EVE Online ISK Making - Beginner Guide to Making EvE ISK

Developed by CCP EVE Online steep learning curve sure doesn’t make it easy for the new players to understand what to do for profit. Is it trading? Sites? Market? Fly in a faction or solo? How to start or how to EVE Online ISK Making looks like? How good PLEX actually are and what return can you make from manufacturing? Where to farm? How profitable anomalies exploration is? What's great about incursions and how much money you can make by doing PVE? You can google all those questions and find no good answers as every major update (and those are often) can radically change the ISK game. 

Thanks to the recent upgrade to alpha clone capabilities, free-to-play players now have way more options for earning their first big space-bucks. New skills give alpha players more choice when it comes to lucrative activities in the game, you will find quite a lot of alpha clones flying in alliance fleets where every member, alpha or omega, counts. EVE Online is one of few games where free players can actually fairly enjoy their game and make a reasonable living in New Eden. 

Over the internet, you can find reasonable articles and guides to a number of popular ISK farming activities like hauling, ratting, anomalies, wormholes, highsec resources, scamming, blueprints, data sites, planets or ice mining. We would like to focus a little bit on less obvious methods that are a good start and will introduce you to this true sandbox market if you really want to invest your time in the game and make a lot of isk, this is why we will not be covering level 4 missions and their rewards, industry, incursion, rare nullsec site runners, industry or multi alt rats killing.

Presented methods are substandard and are kinda harder but also way more fun than your typical grind careers but also way more engaging and creative. You won't need to learn much or have experience in business or PVP, all you need is some decent amount of creativity and in some cases mid-tier equipment. 

Table of contents:

1. EVE ISK Making Guide.

2. Low-Security Salvaging.

3. Magnate - Low Sec Salvager.

4. Jita Vulturing.

5. Gas Huffing.

6. Mining.

You can find many guides that will tell you the basics like running incursions, level 3 missions or doing planetary interaction for some passive income. In this guide, however, I will cover a few less known ISK making methods so do not wait and read how to EVE ISK making looks in reality.

EVE ISK Making Guide - best methods

Low-Security Salvaging

Salvaging is a kind of a mixed bag, you either have to have additional active characters that will salvage wrecks while you do your missions or you have to take the risky path of low-sec salvaging. Both ways are good for EVE ISK making but mission salvaging has a pretty high skill cap since it’s only profitable to salvage level 3 mission and you need to manage an additional character.

For salvaging in Low Security you have to brace yourself for some losses, that’s why you’ll need to go cheap. One of the best ships for the job is Magnate since it can bring just enough salvaging power needed for most of the wreckage and can still be fitted for 40m (60m with T2 rigs), combined with frigate speed and agility and with couple of extra implants it can also escape local pirates so it fits the role perfectly when compared to Noctis that can reach ridiculous prices. So if you don't want to pay exorbitant prices or wait months before you can build a massive salvage ship (that will get lost anyway, those are the rules of the galaxy) pick a Magnate.

Magnate - Low Sec Salvager

High Slot:

• 3X Salvager I

Medium Slot:

• 1X Medium Shield Extender I

• 1X 5MN Y-TB Compact Microwarpdrive

• 1X Adaptive Invulnerability Field

Low Slot:

• 1X Damage Control I
• 1X Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
• 1X Type-D Restrained Internal Stabilizers
• 1X Type-D Restrained Nanofiber Structure

 Rigs:

• 3X Small Salvage Tackle I

Drone:

• Scout Drone I of your preference.

The most important parts of this fit are the Salvage Tackle rigs, salvagers and the microwarpdrive, rest is basically up to your personal preference. Such fit should cost you somewhere between 3-4 million ISK so it's really cheap. It’s a good idea to have few of those frigates stashed in the high-security system close to where you will be operating.

With your ship ready it’s time to choose you area of operations. If you know how to use DOTLAN maps, find yourself a system from a “most violent” list. There are few systems that are a constant free-for-all warzone like Kourmonen, Okkamon, Siseide, Huola, Asakai or Tama.

