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Don't Ignore the Pocket Change

With new members in corp with low skill points I'm spending time discussing finical planning.  They both have purchased a PLEX but my goal is to not have them have to buy PLEX unless they want to buy PLEX.  Therefore teaching ISK making and discussing finical planning goes hand in hand with slapping their hands when lured by shiny faction ships as they learn the basics of the game and spaceship explosions.  We spend time going over ways to make ISK.  From the basics of running missions to teaching them exploration and the market to answering industrial questions.  Everyone is different and the goal is to cater to that individuality with their ISK making.

I've finally reached a wallet goal I've been clawing at for a while now.  Over 10 billion ISK in my wallet without sacrificing anything else.  My character sale pushed me the last of the way over.  I'd been hovering but I kept dumping ISK into random things like spaceships.  There are many that will roll their eyes and call me poor.  My ISK making may be suboptimal but I enjoy it and it pays for all of my tasks plus leaving extra every month.  And that is one of the keys.  I enjoy what I do.  For me, its not a grind that I undertake with gritted teeth to force myself to afford my PvP budget.  Because I dislike grinding and dislike the common money making tasks in Eve I expanded to lots of smaller things I could do at my leisure.

I've never come upon the fountain of ISK.  My income has been mostly what I call trickle income.  Bits and pieces that build up over time.  I'm a firm believer that a million ISK gained is a million ISK I didn't have before.  I have things that are 'not worth my time' but I try to eye things from several angles.

I was having a very good morning.  I did a 5/10 in relative peace.  I managed to nab a B-Type 10MN MWD valued at around 240 million.  It was not like the drops I had picked up from two 4/10s earlier in the week but my intake from the complexes was approaching 1.5 bil in deadspace modules.  That makes my wallet happy.

Because it was a 5/10 I undocked the salvager and salvaged the entire field.  My make my own rigs project has been going well.  I do not have much of a surplus yet but I was able to make myself two ancillary current routers and a few more shield extenders with the salvage.  The routers are selling for over 10 million ISK a pop and are useful in a particular fit that we have been using.  I was more than happy to make some for myself and avoid the market on that one.

I was chattering away to Ren at what I was doing and I said, “It sounds boring and like a lot of work but it works for me and I like it.”  I still, even now, enjoy salvaging.  The ISK calculator only makes it more fun.  A few minutes of work and 50 mil of estimated value in the cargo hold.  I like that.

Eve has lots of ways to make money.  That is often pointed out and it is very true.  I avoided missions and mined at first. I moved onto salvaging and then just odds and ends.  I started building blueprints from exploration. I sold exploration loot.  I got to the point where I could do dead space complexes.  But I have never, ever, left my early days of salvaging and working out the price of things on the market.

Eve is an ISK multiplier.  As you gain more abilities you want to do more things and the cost of doing daily business increases.  Often times people look for more and more ways to make their ISK in larger and larger amounts.  ISK per hour has always been a bad word(s) in my book.  The obsession with the ‘best’ means that people ignore what is there and often times find themselves idling when they could be making something and making nothing in the end.

Deno once called me a scavenger because I was spending my time salvaging missions instead of doing missions.  At that time, once I got over my hurt feelings, I realized that he did represent a common opinion of salvaging as a choice.  It is not flashy and it is not exciting and frankly it does not sound badass.  "I hoover destroyed shit out of space.  Keeping space clean is a responsibility that I take seriously."  However, it is a steady source of ISK and an easy source of ISK.  The market drinks modules.

I used to think that it was just about fitting modules to ships.  Now, I have come to learn that an incredible amount of minerals come out of salvaged modules.  Most (but not all) modules have a type from 1-4 that drop as NPC loot.  Out of those 4 possible module types most of them are not used.  What happens to them?  They get reprocessed into minerals.   I had always wondered why there were so many buy orders for them.  It is because of the mineral content when combined with refining skills.

There is both an ISK and mineral market in NPC loot drops.  Rigs are not terribly hard to make as well and I am learning that making the Rig and selling it is a better idea then selling the salvage.  I’ve been feeding people cheap salvage to make expensive rigs for almost a year and if I could blush, I would, at my ignorance.

It isn't exciting and I don't need to spend a lot of time doing it.  My ISK increases during the month doing a bit here and a bit there. I hate 'farming' as the term seem to be.  I do lots of little things that I can pick up or put down.  The side effect is that I do a lot for myself. I build my own blue prints from minerals from reprocessed modules.  I have been saving tons of ISK on rigs.  I now have processes that are making more money than they spend to maintain.

All of these things are good things and give me 'putter' factor.  That time when I play but it's relaxed.  My low maintenance trickle income works for me.  I've done incursions and occasionally do them with my corpmates but my heart is not in them. I don't actually enjoy them so I do not do them.  There are lots of complaints about the PvE being bad.  It could be better but the options are enough that it is not hard to find something that is enjoyable.

Or, I guess, there is always PLEX.


  1. How about you being the one who is buying up cheap salvage and create expensive rigs?

    1. I've been thinking about it. Its not so easy. Buy orders are as competitive as sell orders and I'm terrible at the market.

    2. Are there many buy orders in lowsec for salvage? I didn't mean to come Jita and fight, I meant to buy salvage from other lowsec people where you live


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