In preparation for the winter expansion, CCP have announced that the moon mining changes are now available on the test server, SISI. Reactions are not yet available, but will be on the server soon.
Changes are not usually on SISI this far in advance of release, and there is no scheduled date for this release yet, so the features are in much more of a testing stage than usual. There are further devposts on the moon mining and the personal mining ledger.
The changes are still very much in their infancy, with no descriptions of the new items beyond very basic placeholders. Please also take note of CCPs warning from the dev post:
WARNING: Many, if not all stats, bonuses, industry requirements, skills, models, effects and more are either placeholder or not final at this time, we remind you that any theory-crafting, skill training or market speculation done based on observations made on the test server are done at your own risk (and often to our amusement). YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!
Moon Mining
Before you can mine a moon, you (or a minion) needs to scan it. Whilst there are many people who are familiar with moon surveying, there are plenty of people who may want to try this for the first time with the moon revamps. I will briefly outline the procedure, as it is fairly straight forward.
To do surveying, you fit a survey probe launcher to a ship, preferably one with bonuses (like a covert ops) and load up some survey probes. You then head out to the moon that you are interested in. Once you have warped to the moon, begin flying towards it while launching the probe. If the probe is launched in the right direction, it will have the name of the moon listed as a destination in the window. After a few minutes, it will return the results of the survey. Survey probes function more like bombs than normal scanning probes, so they are used up when you fire them.
As you can see, the moon I just surveyed contains 2 ores. At present, the ore distribution on moons bears no resemblance to the final version, and even the final version on SISI will not be the same as the one on Tranquility. The names may also not be final, and the descriptions definitely are not.
The two ores in my survey yield Vanadium and Dysprosium, respectively, along with Tritanium. As before, these are just placeholder contents.
So, now I have found a moon with things in it that I want to mine. All moons will have ore in them according to CCP Fozzie, but, as always in Eve, not all moons will be equal.
Structures
There are presently two structures on SISI for moon mining, the Athanor (medium) and the Tatara (large). After building (or buying) one of these, you head out to your moon. When you get there, there is a beacon that you can warp to. In my case, this was 5000 km from the warp in point (which is often where POS are placed).
Once you have landed at the beacon, you launch your structure the same way as any other Upwell Structure and come back in 24 hours when it has anchored.
There is a Standup Moon Drill as a service module to be fitted to the structure, which functions as described in the previous moon mining devblog. We will be diving into those a bit deeper once the structures have been on SISI for a while longer.
Reactions are not yet on SISI, but there are modules for the structures presumably relating to reactions. As with the moon mining, we will do a more in depth report once they are available.
Mining Ledger
When Refineries were announced, one of the additions coming with them was to be the Corporate Mining Ledger, this would allow corporations to see who has been mining their moon belt. This is not yet on SISI, but, there is a personal version, so you can see what you have been mining during a given period.
This intrepid reporter went off to try this out, only to find out that I could not fly a venture. It was too much effort to inject it, so, off to an asteroid belt I went in a trusty T1 industrial with miner II’s fitted!
The mining ledger is fairly straight-forward. You open it from the “Accessories” tab on the neocom menu. It has two graphs along the top, one for Total Ore, and one for Ore Type per day.
These do what they say on the tin. They show a breakdown of ore for each graph. Just underneath these is a slider where you select the period you want to look at. This works just like the market slider. Finally, there is a log which shows you what you have mined. This only has date on it, so presumably only shows you the total for each ore type, per location, per day. The log can be exported to clipboard, so spreadsheet fans can track their mining!
Whilst this patch may appear to be only for the miners (whether solo or multi-boxing fleets of Rorquals), or the people heavily into moon mining and running hundreds of reaction farms, the upcoming moon revamp will affect all of Eve, so it is definitely one to get onto SISI and check out. As we get closer to release, more aspects of the patch will be available on SISI for testing, and we will keep you updated as they appear.
One final point: Remember SISI has /moveme as a function, otherwise you might end up doing a load of jumps very slowly in a freighter needlessly.
