Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) is a pretty special starter corp, it has Special Interest Groups for just about everyone, including one for mining, named CAS Mining Alliance, or CASMA for short. If you plan on staying in CAS for a while mining you absolutely want to join CASMA as theres mining OP's, mining boosts, ore buyers and friendly EX-CAS people
To join in on the fun just join the CAS Mining Alliance chat channel, if you aren't all that active you might also want to join the CASMA mailing list as well so you know about mining OP's and other fun stuff =)
Boosting is someone giving mining (in this case) boosts from skills and/or ship, improving your mining laser's cycle time, yield, range and capacitor usage and can be very substantial increase in your mining capabilities. When someone says "Boosting in system x" it usually means (s)he is boosting in an Orca with decent boosting power, providing it free of charge. All you have to do is join the fleet and start mining in a belt in the same system as the booster is in and drop off your ore in a station.
Mining OP is much of the same, someone providing boosts, but this is in more organized forms youre usually at the same belts, and you don't have to think about what to do with your ore, just put it where the boss tells you and you keep on mining. After the OP is done you get ISK for what you have mined. Cielle Tische and others sometimes run Mining OP's at weekends, and can be very profitable for newcomers
Before joining the fleet for boost or OP, you'd want to be in the the CAS Mining Alliance chat channel, ask if there is anything going on. The regular CAS Corp chat is often too chaotic and draining to follow if people want to join in, so people might not see your requests.
You should also skill Leadership III (takes very little time) so you can control a squad with up to 6 people to make handling larger fleets that much easier for the fleet leader. Hopefully the fleet is also on "free-move", which means you can jump freely around in the whole fleet, but most importantly, to squad leader position when needed to invite other people if the fleet leader is AFK
There are several charts [1] [2] [3] out there for prices on which are the best to mine at any time, but at the time of writing Scordite, Kernite and Pyroxeres all are worth about the same at the top, so just mine them and be happy. You want to stay away from Veldspar and Omber as they are the least worth though.
If you are in a Retriever with Strip Miner II you might not want to sell raw ore, but refine your ore to minerals, but same rules apply =)
You have several options when it comes to sell your ores, some of them are:
If you want to know if a price is good, or where the best is, theres tools for you out there like EVE-Central, see also ore chart links above.
CASMA has several mining groups, spread across several locations in the universe, here's a few of them
Large-ish fleet thats on 23/7
Main boosters are Aliana Heartborne as daily booster (in place of Soko Lsi), Zephyr McMaster for weekends. Dalliancer & Aurall Kotor for random days
Backup boosters are Kuni Wah, Myelle Tische and Cass Lockheart
Cass Lockheart and Vendetta Vixen
Arc D'landrus occasionaly boosts
Bhale Styves, Yvonne Ulrich and Saint Ledger
Cielle Tische, but not much activity at the momemt
If you have questions about mining, the CAS Mining Alliance chat channel is the perfect place to ask, you can also send me a mail in EVE.
While you mine you may want to check some of these
Created by Aliana Heartborne. Last updated: 2014-04-11