So there I was, mining away, happy as can be, when suddenly it hit me: I was bored. Bored I tell you, bored from mining, from the same rats, over and over. Mine, put the ore in a can, fill can, get Iteron V, haul, rinse and repeat. I was bored.
So I decided to change things a bit. I have a Vexor stashed away in a system with 3 agents I can work with, so I decided to do some mission running. Only lvl 1 missions so far, and the Vexor is more than up to it, so there really isn’t any challenge (even less when I think of my brand new drone skills), but it’s a change of pace, and that’s what I was after.
One of the missions involved getting some blankets to another station (lots of people don’t have blankets in EVE, it seems). Autopilot showed me it would take 13 jumps or so, and I thought that was really long for a simple courier mission. In the map, I realised the autopilot was (wisely) avoiding a 0.4 system that, if crossed, would shorten the whole thing to a simple 4 jump trip. I decided to risk it.
I checked, no ships or pods destroyed lately and no pilots active in system. Excellent. I jumped, all clear, no gate camps, no anything. I crossed the system, dreading what I might find on the other side (4 pilots in system, thanks a bunch, map!). Thankfully, the gate was empty. I jumped out and delivered the blankets, mission accomplished. Coming back the same way I came in, I decided to see if my setup would handle some 0.4 rats so I warped to an asteroid belt and proceeded to kick some rat butt 
(I think I was lucky, though, the rats were the same kind I had back in secure space).
Looking around me, the miner instinct cropped up again. Kernite! I had only seen it once, in passing trough another low-sec system, months ago. I couldn’t resist. Thankfully, I had a Miner II equipped (some missions send you to deadspace pockets that have some nice asteroids, so I was prepared) and started to mine happily away. Yes, I remembered to align to a gate before I started mining (no stations in system) and I kept my eye in local. No one new showed up, and the rats didn’t respawn, so I was set. The greatest irony was that I only mined 395 units of Kernite, when the minimum to refine is 400. Irony, I tell you!
Through it all, my heart was pumping and I felt sweat in the palm of my hands. Never before, in a game, had I felt this way, never. I played some PVP in WoW (yes, yes, I know. I’m ashamed of it as well), but I knew that if I died, all I had to do was pay some coin and boom, everything was as it was. Not so in EVE, and that’s one more thing I love about it. Anyway, while I was there mining I could feel the danger of it, and that was something that I was not accustomed to. I loved it, and I want more of it. I decided to start ninja mining, but I still haven’t decided in a setup for the Vexor. Cargo Expanders seem a must, but aside from that I really don’t have a clue. Any pointers you guys could give me?
This whole post just goes to show that once you start mining for real, you can’t stop. It will always be there, nagging at your soul: “Oh, look, some nice Omber, why don’t you go get it?” or “You can never have to much Veldspar!”. Once a miner, always a miner.
