Mining Barges – gathering wealth the easy way thanks to CCP

by A scientists life in Eve on Aug.08, 2012, under Eve online

OK, let’s look at a major change to mining barges that has, no doubt, resulted in billions of ISK in value being added to a few players in the game.

The humble Procurer – Eve’s cheapest and (pre-update) least useful mining barge. I mean, seriously, who owns Procurers unless they’re converting them to Skiffs or made a mistake when buying something from the market?

To make a Procurer (pre-patch, unresearched BPO) we need:

560 Isogen
10 Megacyte
6,602 Mexallon
54 Nocxium
16,173 Pyerite
256,824 Tritanium
32 Zydrine

Based on Jita mineral prices (sell orders) on 5 August at 1000 Eve time, that would cost you 2,560,134.5 ISK in materials.

To make a Procurer (on Sisi, unresearched BPO) we need:

28,051 Isogen
211 Megacyte
42,600 Mexallon
2,805 Nocxium
421,470 Pyerite
1,423,348 Tritanium
703 Zydrine

Based on Jita mineral prices (sell orders) as above, that would cost you a staggering 23,203,720.57 ISK, almost 10 times as much.

So, if you had made 100 Procurers before the 8th of August, you get an increase in net worth of just over 2 billion ISK after the patch has completed. Not bad for what was one of Eve’s worst ever ships.

Now a really important thing to note here is that you cannot reprocess the new Procurers to get the materials. CCP have (and I’ve had this confirmed by Trebor Daehdoow of the CSM and from the brilliant CCP Community team) set the surplus materials as “additional”, and therefore they do not get returned through reprocessing.

How long this will remain the case is a different matter, but for now if you had noticed this and hoped to be able to create millions of minerals from nothing, sorry the answer is no – well, not just yet at least.

So in conclusion – perhaps the humble Procurer is actually quite a good at gathering wealth after all!