask you to harvest ice or gas.
While the mision description usually tells you to bring the agent a certain quantity of ore, you will usually find that you need to mine the entire mission area completely before the mission can be completed.
2.2. COURIER MISSIONS
These are the easiest missions you could possibly ask for : pick up stuff in station A, deliver it in station B. You can usually complete them in any ship with a large enough cargo. Most of them don't even have to be completed in a single trip, since they're made out of several identical packages... the mission description tells you how many packages they are and the total volume (so you can easily calculate how large one single package is - that's the minimum cargohold space you NEED to finish the mission).
If you have a small ship and a large cargo, you might have to forefit the bonus reward as you are forced to take several trips, but you still get the regular reward and all the standing increases so it's not tragic.
Watch out for destinations or routes going through lowsec (try to avoid them, check route before accepting mission) or packages to large to fit in your cargo - the warning comes for the total cargo, not one package, so you have to check manually.
2.3. TRADE MISSIONS
This mission is basically "half a courier mission". You don't have to pick some package up and deliver it somewhere else... you just have to deliver something to the destination. How you get the goods is not any of your agent's concern. Some trade missions are part of an arc, in which the previous chapter involved you getting a blueprint copy of the item you need to hand in.
Watch out for trade missions that offer you a reward worth less than the delivery you have to make.
2.4. ENCOUNTER MISSIONS
Conceptually simple: go in, kill stuff, sometimes collect some item from one of the killed ships or structures and return it to the agent. Encounter missions are the most dangerous mission type around. At the same time, they're also the most lucrative missions too, offering the greatest rewards both directly (ISK and Loyalty Points), but also indirectly in form of bounties, loot, salvage, ocasionally tags or alloys instead of bounties... all from the wrecks of the destroyed enemies.
The direct rewards (ISK and LP awarded on mission completion) vary according to agent division, your skills, standings and system security rating. The indirect rewards vary according to the mission - you can count on a general ISK value from bounties, a round number of tags dropping, and a general ISK value from salvage.
Mission running is a popular income stream because it only requires skills you could also use in PVP combat, so it's easy for most pilots to get into. Mission running is also required for building standings with NPC corporations.
For more information about mission-running as a profession, read the Missions & Complexes forum and maybe ask your own questions too.
Note that many pilots posting on the Missions & Complexes forum will be flying solo, in ships requiring a significant capital and skill investment such as officer-fit Golems. Others will be posting about running level 3 or 4 missions in assault frigates or cruisers: this kind of extreme mission-running is not for the faint of heart. If you don't have the skills, it's best to stick to frigates or destroyers for level 1 missions, cruisers for level 2, battle-cruisers for level 3, battleships for level 4.
It's a good idea to try and run missions together with other people you trust.
2.5. STORYLINE MISSIONS
These are special types of missions you are offered after completing 16 missions of a certain level for agents of a faction. The agents do not matter, only their faction and the agent level. The storyline agent "triggered" will belong to the same faction and offer you a storyline of that particular level.
Completing 15 L1 missions and 15 L2 missions for the same faction will not trigger a storyline, but if you complete one more L1 or L2, a corresponding level storyline is triggered soon (within seconds or minutes, usually).
Storyline missions are the only repeatable way to gain faction standings. The only other ways are non-repeatable (rookie missions and COSMOS missions - once you complete them you never get them offered again on the same pilot).
3. SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY
To put it bluntly, if you are a beginner to EVE, it is best if you stay away from this area. The only notable exception to this rule is manufacturing.
Yes, I may sound very harsh, but science and industry is best attempted with large ISK starting funds, and small-scale efforts are bound to either never really get off the ground or fail miserably, while you caould have made a lot more progress doing something else instead. Once you get more cash in your wallet and you gain experience in the game, feel free to revisit the idea of science and industry... but then again, you won't be a beginner, so this guide does not apply to you.
3.1. Manufacture
The entry point for a manufacturer is T1 manufacture, and preferably in either ammo, modules, rigs or small ships (because of the relatively affordable blueprint costs). Do not even bother with manufacture before you have Production Efficiency trained up to level 4, and try to get it to level 5 as soon as possible.
For more details on what to manufacture, how and where, visit the Science and Industry subforum. A good idea would be, for instance, to manufacture ammo in mission hubs, or frigates, cruisers and assorted modules (for the frigates/cruisers you also manufacture) somewhere near a lowsec (or even 0.0) system on a major transit "pipe" across EVE.
The most common mistake made by people new to manufacturing is failing to understand opportunity cost. If you are building things in order to sell them for an income, you'd better damn well sell it for more ISK than you could have made by simply selling the things you used to manufacture it with. That's the most critical mistake a rookie manufacturer makes : selling below cost. The reason such rookies do not go bankrupt is that they usually mine the ore themselves, reprocesses it, and use those minerals to manufacture.
4. HAULING
There are two main types of hauling: the hauler/trader, and the pure hauler. The differences between them are minor enough not to justify treating them separately.
Basically, "hauling" is almost the same as NPC courier and/or trade missions - you pick up courier contracts and fulfil them. Courier contracts are almost the same as NPC courier missions, but the difference is, you have to move it all in one go.
