Making EVE Isk, what secret strategies do the pros use to easily amass billions and billions of EVE Online ISK? How the hell assualt-shipcan EVE Isk making be easy? And why you should NEVER EVER buy EVE Isk from farmers. Find out right here.

Creating an EVE Isk making guide is not easy, mainly because many players hold onto all the best Isk making techniques. Making Isk can take time and dedication if you don’t know some little tricks. (Some people even pay for 2 – 4 EVE accounts just to generate millions of Isk per hour, personally this is a bit excessive but the nature of MMO’s always breeds addicts :P ).

Summary

Unlike in other MMOs, there are a whole host of ways to make money in EVE with little to no effort. If you’re planning on letting your account expire for a while, buying into some good investment schemes or putting your ISK into an E-Bank account could be a very wise move. The information in my  EVE Isk guide is based upon my personal opinion, experience and the consolidation of the best information available online.

Never ever buy EvE Isk from farmers because

  1. You can get banned
  2. It is a rip off, and you’re just lining the farmers pockets
  3. You can make billions of EVE Isk with as much effort as it takes to buy from farmers (not a lot)

I have learned many EVE Isk making tricks from the richest EVE players to date, they might differ a bit from your experiences and opinion, but they work, and work extremely well. I always say “if you want the best you have to learn from the best”. Some of the really secret and lucrative techniques I use cant be revealed here due to copyright and legal restrictions. I can however tell you who and where I got these from, and highly recommend you take a look at EVE Billionaire today. Please make sure you Click Here to read my EVE Billionaire Review first.

Ways of EVE Isk Making, Your Options:

  1. Trading
  2. Mining
  3. Agent Missions/Invention
  4. NPC Hunting
  5. EVE Banking
  6. Stock Markets/Investments

What is the best and most lucrative way to make billions of EVE Isk with the least amount of effort? In my opinion it has always been, and will always be, trading. So if you don’t have a trading alt/character make one today. To make billions of EVE Isk, without any effort, all you basically do is buy cheap and sell high, while just sitting in a station. It takes little effort apart from learning the market, timing your buying and selling, and saving money through the right skills.

Make Billions of EVE Isk with a Trading Character

Click Here to see my EVE trading guide that will easily make you billions without the effort

The thing with trading is you often need Isk to make Isk. On this page I have therefore put together some easy ways to make EVE Isk as a beginner to get you started

EVE Isk Making as a Noob:

Make EVE Isk With Mining

See Also My EVE Mining Guide (Click Here)

Mining is both the most common, and oldest form of making money. It basically means getting a ship and fitting mining-shipmining lasers on them. Mining is done frequently by having a few miners in asteroid belts (which are found in nearly every system) fill up cans, and then have industrial class ships pick up the ore left in the “jettison cans”, this can also be done in secure cans, however they only anchor in less secure systems. The reason secure cans are being used is because of the fear of so called Ore thief’s.

Ore thieves are unsavory people in industrial ships that will come to your cans and take the stuff in them, they cannot be shot or they will trigger concord (=police) response. you can attack them as soon as the theft act is undertaken but be careful, if you attack they can retaliate and concord will not protect you. Often these “Ore Thieves” will thieve with the intention of inviting an attack from the unprepared, lone or noob miner. Do not attack unless you have support or KNOW you will win.

Usually the best mining ships are the ships with most gun slots, i.e you can the most mining laser, ships with mining bonuses or Mining Barges).

Ship Recommendations

Ships in EVE change, new ships are introduced regularly and therefore what might be a great miner today may not be as great tomorrow. However, on the whole, good mining ships usually stay pretty good mining ships. I will give you some examples to consider:

Frigates: Usually frigate pilots will mine solo, therefore cargo hold would be nice to have. E.G. bantam, probe, imicus.

Cruiser: If you have time and money to spare for the skill I would like the thorax, this ships got 2000 m3 drone space and 5 turret slots, so defense and mining capability are at its best with drones and 5 lasers here, a vexor or smaller would be second choice, below that most ships will have near equal mining ability.

Battleships: Most battleships have enough turret slots to be a pretty good miner (tempest and domi = 6, arma and mega = 7, apoc = 8 ) drone bays on these ships are all enough to keep defense at nominal levels.

A very nice ship is the apoc, but the 1 or 2 more slots it’s got only insure a 12.5 or 25% higher yield, which with skills isn’t that much of a difference (especially if it’s the first battleship I would recommend the Armageddon since its half the price).

Mining Barges are a special skill made just for mining therefore they are the best for mining and making EVE Isk.

Mining Areas

Mining location dictates the type and value of Ore mined. The lower security space, the higher the risk and obviously the higher potential earnings. High security areas  start at 1.0 which are safe and secure, risk increases and security reduces as you go down the scale to 0.0.