Once in the low security system, jump around various asteroid belts, gates, customs offices, stations or any other warpable places and look for wrecks, you will often find tech 2 frigate wrecks and drones scattered all over the place all you have to do is scoop the drones to your cargo hold and salvage any remains you will find.

As a frigate you won't have much inventory space so remember to drop off your findings to any station in the system (preferably a NPC one) and then just move the goods to high-sec whenever you feel it’s safe and sell your haul for good amount of EVE ISK.

Earnings are a matter of luck so it's really impossible to estimate how much EVE ISK per hour you can earn, but being a space-vulture is fun and quite exciting ISK making activity. You have to be aware of your surroundings and calculate the risk all the time.

Jita Vulturing

Can be done in any ship on any type of account without use of any skills or special builds. Jita is a major trade hub of the entire eve online and one of the best places to make EvE ISK. If your corporation is at war with some other organization, it is very likely you will meet enemy pilots in Jita. That is why there is constant fighting going on in Jita 4 Moon 4 Caldari Navy Assembly Plant.

To become a Jita Vulture simply undock and look for any ongoing fights within the station docking range (2,5 km). If there is a brawl going on simply approach the most expensive looking ship and wait. Eventually one of the warring parties will die, leaving some loot in the wreck. You want to quicky scoop the loot to your cargo hold and IMMEDIATELY dock up. Since Jita is a high-security system, picking up someone else’s loot will put a “suspect timer” on you, which means anyone can freely kill you for the next 13 minutes. You can spend that time selling the snatched loot for EVE Online ISK.

It’s not very active method and consists of long periods of downtime but is a grate half-passive activity you can while watching your favorite Netflix show. It's a good idea to have world sounds active and make EvE sounds work while the game runs in the background if you know how to recognize sound cues of combat it will make Jita vulturing much easier.

Gas Huffing

Lots of guides often recommend EvE Online newbies to pick up mining as an easy way to make your first EvE ISK. Unfortunately, due to the popularity of this method the supply of ore increased exponentially. You can, however, use your venture for harvesting gas and still get a quick return on your investment. It takes about a week of non-injector alpha training to do so making it pretty easy to get into.

Skills you need:

Mining Frigate: As high as you want, preferably level IV

Gas Cloud Harvesting: At least IV (you will need Mining prerequisite first)

Scanning Skills: You will want Astrometric Acquisition, Pinpointing and Rangefinding as well as Astrometrics as high as possible, preferably up to level IV.

With skills covered you should get yourself a Venture and fit it as cheap as possible:

Venture Cheap Gas Harvester

High Slot:

• 2X Gas Harvester I
• 1X Core Probe Launcher (with 8 Core Scanner Probe I ammo)

Mid Slot:

• 1X 5MN Y-TB Compact Microwarpdrive

Low Slot:

• 1X Type-D Restrained Internal Stabilizers

This cheap rig is all you need for your gas cloud harvesting, it will set you back around 6 million ISK a piece. Since we will be delving into low-security space it's a loss that anyone can handle.

Get to the low-security system and find yourself a friendly Citadel and warp to it on “0” so you will get tethered and safe from harm. Use this protection to launch your probes and look for gas clouds. Thankfully, gas clouds are pretty easy to scan down so you won't need any special expensive modules to narrow the scan results down. Once you found yourself a cloud simply warp to the site, harvest and sell. Simple as that. If you will find multiple gas clouds in the area you can use this chart to help you evaluate the worth of each type of gas and how much EvE ISK each cubic meter is worth: https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/ore/gas.html

Mining

The mine is another common required ISK making method. Starting farming by well revenue value mining cannot be done in a few days. People which are playing like a miner can produce huge real money values. The pilot cannot be trained well for mining in a short period of time. It takes years. For this place, I want to share with a better article on our website about including EVE Online Mining. I wish that this content will be useful for you and help in increasing billions of ISK income you will be able to generate, and every next billion will make you happy.

Those are few lesser-known ways to make EVE Online ISK, obviously, you can find tutorials on more popular ones like wormhole space farming, cosmic anomalies, mission running and faction warfare all of which can get a lot of is to a new EVE player. Finding or create basic or advanced method of farming it is a very hard case. I hope young pilots of New Eden will find this guide helpful! Get rich and fly safe o7.