Ice harvesting guide

For the skill related to this process, see Ice Harvesting.

Ice harvesting is very similar to Asteroid mining. You warp to an ice field, lock on to an "ice asteroid" and activate your ice harvesters. Important difference are:

• Ice harvesting can only be done using mining barges. See the Ice Harvesting Ships section for more information.
• The result of the harvesting process will be a single block of ice (per Ice Harvesting beam) with a volume of 1.000 m3. The size of the ice mined cannot be changed unless compressing, which should be kept in mind when arranging cargo capacity.

Ice Fields

These can be located in the same way as any other asteroid belt. To see if your current system has an ice field, right-click in space, select "asteroid belts". If there are any ice fields in the system, they will be identified as "Ice Field" in the dropdown menu. You have the same options in the menu for ice fields as with regular asteroid belts. Ice fields have a very different look from asteroid belts, they generally are a very long string of huge chunks of blueish asteroids, versus the half-circular form of brownish asteroids that ore asteroid fields have.

Ice Harvesting Ships

Mining barges are the only ships that are able to mine ice, as they are the only ships that can fit ice harvesters. Before you rush of to purchase one, please note that you require special skills to operate them, as listed below:

• Astrogeology - level 3
• Science - level 4
• Industry - level 5
• Mining Barge - level 1
• Mining level 4
• Ice Harvesting - level 1

The above skills allow you to fly the Procurer, which can fit one Ice harvester.

The Mackinaw, the best ship for ice harvesting requires more skills:

• Astrogeology - level 5
• Science - level 4
• Industry - level 5
• Mining Barge - level 5
• Mining - level 4
• Ice Harvesting - level 1
• Exhumers - level 2

The Mackinaw lacks the extra high slot of the Hulk for fitting an extra ice harvester but the yield of each harverster is doubled, yielding two blocks of ice instead of one per cycle. A drawback is that the standard cycle time is longer, but this is reduced by training the exhumer skill.

Harvesting Skills

Now that you have the Ice Harvesting Skill what does it mean to you?

Therefore with level 5 Ice Harvesting and Tech 2 Harvesters your cycle is only 6.25 mins (6 min 15 sec).

An additional skill that can reduce your cycle time further is Mining Upgrades. An Ice Harvesting Upgrade I reduces cycle time by 5%. Meaning it is equal to 1 level of Ice Harvesting. Level 4 of Mining Upgrades opens up the ability to use Ice Harvesting Upgrade II giving a 9% reduction of cycle time. All together you can get your solo cycle time down to 5.5 mins (330 sec).

Ice Harvesters

These are specialized mining lasers and should be available on the market. They can only be fitted on mining barges. Operation of an ice harvester requires the Ice Harvesting skill, which in turn requires Mining level 4.

With the skills trained and the necessary items acquired you are now ready to do some ice mining. Please keep in mind that NPC pirates spawn in ice fields as well as asteroid belts and that the ice harvester has a very long cycle time, so you won't see any units of ice in your cargohold for a while after you start harvesting.

Reprocessing

The amount gained from reprocessing ice depends on your reprocessing skills. Refining V and Refinery Efficiency V are a prerequisite to the specialization skill Ice Processing and at a station with a base yield of 50%, will increase your yield to 99.5%. Ice Processing will then further increase yield by 5% per level.

Maximum Earning Potential

To achieve the Maximum Earning Potential (MEP) the following items/skills are required:

SOLO

• Mackinaw
• Ice Harvester II
• Ice Harvester Upgrade II

With Fleet Boosting - Each miner is using/have the above items and skills

• Orca
• Mining Foreman Link - Laser Optimization