Skill Farming
Introduction.
Skill farming is a style of game play in EVE Online that uses a character to train skills solely to extract and sell their skill points, creating a passive income stream.
After initial preparations are completed, skill farming can return 3,278.3M ISK every 30 days (or 4.6M ISK per hour) on an investment of 1 day of game time. An EVE account costs 500 PLEX for that time. At an exchange rate of 3.2M ISK per PLEX, that’s 1,580.1M ISK. Therefore, it’s possible to finance 207% of the cost of that account with the skill points farmed by a single character. Deduct the cost of the account and profit would be 1,698.2M ISK = 2.4M ISK per hour = 107% of account cost. Skill farming with two characters on the same account simultaneously requires the purchase of a Multiple Pilot Training Certificate for 485 PLEX. 30-day profit from both characters would then be 3,443.8M ISK = 2.4M ISK per hour per character = 111% of account cost. Initial costs will range from 374.7M to 1,885.2M ISK (mostly for skill extractors), which will be returned in 3.4 to 17.3 days. The only ongoing costs are for replacement extractors. The helpful and prerequisite skills require about 2.6M skill points, which can take 39.5 days or more to train (depending on your attribute settings and on which you have already trained). Most are common market trading skills. Some travel is necessary to install jump clones, distribute attribute enhancers, and exploit market trends. Skill farming monopolizes the training queue on its account, but produces skill injectors which can be used by the other characters. Skill farming for alpha clones is possible but pointless. 5.5M skill points are required to use a skill extractor, but alpha clones are limited to 5M free skill points. So, an alpha clone must consume a large skill injector in order to produce one. Alpha clones can only extract skills that require omega status (i.e., skills they can’t train in the first place), which limits their choice of a farm skill. Several of the helpful skills are unavailable to (or limited for) alpha clones, reducing their efficiency at skill farming. Therefore, this article assumes omega clone status.