The higher in the alphabet the first letter of ore is, more valuable it will be (A being higher than Z, e.g. Kernite is more valuable than Veldspar)

General Location Overview and Profits Considering 1 industrial and 1 battleship, solo):

1.0 – 0.9:

  1. These are some of the worst areas to mine in, often very
    close to general traveling routes and will be mine by hordes of people
  2. Likely strip-mined by mega corporations
  3. They’ll contain scordite and veldspar most of the time.
  4. There are no pirates.
  5. Expect several millions per hour

0.8 – 0.5:

  1. These belts are often mined unless you find one out of the normal
    routes, I found a few totally unmined, this can be profitable.
  2. Common minerals are veldspar, pyrox, scordite, plagio,
  3. Lower security levels offer omber (0.7) and kernite (0.5).
  4. Expect a few frigate pirates, but nothing drones cant handle.
  5. Also player pirates are not to be found in these sectors.
  6. Profits are again several millions per hour, yet more then 0.9 and 1.0,
    but at a slightly higher risk.

0.4 – 0.1:

  1. STAY OUT OF HERE unless in groups, in my opinion this is
    the domain of the real player pirates
  2. Expect to find descent ore, cruiser NPC pirates
  3. Worst of all player pirates, these are people usually working in
    groups of 3 or so, they will first come in with one of them, he will scan you, by this time you should already be at a station or even docked!

If you plan to mine here, in any kind of group smaller than your whole corporation watch local with your life. Profit can be around 2 – 3 mil per hour per person if it’s mined correctly. There are sentry guns at the stations so you’re safe there. However the risks are high and, unless you have friends or know how to run away properly, I suggest going back to 0.5 – 0.8 for more profit and less risk.

0.0:

  1. Lawless space, no sentries, a players will is the law here.
  2. You can be killed without any security hit.
  3. In my experience as long as the refinery and your mining spot are close to each other there is not that much risks from player compared to immense rewards.
  4. Expect 10 – 20 million per hour earnings or sometimes even more.
  5. The NPC’s are very powerful and 1 or 2 battleship sized defenders are a must (or park your own tanked battleship in a safe spot).
    If you’re on your own id recommend ninja mining, which basically means, get a ship that can run properly. park an industrial at a safe spot in the system, and mine in the ship until you see pirates. once you see them, run to a moon or your safe spot. Wait for about 10 minutes till your scanners clear and go back. Then once the can contains about the amount your indy can carry get your indy out of
    its safe spot and make it grab the stuff also bookmaking your mining asteroid is a good idea so you won’t have to travel much.

My Own Favourite: 0.0 Space

If you’re in a good alliance, have a good group and don’t have too many player pirates around this is the best way to generate EVE Isk from mining.

WARNING! This is only for the people with nerves of steel and people that live with the knowledge they will likely lose a ship daily.

For anyone that is simply not ready for 0.0 space  I would recommend 0.8 – 0.5, that is if you can find a descent system.

For the some great tips on how to start your mining character, what skills learn, and how to mine in detail check out the Mining Character guide and the EVE mining guide within this site.

Agent Missions

Agent missions at the moment are one of the safest and most boring ways to make money. To start you need to climb up from a lvl 1 agent to a lvl 2 agent to a lvl 3 agent. This can take several days.

gallente-deimosThe 3 levels all contain a different difficulty, lvl 1 is very easy and can with ease be done in frigates, level 2 can be done in frigates but is hard. At level 3 either a battleship or a cruiser and industrial are a must.

Of course each higher level will give bigger rewards. An agents effective quality will show the height of its rewards, this can be raised by standing and by certain social skills (so can the standing with the connection skill by the way) I’d say agent are for people that like to watch television while playing and can’t find a good belt to mine in, and for people that are starting the game and need their first frigate or cruiser and wish to do this solo.

There are 2 different classes of agents:

  1. Research and development agents
  2. Regular agents.

Research and Development Agents

These used to give out rare blueprints, and were based purely on luck, no matter what you did, it will always  a lottery, you could get nothing for weeks, while others could get 3 blueprints in a row.

CCP stopped this blueprint lottery and implemented a new system called Invention. This basically allows players to create “limited use” tech 2 blueprint using a tech 1 blueprint and items called datacores. Research and development agents exchange datacores for research points. Getting research points with an agent is easy, just train the relevant science skill and talk to him to start a research project, you’ll then get research points free every day. Research points can be doubled by completing special missions but I don’t carry any worth in this. (With free research points you can bank for months to collect datacores and then sell them on the market)

With level 4 in the science skill your agent is using, you can make over 20 million ISK each month from selling the datacores from one good agent. The Research Project Management skill allows you to use one more agent per level, increasing the maximum potential earnings to over 120 million ISK per month. Just having 2 characters on an account doing this can generate enough ISK to pay for your account with game time codes.

Good R&D agents require high standings to use. Open your character sheet in-game and open the standings section. In the “liked by” tab you can see what your standings are with the various factions and corporations which have agents. To use good level 4 R&D agents, you’ll need a standing of 6.0 or greater with the corporation or faction in question. For example, having 6.9 Gallente Federation faction standing or higher will allow you to to use the very best R&D agents from all corporations within the federation, regardless of your standings with the individual corporations.

