Back in the late summer of 2017 I was feeling done with null sec life. I wasn’t sure where I was going to head, but I started pulling up stakes and shipping everything to Jita to facilitate my exit. I had cleaned up, turned off, and shipped out just about everything when a Reavers deployment came up and I figured that would be my final act in null sec.
And then the deployment and subsequent war lasted for about a year and I was invested again and decided to carry on. During that time and since I haven’t focused on earning any ISK, save for a brief experiment with Myrmidon ratting, which was as much about seeing how long I would survive as anything.
Being a target for ISK
I have been living off the stack of ISK I had accumulated before along with what I got for selling off various assets in Jita and whatever SRP the coalition has had to offer. But now that stack of ISK, never that fat to begin with, has stated to dwindle. I really don’t spend that much ISK, with ships and refits for doctrine changes being my major expenses, but the prices there have been going up thanks to CCP, while SRP hasn’t kept up.
So I want to at least start a trickle of ISK coming back into my wallet. The catch is that I don’t really want to do any of the standby methods. I’ve ratted, mined, and played the market enough to bore myself to tears. So the options I have in my mind.
Sell Stuff
I still have a pile of stuff… piles of stuff… sitting around in various stations, so this would be less playing the market and more clearing out hangars. A bunch of it is nicely in Jita already, left over from the great clearing out of 2017, and I can contract other valuable caches to a high sec alt to move and sell.
Good: Easy-ish money, prices are up
Bad: Even I only have so much stuff stashed away, so this would be a short term-boost and not a long term strategy
Planetary Interaction
I pulled up my PI stuff back when and since then there was a UI update to improve the usability of the feature, so I already started on this just to see how much it had changed. It is, I will admit, better than it was, but it is still opaque enough that I don’t know how anybody figures it out without a guide or a mountain of patience. As before I set myself up to make components for fuel blocks, as there are always buy orders for that.
Good: Low effort, constant drip of income
Bad: Not really that lucrative unless you make it a job
Abyssal Sites
I have a high sec alt trained up enough to do fierce sites, the middle of the five levels of difficulty, in a Gila. I have no mind to do any of the higher level ones as you get flagged as a target, but I could see myself running these a bit more regularly. The problem is that the payout is very much RNG based. I got a Leshak BPC once, built it, and sold it for a serious payout. But more often I get dinky stuff to the point that losing a drone makes the whole thing a wash. And I’ve yet to do anything but ruin modules with mutaplasmids.
Good: Not really that difficult, short duration, can listen to podcasts and audio books, lots of great screen shots
Bad: Payout is all over the map, feels a lot like ratting after a run or two, lost a half a billion ISK Gila stuck on an rock once so I’m already ISK negative
Skill Injectors
This is the “make money fast” arrow in my quiver. I have a character setup to poop out a large injector every week and they are still going for more than 700 million ISK. That would refill my wallet much faster than my ship losses are draining it. There are two issues with it for me though.
First, though I am sure they make a ton of money for CCP, I feel that skill injectors diminished the game. If I bitch about something and then make ISK from it there is an obvious level of hypocrisy present and, while no life is free from contradictions, I try to at least examine the more obvious ones I find in myself.
Second, while you can do it as an all in-game ISK operation, you are rewarded for spending money. If I pay cash for the subscription and the extractors, I get to keep the full 700 million ISK per injector. If I buy extractors on the market that goes down to about 350 million ISK. And if I PLEX the account I end up getting a few million ISK per injector, which can can make a farm of many accounts lucrative, but makes the single character routine a bit paltry. And if I am going to spend cash to make ISK I could just save the effort and buy PLEX to resell.
Good: Low, low effort, easy money
Bad: If I PLEX the account payouts are pretty thin, if I pay cash why not cut out the middle and simply buy PLEX to sell
Other?
I need to go back and look at that that “everything in New Eden” chart again to see if I am missing something that aligns to my level of commitment. I remember a time when just collecting datacores once a year would sustain me for a while.
I’m not dying for ISK. I could easily wander along as I have done for a couple more years before things became dire. But I feel like I need a plan for the longer term, even if it means just getting a trickle of ISK flowing in regularly. All I want to be able to do is keep on getting in sub cap fleets for fights. That’s what keeps me logging in these days.
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