I’ve been testing my theory on AFK Mining.
(Apparently I just can’t stop harping on it – or to put it in a better light, I wanted to put my own views to a practical test.)
I used a Retriever fitted with T1 Strip Miners, a T2 Survey Scanner, T2 Damage Control and two T2 Mining Laser Upgrades. EFT gives it a suggested yield of 1,002m3 per minute.
I stuck with T1 Strip Miners as this was meant to be as AFK as possible.
I solo mined in a 0.8 system with an Alt skilled enough to have maximum yield. The belts tend to get hammered, so the re-spawn size of the rocks wasn’t always great. I worked on full belts, using ideal bookmarks for maximizing the number of rocks in range, mining from the highest return rocks down, and warping back to a fresh position each time I have to dock to empty the Ore Hold.
I left the Strip Miner to deactivate on its own as each rock depleted about 80% of the time. The remainder I manually recycle to maximise yield.
I ignored D-Scan and Local, and would not have noticed someone trying to suicide gank me. Instead I worked on financial paper work, or read blogs and news sites, or watched downloaded shows. I even wrote a blog entry or two.
It wasn’t a comfortable AFK process, but I did go for periods of time where I would only glance at EVE when the voice prompts alerted me to an asteroid being depleted. The effort should however fit within the sphere of what people are calling AFK mining. I generally didn’t have to concentrate on it too hard.
So the end result over multiple sessions was that I earnt on average 7.4M ISK an hour.
I could have dropped the Damage Control for a third Mining Upgrade, which would have seen the income increase to around 8M an hour. Given I suspect I wasn’t as AFK as I should have been; I’ll stick with the original figure for what is relatively low risk, AFK mining in Empire.
Is that income level a problem?
Again – with real EVE examples, that is not the source of income nirvana that many people are crying so hard about.
I was however surprised by how relatively close the income was for AFK mining when compared to concentrating on the screen and optimising each mining cycle. (See my notes here) Basically I was getting around 80% of the return for about a third of the effort. That didn’t sit entirely right with me.
Will this be my new form of mining? Probably not. Interestingly time did pass quicker with this approach, and it would be easier to mine for longer time periods. However it wasn’t particularly satisfying, and I prefer my EVE sessions to be a little more immersive and distracting from real life. I can see why others would do it however.
So maybe the result of this effort wasn’t quite as I expected after all. Not silly income, but maybe not entire right either.
Evehermit 