Eve's PvE Play Can Be A Tad Slow

This week I am on vacation.  Well, not really a vacation, more of a staycation.  I'm doing important things like filing my taxes, going to the dentist and learning how to use Twitter.  And when I'm not doing that, I'm getting some much needed time flying internet spaceships.

Now, being a carebear isn't all rainbows and unicorns.  Being an industrialist, at least the way I'm playing, involves sneaking through low-sec to get free slots to copy blueprints or perform material research.  But with a lot more free time this week, I'm doing a couple of things I usually don't do a lot of: missioning and mining.

I'm glad I dual-box, because I think trying to do level 4 missions with just a battleship would drive me crazy.  Instead, using an artillery-fit Maelstrom to poke things from long range while dashing around with an autocannon-fit Hurricane keeps things interesting.  This really comes into play when doing a mission like "The Score" when I just fly from one gate to the next and the battlecruiser just eats up all the small stuff while the battleship crushes the Serpentis' battleships.

Of course, sometimes the missions are still a bit slow.  So far this week I have not only gone on-line and paid bills while running missions but also wound up installing a new version of my anti-virus software.  Of course, I waited to reboot my computer to finish the install until after I finished the mission.

One other interesting (to me, at least) fact about "The Score" is that the first room has a lot of pyroxeres in it.  I live in Metropolis and Heimatar and pyroxeres is usually only found in Amarr and Caldari space.  What makes pyroxeres so interesting?  Nocxium.  Sure, pyroxeres only has trace amounts of nocxium, but I currently have a thing about harvesting all my own materials outside of moon products if possible.  Throw in all the other minerals pyroxeres contains (tritanium, pyerite and mexallon) and that is just a lot more minerals that I don't need to buy for my ship building program.

What I really like are drone missions.  Those basically combine missioning and mining and give me a lot better selection of minerals than mining. But I do have a nice Orca and it just seems a shame not to use the ship's mining bonuses at least once a month.

Was mining all that pyroxeres really worth it?  No.  Sure, I had the time to write this blog entry, but how fun is the game play if I'm writing blog entries while playing?  Then again, this is mining in Eve.  To anyone who does this a lot, my hat's off to you.  I don't think I could do this more than once a month.

Update:  After waking up, I started looking on the markets and at Rens prices I can dump the minerals on the market for 54 million isk, with 26.5 million of that nocxium.  But the boredom!