Why Gas?

Gas mining is one of the most lucrative parts of the industry process at a smaller scale, making it an excellent activity for newer players or those with only one or two accounts.

Depending on the gas you mine and what you do with it, your income can exceed 200 million per hour per miner, but there are many qualifiers and optimizations attached to that figure.

In this class we will briefly review probe scanning, then cover how to mine the gas itself, the different types of gas and how to find them, the ships used for gas mining and when to use them, considerations and best practices, and what to do with the gas once you have it.

There is a great guide from Rykki's Gas Guide that is maintained by Nolak in google docs.

Find the sites

Enter the system with the gas site, then warp the class to a safe and give a brief review of probe scanning:

• In order to scan you need a Core Probe Launcher and 8x Core Scanner Probes. You should use Sisters Core Scanner Probes, and start with 16 in cargo so the probe launcher automatically reloads.

• Warp to a safe, then launch the probes. If you do not have the probe scanner open, open it. Then open the solar system map if not already open.

• Using the solar system map, drag the probe formation on top of one of the signatures— just double click the signature to center it in the map, and drag the probes on top of the “X”, then rotate the map to center the probes in 3D, expand to 16 AU, and scan.

• Then recenter, reduce by one tick (to 8AU), and scan again.

• This is not a probe scanning class so briefly address any issues or questions but direct students to online resources or WTF 201.  (ed: Exploration has how to do this.)

If the site is not named “[color] Nebula” or “[something something] Reservoir” then it is a combat site in disguise! These sites with scary-sounding names such as “CHAIN Mindflood Production Facility” or “Blood Raider Chemical Lab” are combat and hacking sites that drop booster-related loot, including booster reaction formulas and blueprints. We will cover this more towards the end.

Types of gas

Warp the class to the gas site if you have not already. The gas clouds should be labeled “Malachite Cytoserocin.” We will take this opportunity to explain the different types of gas.

If you cannot see the clouds on your overview, switch to a mining overview, or use Alt-Z to show all brackets, click on the cloud in space, then right click -> Add to Overview.

Again, DO NOT START MINING OR YOU MIGHT BLOW UP!  There are certain types of gas that explodes when you mine it.

Cytoserocin

This gas is one of the three types called Cytoserocin. 

Cytoserocin is used for the production of non-Synth boosters and larger/T2 ships. Different colors are found in different regions and used for different types of boosters / production materials.

Cytoserocin is found primarily in nullsec and there are specific “hotspot” constellations where it adheres to standard cosmic signature mechanics (meaning, as soon as it is cleared a new one will respawn in the same constellation). You can find these hotspot constellations on the E-Uni wiki (put link in chat). You can also find Cyto in smaller amounts sprinkled throughout nullsec and lowsec, but once cleared they do not reliably respawn. 

The reason that students should NOT be mining right now is because Cytoserocin clouds blow up! Just like Mercoxit, at the end of a harvester cycle there is a random chance that the cloud will detonate. Unlike Mercoxit, the detonation deals a single burst of damage (usually EM and Thermal; the specific damage values can be found on the wiki). Also, some Cyto sites have rats to clear first. 

Because of the detonation, you need to make sure that your fit will work — show an example of a Cyto Prospect or Venture fit. You can use Pyfa to check your EHP/s against the harvester cycle time and the cloud damage values.

A way to minimize the damage is to make sure the harvesters activate on the same server tick— in order to do this, prime the harvesters by activating them before locking the cloud (so they are flashing in the module rack), then click on the cloud. This will make sure that they both activate at the exact same time, and therefore the random roll for the cloud exploding only happens once per cycle.

Mykoserocin

The next type of gas is Mykoserocin, found all over.

Mykoserocin is used in the production of Synth boosters, and in ship production like Cyto. It tends to be more valuable than its Cyto counterpart, but we’ll cover that more later. You can see the rough prices for gas types here: [Fuzzwork link]

Mykoserocin is only found in lowsec, and it does not adhere to standard signature mechanics — once cleared, it does not reliably respawn. This makes it less reliable to find in specific areas so you may have to hunt far and wide for it.