Regular Agents:

These are also based on luck, and the only big profit to be made with them is by selling the basic implants for 12 – 15 million a pop. If you’re lucky you can get one every 10 missions, I think the average is about 30 missions. But again this is based on pure luck, you can only get implants during important missions, which are pretty rare. You need a level 3 agent with 6.0 standing (at least) to get implants though.  So dont expect to start of with them, it requires some work.

The rewards per missions are around 150,000 EVE Isk a pop, which is not much so I wouldn’t go for that. There are tech 2 building components to get and sell though. I have no idea how much this can make you extra per hour but it doesn’t exceed mining or NPC hunting unless you’re lucky.

You can direct the type of missions you’ll get a bit by picking the right corporations and the right part of this corp. For example, security in caldari navy will likely get you fighting missions. however you will still get some gun shipments, so keep that indy ready. What I often do is have 3 level 3 agents in the same station, so I can take all 3 missions at once and complete 3 missions in one go.

NPC Hunting/Chaining

See My PvP Fighter Character Guide for Some Build Strategies

Quite profitable, try and take your abilities to the max because the higher the more money. The most important thing here is to know your limits, don’t try to take on spawns that are a lot higher then your own ship and fighter-templar-4ability, if you get killed this will ruin your profits for some time. Its better to take pirates a bit below your ability then take them to high, also chaining will mean they’ll instantly respawn, if you had any difficulty in the original spawn that problem might get duplicated when they spawn right after they die.

Commonly chaining is the best way for making money, however some voices say this will be removed in the future, still I will discuss the basics:

  1. First you skim through belts trying to find one that suits your own power
  2. Then kill the entire spawn except for one pirate
  3. This should be the weakest one, let him attack you constantly and don’t let him get away.
  4. At first nothing will happen but after some time (can be anything from 5 minutes to an hour for the first respawn) the whole spawn will respawn, again you kill all but the one circling you
  5. The respawn will get faster and faster, until it will be nearly instant (right after you kill one he’ll be back).
  6. You need to experiment for yourself what chains suit you, and sometimes you will have to learn the painful way, but eventually you’ll get good at it, or ask corpmates for advice about your abilities.

Another way would be going to a base:

  1. This is hard at first because there can be upto 30 pirates at once, but there usually only a few spawnpoints, and them spamming one at a time at a slow rate (this rate cannot be increased).
  2. The biggest prize often comes in the lootcans the ships drop, but can also be their bounties
  3. Usually you alone will be enough to chain, unless you’re going
    to chain battleship pirates (0.0 space) then you might need a group
  4. In this case I recommend shield transfer arrays for everyone in this case (with 4 medium arrays at one ship he’ll be invincible compared to the enemies, even if its the heaviest npc battleships).
  5. Profits killing npcs bs’s aren’t that high because of the group split, but sometimes the loot is very rewarding

(NPC hunting is profitable but it is risky and knowing your own limits is a must)

EVE Banking (E-Bank)

EVE has experienced multiple attempts in creating player-run banks. With the harsh “real world” nature of EVE many of these have just been scams in some way or another, often taking billions of EVE Isk from their users.

However E-Bank soon merged, the brains behind this was entrepreneur Ricdic. After a slow start E-Bank took off massively, expanding to include to a board of directors, a number of bank tellers, web-development and consultant staff. E-Bank offers monthly interest at 1.5% for standard checking accounts and 3% on savings accounts. E-Bank its Isk through the investment of large businesses and offering loans at rates of 10-15% interest per month. If you have the Isk slap some in a savings account and enjoy the free growth.

Rental Agreements and Services

Some real-world services can be traded for ISK and offering these services for a recurring fee can make a substantial income. Website hosting, server rental and killboard hosting are all regular services that you can charge ISK for. For example voice coms servers have been know to easily fetch 100 million ISK per month.

In-game rental services also carry a price tag. Large PvP alliances hold dangerous and lucrative areas of 0.0 space and rent access to this space out for a recurring fee. The ISk making potential is shocking with billions and billions being collected monthly.

Other types of rental agreements can come in the form of renting out blueprints. Rental agreements on Tech 2 and/or researched capital ship blueprints can make serious amounts of Isk, however precautions must be taken to prevent people stealing your valuables. Have your prints locked down in a corporate office. This allows the renter to use the blueprints without letting him take them. To lock down a blueprint for renting, it is advised that you make a new character who can create a new corporation. This character will have to rent an office at a convenient location and put the blueprints inside. The blueprints should then be locked down by vote and the renter can join the corporation.

If you want to learn the underground EVE Making tactics used by the richest EVE players Click Here and you will be taken to the EVE Billonaire site. If you want to read the definitive EVE Billionaire Review Click Here.