+1 many new players have been asking for advice regarding this.

+1 seen way to many questions from new peeps about this mission

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ?

+1 in ICS Alpha the titan field is very next to a spawn. I helped 2 newbies by guarding the spawn site while they mined, they would have been killed otherwise.

Also seen countless questions regarding this in help channel.

Just adding 2 Cents as a Noob. The first 2 tutorial missions were fairly straight forward, no issues, once I read what I actually needed to do. The third stumped me for literally hours, due to the scanning mechanic not being abundantly clear.

In the tutorial, it asks you to do an area scan, look at the percentage, then go drill there after a tile based search once you found a decent percentage (it goes into great detail about this, when in fact it is no longer relevant mechanic).

I didn't end up with NPC issues, my real issue was not understanding (due to lack of clear instructions or searchable answers) that I needed to area scan, follow the arrows until I found an X, and then tile search there.

Asking in chat Help room, I received great support from 2 players (Michael and another account) that explained the correct mechanic. Once I had that help, I was able to complete the mission, and have since started the grind of trying to get enough credits to be able to afford a better mining bot, to then try and grind enough credits to do what I really want to do, which is indy on one account and PVP on the other, with Indy paying for my PVP deaths (expected). Yeah, I'm a long time Eve Vet, and that made the most sense to me to be self-sufficient without being forced to join a corp from day 1 or just idle in general chat crying about the grind....