To get the upgrades you want, especially the ship upgrades in 2, you're going to have to do a decent amount of mining. Which I really didn't find all that horrible to make it through. I started ME1 last night and it's pretty fun so far. The only bad thing I have to say about it so far is finding places to be in cities is quite a bit more difficult than ME2, but not to the point of killing the game. After knowing how a lot of the story goes and whatnot, there's no way I'm going to go into ME3 with a half assed save like I originally planned on.