Fortunately, Mykoserocin does not explode when mined, making it “safer” to harvest. However, the fact that it is only found in lowsec — not in safe blue territory — makes it dangerous in a different way. Additionally, because of the (lack of) respawn mechanic, Myko sites are often competitive.

Despite these drawbacks, the clouds in Myko sites are quite large— sometimes large enough that they would take a single Venture with T1 scoops up to 12 hours to clear the whole site. So once you find a site and get mining, the isk will keep flowing in.

Between Cyto and Myko there are two different ways to go about mining gas, both with their own benefits and drawbacks. However there is a third type of gas: Fullerites.

Fullerites

Fullerites are only found in wormholes. They are used primarily in T3 ship production but also some T2/capital.

Fullerites are different from K-space gases in a few different ways.

Not all of the “flavors” are the same size per unit, so keep that in mind when calculating your income because your harvesters work off of M3 per cycle. 

The type of site (Minor, Ordinary, Bountiful, Instrumental, etc) depends on the class of wormhole but if you’re just going wormhole-diving to huff gas then that distinction doesn’t matter as much. However, the most valuable flavors (C320 and C540) are only found in high-class wormholes (C4-C6).

Fullerite clouds are very large (like the physical model in space) which we’ll touch on later.

Best Practices

So let’s cover some specific techniques and best practices.

Prepare sites

Firstly, how you go about finding sites. Although you can fit a probe launcher on a Venture, it has no bonuses for scanning, and you cannot fit one on a Prospect if you have a cloak. Therefore, it is often more effective to use a scanning ship to go out and find sites, bookmark them, and then come back in your mining ship.

This also allows you to make a perch at the site so you can use the perch to warp between the clouds for efficiency and safety. I also like to bookmark the individual clouds so I can warp straight to them.

However, if you are mining in a wormhole, do NOT do this in a scanning ship, because this will start the timer.

Some Cytoserocin sites are deadspaced, meaning you cannot warp to bookmarks and will always end up at the site warp-in.

Some Fullerite clouds are large enough that you can warp to a bookmark on one cloud, then move yourself around a bit so that the bookmark for the next cloud in the site is more than 150km away, allowing you to warp to it once the first cloud is cleared.

Additionally, you want to be as close to the center of the cloud as possible. This is because the cloud will decloak anyone that might be hunting you. 

If you are on grid with the cloud and warp to it using the overview, you will end up at the edge of the cloud. If you bookmark the cloud and warp to the bookmark, you will end up at the center.

Fullerite clouds spawn close to the warp-in, meaning you can mine them from the warp-in location (whereas K-space clouds are about 30km away). Therefore, warping to the bookmark will position you further from the warp-in for safety. Don’t get complacent.

An alternative technique is to orbit the cloud, and as a hunter, this can make it difficult to get in position because the miner is constantly moving. However, I do not recommend this, because your orbit will take you into the hunter eventually, and the fact that you are moving can increase your align time depending on where you are warping to escape.

The exception to this is for Cytoserocin, because its explosion acts like a missile — if you are moving you will take less damage.

Ninja Huffing

There is a specific technique you can use to huff wormhole gas called Ninja Huffing. This is a very secret technique shrouded in mystery.

All you have to do is warp to the site and start huffing… and then when the rats spawn, you warp away!

In all seriousness, if you are day-tripping (and especially if you find a wormhole with multiple gas sites in it) this is a very reliable and safe way to huff wormhole gas.

This requires the site to be un-triggered, so that is why you don’t want to warp to the site in your scanning ship to bookmark the clouds if you know you will be doing this.

There is an alternative technique called Jedi Huffing which involves speed-tanking the rats on specific sites where they do not have webs or neuts. However, this is an advanced technique so I will simply link a couple of resources if you want to try it for yourself. [link]

If you are in a fleet you may want to consider compression. This is not necessarily a bad idea because gas is quite bulky to transport. However, unlike all other compression, gas compression is lossy.

Technically it’s the decompression that’s lossy. Either way, compressed gas loses about 10% of its value. Training the Gas Decompression skill can mitigate this effect, but it never gets down to 0% loss.