EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

The second part of a series of guides explaining mineral compression in EVE Online. This EVE guide includes guidelines for skill training, designing successful business models, and (of course) the nitty-gritty details.

In the first part of this EVE guide series, we dealt with motivations for importing minerals, situations that would require large amounts of minerals, training the required EVE skills, and some suggested blueprints for compressing minerals. In this second EVE guide of the series, we focus on EVE mineral acquisitions, transportation in and out of high-sec space, refining compressed minerals back into their constitutuent components, and so forth.

Acquiring And Packaging EVE Minerals For Compression

The need for minerals in null-sec space can reach the billions of units, at least where tritanium is concerned. With volumes like that, even small price differences can mean a lot of ISK saved or squandered, depending on what happens. There is also the risk that you may buy a large quantity, and the market will shift downwards, de facto reducing the value of your mineral investment. The market for tech I minerals is generally as likely to shift up as down, though, so don't worry about that too much.

The simplest way to obtain minerals is to put buy orders up in Jita. It is rare that it will take more than a day for even pretty large buy orders to be filled, and will be convenient for moving them, whether you are using a freighter to carry them yourself, or can afford to pay for courier contracts.

The less simple way is to pick somewhere off the beaten track and place buy orders there. This will mean taking longer to fill your buy orders, and possibly increase the amount of time required to collect all the minerals for compression. The up side is that you can probably get a better price for your minerals, which will pay off pretty meaningful dividends since you are presumably buying really large amounts.

Transporting EVE Minerals In Empire

The best way I have landed on is to not carry more than a billion in minerals, then autopilot it from point A to point B. For smaller volumes I have sometimes used courier contracts, but I generally think it is not worth taking the hit when autopiloting is so easy. The down side here is that you need to have a freighter character and hull, but such is life.

Finding A Compression System In EVE Online

In and of itself, Jita has a tremendous number of production slots available. Most of the time they are back up a few days, but if you amble over to Lonetrek, Sinq Laison, or another nearby region you should be able to find plenty of unused production slots.

Using Compression Blueprints In EVE Online

Having assembled the appropriate compression modules described in the first part of this EVE guide series, you may be wondering what material efficiency is best for each of them. Most blueprints have an "optimal" level to which they can be researched, after which the diminishing returns make it not worth doing.

For the large-szied guns mentioned in the previous article, the ideal material efficiency level is 36. For the citadel torpedoes, there is rather more variance:

• Doom Citadel Torpedo: 34 material efficiency.
  
• Purgatory Citadel Torpedo: 53 material efficiency.
  
• Rift Citadel Torpedo: 16 material efficiency.
  
• Thor Citadel Torpedo: 30 material efficiency.