When capsuleers first went into space, the most readily available resources were found in the tumbling asteroids that swarmed in belts in every system of New Eden. The mineral riches to be found in the belts, particularly in the relatively pristine outer systems, were high indeed. The ores extracted from these rich fields were swiftly used to fuel the burgeoning space industries, and asteroid belts remain at the heart of the capsuleer economy. Early technologies were limited to relatively low-yield mining lasers, often mounted to ships that were not even specialized in mining. The technology of mining improved as time went on, with the Tech II revolution affecting mining lasers and their yields as it affected other areas of capsuleer endeavor.

In Eve Online ISK，Even more important than the improvement in narrow-beam mining lasers, was the development and release of an entire class of specialized mining ships. The mining barges, and the high-yield strip miners they could wield, enormously increased asteroid mining yields. Tech II versions of these barges branched out into specialized mining such as the extraction of Mercoxit ore and ice-harvesting.

The expansion of mining into ice fields, in search of advanced fuels for starbases and capital ships, was not the only advance in resource harvesting. Those manufacturing illegal boosters for the capsuleer market required large quantities of various chemicals found most abundantly in certain interplanetary gas clouds. The technology of gas harvesting  inEve Online ISK was quickly developed and put to work extracting these useful chemicals. When wormhole space was found to contain large clouds rich with rare fullerenes, the gas harvesters found a new resource to collect and a new market to sell into.

Mining and resource harvesting are not limited to spaceship-mounted systems. The first capsuleer starbases were dedicated to running automated mining arrays that extracted many useful materials from the moons they orbited. Even now, after starbase capabilities have been expanded to running factories, laboratories and shipyards, many thousands of moons continue to be mined by harvesting systems based on industrial starbases