Science & Industry

In honesty, that's likely to be your problem. In particular, do you have Production Efficiency V?

You are an amazing person for actually considering the opportunity cost of the materials, and not just saying "I mined this myself so it's all profit!"

Fuel blocks are pretty hard to profit on, since so many miners like to mine ice, and so many of miners like to build with what they mine.

Yes, Production Efficiency is at V.

And yes (to the other poster) I mine my own ice. In fact, I still have a stash of ~12K ice cubes from before Odyssey.

I am set up in three different systems - each with different materials. I clone jump as needed and jump freighter my PI stuff out of lo sec ( you may have seen my recent post "The Real Costs of Lighting a Cyno?". It is a very efficient supply chain that has taken quite a while to set up.

Raw materials : I did notice that jump fuel and cyno fuel sells for a lot - again - a raw material with no extra work involved and no hidden costs.

As for the 4 billion profit - I could see that if I blindly sold blocks and looked at only income from those sales. I analyzed costs in terms of :: (income from block sales) - (income from raw materials if sold) - (maufacturing costs) - (jump freighter costs) . Calculated that way, I barely make 1K per block. So I'd have to sell 1 million blocks to make 1 billion ISK real profit, while I make billions in income from raw materials sales with no extra effort : harvest - refine - take little piggies to market.

I'll double check all manufacturing skills and see if there is anything I missed. But I have a hunch that taking any one skill from IV to V will net minimal gains, like many things in this game. SO unless I can find a cumulative gain somewhere, that is time effective, I'll think I'll just sell raw materials.

Hey guys, thanks for your input !!!

Ice mining time per volume yield was cut in half with Odyssey. I spend maybe 7 hours total in 3 sessions per week.

I get at least another billion from leftover isotopes and heavy water, plus everything else I do in the game.

I don't use a Jump Freighter. I don't even use a Freighter.

I sell around 250,000 blocks per month.

If you get 1 K more per block as opposed to selling as raw materials that's a difference of 250,000,000, which is significant ISK.

If you aren't happy making ISK this way, try something else. But your profit margins on T2 ship sales and such are just going to make you madder.

What about the me level on bpo

Hauling? Mining? Jump Freighter costs?....Planetary Interaction?

Those are time intensive activities that people do for cheap. Lets say that final building stage where you combine your materials into fuel blocks earns a paltry 5% profit. For you, totally not worth to combine your little collection of materials into fuel blocks.

But lets say, that this week I decide to use the 10 manufacturing slots on this character for Caldari Fuel Blocks.

I go to Jita, I buy 7 days worth of production maters for 10 slots......cost: 26 billion

This is approx 11 freighter loads. I'll be generous, like hell i'm going to haul this myself so I pay 1 million isk per jump for say...3 jumps to a station with manufacturing slots. Cost: 33 million

Log on the next day, shuttle over to my manufacturing station, set jobs, forget for a week.

Log on, courier contract big old pile of fuel back to Jita. I forget the compression ratio so lets say its 11 Freighter loads. Cost: 33 million

Then I use my max trade skilled and high standing trade character to list it in Jita 4-4. Some 0.01 isking but fuel moves relatively quickly.

so on that 26 billion invested, 5% earns me after hauling/manufacturing fees/brokers/sales tax right around 1 billion isk.

So do that for 4 weeks, and 4 billion isk profit! (remember above posters 4 bill profit/month quote, its actually quite reasonable)

Now some weeks you'll flip your mats and earn less...some you'll earn more...some you'll even lose some isk. But overall its a nice profit for so little time invested.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of the tool on Eve Industrialist ( https://eve-industrialist.com/eve-industrialist/building.eve ) . But this one attempts to answer the question of whether it is profitable to fabricate something, or just sell the materials.

If we assume this is reasonably accurate (or at least gives a sensible indication), you'll see that if you put in "Fuel Block", the profit you'll make over the material value ranges from 2.5% to 4.5%, for the different types and sizes. Increasing the ME/PE increases this, ofcourse, but not by much

So all the manufacturing ultimately increases the value of your commodities by an extremely small margin, and trading in bulk/large quantities won't really change that.

There are many ways to make money...sadly, Fuel Block production does not really seem to be one of them, at the moment.

Never a waste, but a whole load of people all doing that plus market speculation, the possibility that people are dumping the stocks they bought pre-patch and so on, might mean you aren't going to profit from it right now. People were saying ice was going to go through the roof after the patch, so people all piled in. Things didn't turn out like that though, so I expect there are a lot of people closing their ice positions right now.

How can you subtract your raw material cost that you got from your own planets? I dont understand your logic. You have increased your profit by 1000isk/ per block. I'm an indy noob 4 sure but it sounds like its subject to market prices and where you got your info. Try actually selling all the materials and see if you actually make more. Than ask yourself which way is more fun? Personally, I enjoy following through with the process. But what do I know, I still struggle to buy a plex, lol

You save time/order slots by selling as blocks instead of raw.

This is a very positive factor on your bottom line that you don't seem to be factoring at all.

Plus volumes you can sell of said items over a given time period v.s. time spent updating.

If you looked at the isk per hour with all that time included you would see the true isk per hour ratio by making the blocks is large. That is why people move it with such a small isk margain.


Time is money.