Ratting tactics
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This guide discusses various tactics for deep 0.0 ratting. See also belt rat spawn system description and list of Eve's NPC Rats.
Farming
Also known as "chaining rats", this is the tactic of clearing all poor spawns, and leaving at least one ship from all good spawns, as a seed for future growth. That is to say, if there is a good spawn, eg a battleship, kill the battleship but leave at least one of his friends - this will ensure another battleship will respawn in its place. If you kill all rats, a new spawn will form (possibly without a battleship). Chaining rats can allow for more profitable ratting.
While average spawn total bounty value is around 1.6M, in a couple of hours of farming that can be increased to 2.1M, and rise up to 3.0M in long term (15+ hours) community-wide farming.
These incomes are further boosted by some 1M per hour, if we assume special spawns on average net 50M extra. If the special spawn average profit was around 150M, then farming would not be optimal at all.
Optimal cut-off point for which spawns to leave and which to kill lies around 2.6M - 3.6M, as in terms of total bounties of rats. Or in other words, clear all spawns that don't have at least triple 950k BS, or equivalent.
Clearing
Kind of opposite of farming; killing all spawns thus getting more chances for special spawns. Profitability really depends on what one assume's special spawns (hauler, faction, officer) average extra profit to be. If it is around 50M, farming always wins, if beyond 150M this one is better.
This test set seems to indicate that farming is good idea for non-sov systems, and might be non-optimal for NPC home systems (like Stain).
Faction hunting
Kind of niche tactic, where focus is on finding special spawns. The idea is to check belts in multiple non-checked systems, and kill only special spawns.
Doable in some agile but powerful ships like Zealot/Ishtar, or with scout/killer pair (Interceptor/Battleship, Covert_Ops/Black_Ops). Upon finding a target spawn the scout would write down the belt, leave it, and wait for the killer ship to arrive.
Since there is no point to check a system someone has already checked, faction hunting is effective only:
