Primarily the main drawback is that many missions don't have mineable asteroids, and since you have only limited control over mission selection you might have to deal with a few agents to get a reasonable mission to spawn. Thankfully, the prices of tritanium right now mean that you should be quite happy with the crops of veldspar available to you in most missions. Unlike asteroid belts, the ore content of missions is not affected by the system's security level, so you don't find any more exotic ores in low-sec missions vs hi-sec missions.

Also, there are plenty of actual mining missions with special mission ore - chondtrite, pithix, augumene, banidine etc which is only usable for the mission, these are not the missions I'm interested in here. All the asteroids I've seen are the basic grade ores, no +5% and +10% variations have been sighted, but I have seen Fools Grade ore which essentially refines to nothing. Kernite and Omber are found in small quantities in a few missions and in one ecstatic moment I found myself with 3000 units of Arkonor in a mission 2 jumps from Jita. Generally most mission asteroids are veldspar, with scordite, pyroxeres and plagioclase being relatively common. The rats usually don't add much to your gains, unless you move your hulk to low-sec, but that's just asking for someone to scan you down and pop your ship. I was once lucky enough to pick up a pirate implant worth about 72million from a True Sansha frigate, so whenever I see those special spawns in belts I feel I can't ignore them. Personally, I also like the fact that you get to deal with the belt rats all on your own, especially when you're lucky enough to get an officer spawn there's no huge rush to loot the wreck when you're the only one in the space. You also can mine without the extra stress of seeing fleets of macro hulks with random names, we've all petitioned enough of them and they don't go away, it's easier to just leave them to their thing and hide in your own secret corner of space. With mission asteroids you never need to worry about someone having cleared out the belt before you got there, after all, technically the asteroids didn't spawn until you got there. Ninja salvagers OTOH are likely to stumble upon your secret little operation and are more likely to be annoyed that they spent their scan probes Similarly, the privacy enables you to solo jetcan with less chance of an ore thief or can flipper getting involved, again in theory they can track you down, but with so many potential targets in the main belts you're unlikely to get a dedicated ore thief scanning you down. If you're wardecced then it might be a good plan to pickĪ decently high traffic system in empire so that the number of scan signatures will make it harder to find yours. At best you can expect to have a little more time to notice hostiles in local. Never assume that it's 'not worth the effort' to scan you down, since you're sitting still for long periods then the pirates and reds have plenty of time to break out the scan probes and go looking for you. It's especially useful if your empire based mining corporation is subject to a war-dec, since it's a whole lot harder to scan down ships in deadspace than it is to fly to every belt in a system. Primarily because it gives you a largely private location, out of the way of other players who might have an agenda for ruining your day. Spend some effort mining these asteroids as a bonus. While you're suposed to be spending time dealing with the mission objectives, frequently in the form of rats representing some faction or other, you can instead

Ill's Guide To Mining Non-Mining MissionsĮncounter missions frequently contain mineable asteroids as part of the scenery. I'd started compiling a guide a few months ago, I got bored, so here's the incomplete version split into parts.

Eve online omber vs plagioclase mining