2011-08-02

Life in a Wormhole: A Miner's Tale

The next week is a whirlwind of activity, and very little of it involves EVE. We're in Orlando for a working vacation, and while I'm online a fair amount at least one day of the week (for work), and on some of the evenings (watching the kids while Kate meets with her publishing peers), I'm never quite comfortable enough with the shaky-yet-expensive internet connection at the hotel to tuck into a Gila and kill sleepers.

The first evening, after discovering that almost all of the 'easy' mining and gas harvesting sites have despawned, I decide to "open" one of the harder-to-locate mining sites, so I can do some mining during the week (or at least for the next 3 days, until the site disappears). I'm not much of a miner, but it's a lower key, less intensive activity that I won't feel weird about abandoning 'right in the middle', the way I would for a combat site. That makes it perfect for desultory evenings where I'm killing time in a darkened hotel room and interruptions in the form of hungry infants are likely.

And that's pretty much what happens for the next week; check in, make sure my planetary colonies are still functioning, shoot mining lasers at rocks if there's time, check my evemail, notice that the Germans have set up a pair of  'mailboxes' outside our towers so we can share bookmarks more easily, and that's about it. Knowing that this away-time was coming, and that CB was going to be gone for a stretch as well, we prepared ahead of time and stocked up well over a month of spare fuel for the tower (thanks to the 200 million ISK sleeper site run just before we left), and Gor handles the refueling logistics easily.

After the vacation, I check in on my characters (who have been training 'long' skills in my absence) and celebrate some skill completions by going shopping for a Cheetah covert-operations frigate for Ty: no more whining that I can't sneak around the system without Bre around. I'm very pleased by this new purchase, as it's going to make scouting work much easier: honestly, I think that being able to fly a cov-ops ship might be the second most important 'utility' skill set in a wormhole, right after scanning.

And mining?

Well, it was a fine way to pass the time, but in all seriousness the only way that mining can compete (in terms of financial benefit) with salvaging sleeper wrecks is if you're working through the asteroid belt with 2 or 3 other folks, all boosted by a proper mining foreman with all the skills to go with it. That is something we *can* do, and something we're equipped to do, but not something we're actually currently doing at all -- bottom line, mining is always going to be a last-resort kind of activity for me.

That's EVE: end-game starts right away, and is exactly what you decide you want it to be.

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