Science & Industry

I have been running missions for a while and am looking to branch out into something new. That being said, manufacturing looks like it could be interesting. What should I start with BPO wise? I have an initial capital of about 250m-400m I am willing to use to get started. Should I start with ammo?

Edit: Was led to a more thorough thread. Feel free to not bother answering! :D

I was going to be much more nasty, since you didn't bother to do any searching on your own (not a good start, as industry involves a lot of research on your own), but here's a post where I made similar suggestions:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1241528#post1241528

You should also browse the guides in the resource sticky posting at the top of this forum.


I try to be helpful. I post a _lot_ in this forum. You may find that doing an advanced forum search for posts by me will help you narrow the search for posts on your keywords. This is how I found the link above for example. Posts by others in those threads are usually worth reading too!

I even invite you to send me EVE-mail if you have any questions you can't find the answers for, or don't want to post publicly. I don't know everything (and you can bet if I don't, then I will try to find out more about it), but I will always try to point you in the right direction.

Trading is easier to get into than manufacturing, you may want to try that first. Manufacturing is like trading with extra steps.

Personally I prefer manufacturing, pure trading burns me out quickly, but you will still need to purchase materials at the best prices and usually products on the market need some babysitting.

- Set up excel spreadsheet to figure out profit margins on various things
- Take advice, start with commonly-used ammo
- Buy BPO
- Set it researching
- Buy BPCs off contracts
- Buy minerals
- Produce from those while the research happens

EDIT:
As for what to produce, I will give you one simple tip:

If you use it in your missions, and buy it in, others are likely to as well.

Google's spreadsheet also works well. And is a little easier to use with xml than open/libre office's Calc. (I'd suggest libre office over open office. mostly for things like Visio import support)

doing it in Calc needs you to mess around with their coding (if it hasn't changed recently) http://www.openoffice.org/xml/filter/#3.3.Import:WritingintotheXMLFilter|outline for example.

Not that I want to hock my own program, but telling people that are starting to make a spreadsheet is poor advice. There are several programs out there already that do this. If you really want to go that route for yourself, go for it. But to suggest someone go through the same pain when the work has already been done is almost cruel lol.

Maybe Steve can back me up but there are so many variables and input/outputs to manufacturing that it's not worth the time to re-invent warp drive travel again and again. One of the reasons I haven't updated IPH in awhile is because I've been playing the game more. I can't tell you how much time Ive put into it. Then every patch CCP seems to change something else that requires a fix to IPH.

So don't waste your time making a spreadsheet. Use a tool already built. Steve's is great. Windjammer has another. Dedaf another. Mine is in my sig.

Good luck!

Faction ammo is a good place to start when getting into manufacturing. Since you're all ready been running missions, you'll have the LP (and standings help with tax charges, NPC research slots, etc) it would be a good way for you to combine you're all ready low investment amounts and available resources.

Sell the faction ammo in other faction regions to increase the sale value.
If you're really going to get into ammo manufacturing just buy a pre-researched set through contracts. 200M +/- for all ammos will save you 6 months of research time (don't buy bpc's) and you'll be able to pay that amount off in no time (if you have alot of LP saved up).

Don't sell all your ammo in 1 place. 500,000 rounds of ammo in 1 station is a waste of time if you're only selling 5,000 per week. Move into different regions, and make sure you diversify the ammo's. Sell ammo in regions / systems that deal the most damage specific to the rats that spawn.

Train production efficiency V right away. The 5% of building materials adds up fast, and since your profits will be so low all ready the extra 5%-10% isk you save on research costs may be the only way to get any profit on a sale. Production efficiency IV is only useful if you're manufacturing for yourself.

That is a great rule of thumb, but not always true. I always use it as a starting point, but I find that there are many times I can sell a product faster than I can flip the materials that I purchased.

Example:
Say I can purchase 100mil trit for 6.10 and sell for 6.35, but it takes me 3 days to sell that 100m trit. Or I can sell 50m trit in 1.5 days, then take the other 50m, convert it into something else and sell that product for an effective 6.28/trit. I didn't maximize my margins, but I maximized my revenue.

I still use material sell prices as my starting base when determining if a product is worth producing.

One thing I wanted to touch on which is really the key to manufacturing (and the market) is the "buy low sell high" obnoxious response many people give in regards to anything relating to the market. It's a good obvious blanket statement that gives no real explanation.

There are basically 3 types of people in Eve when it comes to the market (in regards to buying or selling items). Yes this is a huge generalization, but when you start to think in these terms, everything becomes much clearer.

1. Your basic players who buy/sell based on average market data. These people look for a good buy/sell price, checkout external sites and make good decisions when buying/selling items. These people are pretty much irrelevant to this post as they are the people who average everything out .


2. Stupid people. These are the people who sell without researching or knowing anything about the market or item they are selling. Generally this relates to loot drops and such, or everything they picked up running missions, etc. These are the people who sell items for .01% to 10% of their market value. These are your key players for buying goods/materials from.


3. Desperate / lazy. People who don't want to fly 5 - 10 systems to buy / sell items. These people will generally sell items for 10%-20% lower then "average" prices, or buy them at 10%-20% higher than average. These are your key players to sell to.

So understanding this you should start to understand that there are some people who sell items crazy low, and people who buy items much higher then average prices. Setting up buy orders for low prices do get filled (and seriously by low I mean at times .01% of the items resale value). And people will buy items at a higher cost because they are lazy.

The next thing to understand is manufacturing and selling takes time. I'm not talking about station trading where your profits are .01 isks, I'm talking about making items to sell from materials you bought from crazy low prices though buy orders, and selling items (hopefully at a higher than average price).

Don't try to buy up everything to manufacture an item as fast as you can. Your profits are going to suck. Instead make a plan for items you need for items you want to manufacture, and setup some buy orders and buying up items over a few hours/days.

Never buy items at a sell price, and never buy items at a buy price. Buy your materials at a buy price (buy price + .01) and sell your items at a sell price (sellprice - .01). Only suckers and desperate/lazy people buy from a buy price (or sell to a sell price). Think of these prices as the consumer price, and being a manufacture you need to get your stuff at a lower price, or sell at a higher price.

Here's an example for you (since I so love examples).

Medium cargo hold optimization I. used by miners, haulers and sell all the time. They are a rig and use salvage for their materials. Salvage is a great source of isk for new players and these players tend to sell off stuff at whatever price they can. The main expensive item in this bpo is Alloyed tritanium bars (22 of them). Currently (in my region) these sell for 222,900, and people are buying them for 214,003. Now this items profit margins are very low, but the volume of materials is very high (filled buy orders of 250 in 2 hours). As you can see, just by waiting 2 hours for buy orders to fill I was able to save almost 2m isk in materials (for 10 runs) using a buy order. Now sure that isn't much, but this is just an example. using the same example if you did a 24 hour buy order the isk saved almost 24M for example.

So to summarize. use buy orders to buy items for much cheaper then you would from a sell order, and sell your items using sell orders (again only stupid, lazy or desperate people buy from sell orders, or sell to buy orders). As a manufacture you are a business, so its good to think as a business owner, and not a consumer.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding...but even if I'm mining the minerals myself, I always factor in what I could have sold the minerals at to determine if the manufacturing is really netting me anything, or if I'm better off selling the minerals straight up, rather than turning them into anything.

Also, +1 on the suggestion of Google Spreadsheets ;) Nothing like getting a Google App account to run your small, entirely fictional, manufacturing business. We've used Apps for the past 4+ years of casual T1 manufacturing.