Having been thwarted on my first run at the Winter Nexus event, I decided after the weekend to regroup and maybe try another tack. There was a whole mining aspect to the event and I figured I could give that a try. It probably wasn’t going to be as lucrative, but it might also be less contested than the combat sites.
I poked around through alts, found one that had a Venture mining ship to hand, used one of the High Sec ice storm filaments to jump me to a likely location, then opened up the probe scanner to find one of the ore sites. That was easy. I warped it, took the acceleration gate, and realized that this was, of course, the Winter Nexus, with an emphasis on Winter, so the whole thing was about ice mining, and a Venture can’t do that.
Here is your daily reminder to read the quest text. Back to the selection of alts.
Having done my half-assed worst, I decided to take this more seriously. I got out my main alt, the one who had been doing the Abyssal filaments until I lost her ship. She has a Mastodon, the Minmatar deep space transport (and not the social media site) which, among other benefits, has a fleet hangar, which can be used for hauling fully fitted ships. Small ships, granted, but I only wanted to haul around one small ship. Specifically, I wanted to haul an Endurance, the ORE mining frigate capable of harvesting ice.
Why haul it rather than just filamenting around? Because I figured there might be cargo to haul home, and the Endurance may harvest ice, but it doesn’t haul as much as safely as the Mastodon. I found an Endurance fit over at EVE Workbench… it seemed okay… bought and fit it, then realized she didn’t actually have the skills trained to fly it.
Fortunately we were a few days into the event because the day four reward included the event Expert System, which gives you the skills temporarily to fly that very fit.
I have been *cough* a bit critical of the whole Expert System idea in the past, seeing it as not something worth selling in the shop… and all the more so in an era when CCP is straight up selling skill points. But giving it away as part of an event like this… seems pretty good.
So I used that… then set up my skill queue to get those skills for real… I was only a couple days of training away in any case… then plopped the Endurance in the fleet hangar of the Mastodon, undocked, and found a quiet spot to filament.
I was soon in the space winter wonderland that are the Winter Nexus metaliminal storms. I docked myself up, pulled the Endurance out of the fleet hangar, jumped into it, and set off to do some event mining sites.
Docking up in snowy space
The cycle of the mining portion of the event goes through the same steps over and over. Step one is to enter a site… find it on the probe scanner and warp to it… use the opportunities UI, if it is feeling helpful at the moment. Then click the “claim” button to clear that objective and move on to the next.
The next is to harvest seven units of ice. Easy enough. The site has a bunch of ice asteroids, go mine.
In a mining site
When you mine your seven units, collect your reward. Then it tells you to exchange four loads of ice. Seven units of ice is a load and you go turn them in at the ORE Ice Processor, which is an Orca in the center of the anomaly.
If you have opportunities on it will highlight it for you
So mine some more, when you’re full up turn some in, then go mine some more until you’ve done your four loads. Once again, collect your reward and… start over again. Warp out and then back to your site if it is still a bounty of ice, or find another site if your current one is being scooped up by others. 5 points for entry, 10 points for seven chunks, 15 points for turning in four loads; 30 points a cycle and you just need to do it 30 times to finish the event.
The ice harvesting is not as competitive as the combat sites, but people on a mission will show up and mine the hell out of an anomaly. I saw a lot of Endurance miners like myself, and some Retrievers and Mackinaws, more serious mining barges for those who want to pull in more ice.
The most serious I saw was a group of two Hulks and a Porpoise that landed in one anomaly I was in.
The big players arrive
That trio ran through the site like a Hoover, popping asteroids as they slowly cruised around the arc of the anomaly. Nothing survive long enough to get out of range of them.
All your ice is belong to us!
So what is the reward for all of this mining? I mean, you have to turn in the ice product since it has no value otherwise.
First, there are the even challenge points which earn you SKINs and boosters and more even filaments. And that is okay, though I have so many event filaments now that I think I must be doing something wrong, since I have only used one.
Also, every time you turn in seven you get a salvage crate that contains some prizes.
ORE Green Salvage Crate
The “salvage” aspect is fairly literal, as a good chunk of what I have gotten has been T1 salvage. But there are also various versions of the Overseer’s Personal Effects, which you can turn in to CONCORD for an ISK reward. I’ve gotten 5th tier through 13th tier from crates, 5th being worth 100K ISK, while the 13th is worth 13.2 million ISK.
And there are SKINs and more filaments and fireworks and snowballs and boosters and a few seasonal collectables.
Sometimes you get a Peculiar salvage crate, which has some better items in it.
A seasonal crate upgrade
I am pretty sure that is where the 13th tier effects came from one of these.
Is it worth the effort? Maybe. I got a lot of SKINs, and those have value to me. And the rewards from the crates add up. The cargo value estimate in the Mastodon is about 200 million ISK right now.
The loot haul so far
But the ISK per hour, if that is your thing… well, maybe it is okay if you’re that team with the Porpoise and two Hulks. But in an Endurance, it is pretty slow.
Just one ice miner humming away
But it is also very low effort. I can set myself in an anomaly and tab out to another window and keep an eye on things while I work on something else… like writing this post. The 34″ monitor leaves plenty of space for my overview and cargo hold to be visible while I work.
As I write this, my Endurance mining away in the background, I am past the 600 mark of the 900 total event points you can earn. I should have all the prizes soon enough. Will I carry on after that? Maybe… or I might go back to something that requires a little more attention on my part.