Hauling/trading is basically the same as a trade mission, but you set your own destination and cargo type: you just scour the market for cheap things in one station that sell high in another one, and move them around.
It's very simple, if not necessarily exciting.
5. TRADING
Some people like to include "non-courier contract hauling" in this category. Truth is, a "true" trader doesn't even have to leave the station they are located in. A trader can set up courier contracts so others do the hauling (for a price, or course).
Trading can be explained in many different ways, you can go into details of what to sell and what to buy, when to do it, how to manipulate a market to see a spike in price and so on and so forth, and you can read a lot of such stories over in Market Discussion.
The thing is, eventually, it all comes down to a single thing : buy low, sell high Whether you buy low in place A and sell high in place B, or you sell and buy in the same station at a small price difference, or even if you buy and buy a lot witing for price to grow then sell it all at the higher prices... it's all just details.
Things to watch out for : prices you sell/buy at, and all broker fees or sales taxes. It's a bad idea to disable the market-related warnings : people have accidentally put up an order with an extra zero (or two, or three), and not only did the taxes amount to more than they would have wanted to buy/sell the items for originally, but they also lost the ISK or the goods in question more often than not.
6. COSMOS
This is a lot like mission-running, after a fashion. The big difference however is that you can only do it in the "COSMOS" constellations, and NPCs respawn continually in there. A list of empire-based COSMOS areas can be found by a simple site google search, but here's one of the possible results : [url="http://eveinfo.com/cosmos/caldari/"]Eveinfo - Caldari COSMOS page[/url]. EVEinfo is also a decent resource for regular missions too, in case you want to have an idea of what to expect in them.
7. RATTING
Ratting is simply a matter of patrolling asteroid belts for hostile NPCs. The problem is that the "good NPC rats" only appear in lower-security systems, and the very good ones only in deep 0.0 space.
The advantage of ratting (especially for the beginner) is that highsec belt rats are VERY EASY to kill, and you find usually a lot less of them compared to what you could find in a mission. This means you can take your time to kill them, which is especially useful for low-skilled characters. Then again, by the time you can fly a destroyer you're capable of finishing most level 1 missions.
Another advantage of ratting is that there's always a (very small) chance of encountering a "faction spawn", even in empire highsec. While they usually only drop some tags, faction ammo and such, you might also find occasionally some valuable faction modules, or even more valuable implants. Hisec ratting is not a particularly high income stream.
The drawback of ratting compared to mission-running is that you don't get any agent/corp/faction standings.
8. EXPLORATION
The shipboard scanner is only able to find "encounters" (almost the same as a mission) but you have a slightly higher chance (compared to belt-ratting) to encounter faction or even commander NPC spawns dropping valuable loot.
Using probes you can find various other things (including entries into wormhole "wildspace"), but these are best left for others to explain. The Probing wiki page is a good place to start your exploration career.
9. MERCENARY WORK / WARS
While not the best avenue for a solo beginner pilot, it could be a nice endeavour for a group of younger pilots, especially if they can find a tutor of sorts in the "art of war" but like they say, experience is the best teacher.
Basically, you find somebody in need of protection... or in need of a good shakedown... and you start a corporation war against your chosen targets. It could be good, it could be bad, but as long as your goal is to have fun, every bit of ISK you get from it is an added bonus... if you pick your targets carefully, you might actually make some decent money, even if your group is not that good.
Of course, the opposite could happen, and you end up all losing everything you have.
10. VARIOUS "DUBIOUS MORALITY" ACTS
Among them, included but not strictly limited to them, things like baiting, can-flipping, ganking, suicide ganking, pirating, ransoming, scamming, ninja-salvaging and so on and so forth.
Scamming in itself could fill whole threads, for instance... from contract scams, to chat spams, the "lofty scam" and so on and so forth, the possibilities are almost only limited by your imagination (and your victim's stupidity, greed, lack of knowledge or a combination thereof).
While not the most lucrative things you can do on a regular basis, SOME of them can offer the enterprising (and unscrupulous) beginner untold riches compared to any other endeavour he could embark on, at his "young age".
To get an idea of the activities mentioned here, you can head over to the Crime and Punishment forum and read about other people's stories regarding this "edge" lifestyle.
Ninja-salvaging is worth noting here: has it's own Ninja Salvaging Guide, written by Kahega Amielden. Ninja-salvaging is an exploration-based activity which can provide a decent income of ISK. Most people partake in ninja-salvaging for the copious carebear tears that you can harvest.
11. DATACORES
Collecting data cores is a relatively passive income stream: if done properly each character you create can produce around 150M ISK a month. The Research Agent Guide is a good place to start. Basically, you grind some standings (via missions usually), train some skills, and then once in a while you exchange the RPs accumulated for datacores, which you could then sell or use yourself.
[quote=Alyx Farstrider]The goal is not "maximise ISK/h". The goal is typically "maximise both ISK/h and fun/h with an acceptible exchange rate between ISK and fun".
Some people find mission running fun. Some people find ratting fun. Some people find manufacturing fun. Some people find micromanaging buy/sell orders fun.[/quote]