Ships aren't cheap in EVE Online. Spend ISK and you can recoup the loss of a ship. This is especially useful for those players who expect to have ships destroyed frequently, like PvP players. This guide will explain the details of buying insurance for your ship.
How to Insure Your Ship: The Basics
When you are docked in a space station, the station window has an icon that looks like chains and a lock around a ship. This is the ship insurance icon. Click it to make a window appear that offers you different levels of insurance for your ship. Choose the level of insurance that you want to purchase.
How to Choose a Level of Coverage
When you first buy a ship, it is automatically insured at 40%. However, just as with any insurance, this insurance goes away after twelve weeks.
Therefore, it's important to keep in mind that insurance is only super-useful if you expect to lose your ship within the next twelve weeks.
Buying insurance increases the payout to:
- 50% for basic insurance
- 60% for standard insurance
- 70% for Bronze insurance
- 80% for Silver insurance
- 90% for Gold insurance
- 100% for Platinum insurance.
Things that invalidate your insurance
If you have purchased insurance on your ship, you will lose the insurance if you do the following things (although you will still receive the default 40% payout even if you do these things):
- repackage it
- sell it on the market
- dock it in a player-character corporation hangar
- put it in a contract
- trade it to someone else
Is it worthwhile?
If you lose your ship within the first twelve week period that you have the ship insured, then yes, it is worth it. But if you lose your ship after renewing your insurance in week 13, you will neither lose nor gain money from having insurance. After week 24, if you re-insure for a third time, it is not worth it.
This means that insurance is best for people who expect to lose ships frequently, like those who do a lot of PvP, or a lot of very difficult missions or complexes.
How your ship's value is calculated
Your ship's value is based on the value of the raw minerals of which it is composed. The game has assigned some secret base prices to all of the minerals. These values are pretty much only used for insurance purposes, and are not related to market prices for these minerals.
- Isogen: 128 ISK
- Megacyte: 8192 ISK
- Mexallon: 32 ISK
- Morphite: 32768 ISK
- Nocxium: 512 ISK
- Pyerite: 8 ISK
- Tritanium: 2 ISK
- Zydrine: 2048 ISK