EvE Online Hauling Guide - how to haul and transport in EVE Online New Eden

Hauling is one of many jobs players can perform during their time in EVE Online.  Often performed by specialized alternate characters, many people concern this is a full-time EvE job fulfilling their space-trucker fantasy. In this tutorial, we will cover the basics of hauling.

How to start Hauling?

To begin your space-trucking adventure you need a truck.... or should we say an industrial ship. There are a few ships to choose from each with different cargo capacity, bonuses, and resistances. To begin your adventure however it's completely fine to stick to whatever industrial your chosen race provides, pick the one with the biggest cargo bay since your ships agility and armor does not really matter at this point of your hauling adventure. Be advised that as an entry-level hauler you are, as some might call, a "loot pinata" which means: you will fly easy to destroy ships packed with loot. We will be covering how to avoid ganks and how to prepare yourself for long trips in our future articles but for now, let's stick to basics. 

Tayra is a solid Caldari entry-level ship. 

Training your racial industrial skill should take only a few minutes but if you are thinking seriously about hauling you should consider leveling this skill up to at least level four. Each grade of the skill gives additional bonuses to your trucks cargo capacity. You should also have prepared some ISK for collateral, usually, you small hauling contracts begin with as much as 20 million collateral and "real" jobs begin with one or even two billion. Also, remember to buy platinum insurance for your ship as you will lose it sooner or later!

EVE Online Hauling - how to find work

The best way to start your trucking adventure is by joining the Haulers Channel chat, where many independent contractors reside and look for reliable hauliers to move their stuff. This is a place that will help you avoid scam contracts, dangerous routes and will provide you with some basic understanding of "do's" and "don'ts" of the hauling world. Another important tool is Public Contracts, go to the region you want to pick your parcel from and start looking for offers, note that private contracts can be accepted from anywhere in space. 

In the public contracts window, you can filter contracts depending on their volume, collateral, pick-up location, drop-off location, max jumps, max route length and security status, so you can modify displayed contracts to your needs or capability. You will find a lot of bait and scam contracts and we will teach you in the future instalments on how to recognize and avoid them. Unlike distribution NPC missions, courier contract packages cannot be split, the package has to be delivered in one piece so if your industrial can only hold 10,000 m3 of cargo you can accept 10.000m3 package - not a drop more. 

There are industrial ships that are specialized in one type of commodity, for example Miasmos has bigger ore cargo bay that can be loaded with huge quantities of space-rocks. Unfortunately once a contractor sets up a contract with ore the material then goes into a package and is no longer recognized by your Miasmos as ore material and you need to use a regular cargo bay to transport it.

what are Hauling Skills 

Apart from skilling up towards better and bigger industrial ships, there are few skills that you should consider leveling up before you go for better ships, those skills will improve your overall survivability and ship handling. Training Mechanics and Hull Upgrades, as well as Shield/Armor skills, will improve your overall ship toughness. Agility of your ship is also very important as it determines how fast your vehicle will align and warp from gate to gate, this can be improved by training Advanced Spaceship Command, Evasive Manoeuvring and Navigation, ship agility can also be improved with appropriate implants if you can afford them.

If you cant figure out which skills to develop next you can also follow the mastery path for a certain ship. Masteries usually cover most skills that are useful to that particular type of ship. For example below you can see requirements for fourth mastery stage of a freighter, as you can see it covers basic skills that can help in navigating this gigantic ship. 

what are Advanced Ships for Hauling in eve

Apart from a freighter, there are few advanced options for dedicated haulers varying in their role in the space-trucking universe. Blockade Runners are Tech 2 industrials capable of warping while cloaked. They are used to carry low-volume high-value goods around low security or heated sectors. Deepspace Transports (DST) are another variant of Tech 2 industrial ships but instead of stealthy approach DST's rely on their warp strength, they have biggest cargo holds of all non-freighter transport ships and can carry up to 62,5m3 of cargo volume with all skills fully trained. Jump Freighters are Tech 2 freighters that can utilize jump bridges, with assistance JF can jump directly from high-security imperial space to null and low-security regions, although they can carry much less than a normal freighter they are still best for importing large quantities of goods to deep-space. Jump Freighters can jump only from High-Security to Low-Security, not the other way. 

In the future haulier guides, we will cover topics like: webber alts, scam contracts, private station frauds and bumping. Being a haulier is a dangerous job full of traps and nasty people, we will do our best to get you prepared for that!