EVE Online Moon Mining - The Process of Harvesting Raw Materials

Moon Mining in EvE Online is a process of harvesting raw materials using refinery upwell structured anchored around one of the moons in EvE Online. Any refinery deployed at Upwell Moon Mining Beacon has an ability to fit a Moon Drill that will tear out huge parts of the moon and then blow them into asteroids that can be then mined by players.

Table of contents

• Choosing EVE Online Moon place
• Moon Extraction Cycle

Choosing EVE Online Moon place

When anchoring a Refinery at the moon mining beacon you should take not that deployables such as mobile depots, mobile tractor units cannot be deployed within 75km from the beacon. This is very important when choosing a place for your refinery. Make sure to avoid situations where asteroids that are result of moon mining could spawn too close to the beacon making it impossible to use deployable structures during your mining operations.

Once you have a Refinery with a Standup Moon Drill online you can begin extraction. To do so you have to set up an Extraction Schedule. If you have control over the station a calendar icon will appear on the right side of your HUD.

Moon Extraction Cycle

The longer the time frame you set for the extraction the bigger piece of moon will be ripped away. The extraction cycle can be set to anything between 6 and 56 days. Below the cycle timer you will also see a standard vulnerability frame dial and expected output in cubic meters and types of chunks.

With everything set up you can begin the extraction. Hitting the “Start” button will make your Moon Drill to shoot a massive laser beam at the moon and process of dragging the moon chunk begins. Any character with appropriate permission can start the cycle but only CEO and Station Managers can cancel it.

Once the extraction is complete, the piece of the moon will wait outside the refinery waiting for refinery to fire at it again in order to smash it into smaller pieces that can be mined (to mine moon-rocks all you need is a standard mining laser). The completion of the cycle is prompted to everyone in the vicinity of the station with the laser beam changing color to yellow.

On rare occasions the Moon Drill can hit a jackpot, a significantly richer vein of ore which will result in a much better yield. Composition of such chunk will still be determined by the moon but the “moongoo” ore that will be brought back from mining it will result in a 100% increase reprocessing yield.  

If the chunk won’t be blasted within 3 hours of arrival it will be fired at automatically (this period can be extended with appropriate refinery rigging). Upon destruction of the moon slab a new cycle can begin immediately and the harvestable moon material will remain on the site for few days or until it’s completely harvested. The asteroid despawn timer can also be prolonged using corresponding rigs on the refinery.

The refinery will log any mining activity performed on the asteroids that spawned after blasting the piece of moon, corporation members with appropriate permission can then see them in the Corporation Moon MIning Ledger available on the refinery.

List of ores obtainable through moon mining and required reprocessing skills:

• Ubiquitous Moon Ore Processing: Zeolites, Sylvite, Bitumens, and Coesite
• Common Moon Ore Processing: Cobaltite, Euxenite, Titanite, and Scheelite
• Uncommon Moon Ore Processing: Otavite, Sperrylite, Vanadinite, and Chromite
• Rare Moon Ore Processing: Carnotite, Zircon, Pollucite, and Cinnabar
• Exceptional Moon Ore Processing: Xenotime, Monazite, Loparite, and Ytterbite