Science & Industry

I just came back to Eve after a long hiatus, and while I do enjoy the occasional combat I am an industrialist. In pretty much every MMO I have ever played I've always been a crafter and have been more focused on that than anything else (which is a pain because so few MMOs allow you to do that, most of them require you to kill and kill and kill to really get anywhere in the game).

I'm posting this to give aspiring industrialists an idea of how to get started, as well as to help me keep myself a bit more organized that I currently am. What I'm going to show, at least for now, is how to make a decent income being an industrialist. This won't make you billions of ISK, but it will show you how to get going.

I'm also starting cheap because I have a low wallet balance right now. I have a bunch of assets scattered all over the galaxy that are worth a lot of ISK, but it will take me time to get sorted through them all.

Before You Start Manufacturing
I have Production Efficiency V and Industry V. Those 2 skills will take about 2 weeks of training for you to get, and the skill book for PE is very cheap (like 30,000 ISK). Industry V is not required to get started, but I would advise getting PE to 5 before starting any manufacturing as it makes a big difference in how much raw material you will chew through.

Also - figure out exactly how much it will cost you to manufacture the item BEFORE buying the materials and hauling it to your manufacturing station. There will be a lot of products out there where you cannot manufacture something cheaply enough to sell it on the market and still make a profit. So do your math (example below).

Manufacturing Project #1
The BPO I have is actually quite cheap if you fly over to Gallente space. There's somebody that sells quite a few highly researched drone BPOs on a regular basis. I spent something like 700,000ISK and got a 100/100 BPO of the 4 main Tech I drones, which seems more than fair to me considering in other areas of space you see people posting 1 drone BPO for 500,000 for that level of research). So my cost for this BPO was about 187,500 ISK.

Total cost for this entire project is somewhere around 700,000 ISK when you take into account the cost of the BPO. You can make that much ISK mining very quickly.

Item: Hobgoblin I
Blueprint: BPO (ME 100, PE 100)
Runs: 100

Based on my skills and the ME of the BPO, 100 Hobgoblins is going to require:

400 Isogen
200 Nocxium
600 Pyerite
45,800 Tritanium

Doing some quick checking on the market, I can get it all for 458,568 ISK. The factory is also going to charge me 3,848.63 ISK to do the job.

So here's some basic math:

Material Cost: 458,565
Factory Cost: 3,848.63
Total Cost: 458,416.63
Cost Per Unit: 4,584

Hobgoblin I's are selling on average for 5900 where I am. So I'm looking to realize a net profit per unit of:

5900 - 4584 = 1,316 per unit

With 100 units, that's a net profit of 131,600

Since I am investing 458,416.63 ISK, I am going to see an ROI of approximately 128.7%. In other words, for every 100 ISK I invest in this manufacturing process, I can expect to see 128.70 ISK at the end of the process. That's not a bad ROI to be honest, a lot of items have a much smaller ROI but a higher profit margin due to the way the process works.



If I had an unresearched BPO, those same 100 Hobgoblins would require:

400 Isogen
200 Nocxium
700 Pyerite
50,400 Tritanium

So I'm saving 100 Pyerite and 4,600 Tritanium. That may not seem like a huge amount, but where I am pyerite is worth about 13 ISK and Tritanium is worht about 5.9 ISK.

100 Pyerite = 1,300 ISK
4,600 Tritanium = 27,140 ISK
That means without PE5 and the ME of the blueprint I would have paid an extra 28,440 ISK, which would lower my expected ROI and profit margin by a significant amount:

Cost: 486,856.63
Cost Per Unit: 4,868

So you can see my cost per unit jumped up by 284 ISK, which means my overall profitability would have shrunk by 28,400 ISK. That means my ROI would drop to approximately 121%. So there is 7% pure profit out the window simply because of skills and a researched BPO.

Always do your math before buying materials.

So I bought the materials and hauled them off to a station with an open manufacturing slot and put the job in. With my Industry V skill and the Productivity Level of the BPO, it's taking about 8.5 hours to complete the run. That's just over 5 minutes per drone compared to the 6 minutes it would require without the skills/BPO research. That may not seem like much, but with 100 units that's about 120 minutes difference. So I'm finishing the job 2 hours faster than somebody else would that had Industry I and an unresearch BPO.

The last metric here worth showing for now is the profit per manufacturing slot per hour. This is a benchmark that most manufacturing Indy's use to identify what is worth manufacturing.

I know that my net profit out of this will be somewhere in the ball park of 131,600 and I know that it will take 8.5 hours to get that done. That means that I am looking to see a net profit of 15,482 ISK per hour while manufacturing this (assuming I sell the units at the market rate listed above). That's a little on the low end, but it's not bad.

15,482 ISK/hour profit may not seem like much, but factor in that you can have up to 11 factory slots per character running with the right skills, and the fact that this is basically hands-off once it gets going. So if I maxed out the Mass Production skill and Advanced Mass Production skill and had 10 more identical BPOs, I would have 11 factories running that would be making me 170,305 ISK profit per hour (that's 4.08 million ISK per day, or 122.6 million ISK per month - almost entirely hands-off).

And that's just a basic item, I'll start manufacturing other stuff soon and post the stats here to show some comparisons and such.

Nice to see some useful information for people starting off manufacturing.

Keep up the good work

Also - I just found a pair of Nightstalker goggles in my inventory, so my avatar is gonna change shortly lol

I thought about it so I could post pictures since the new forum system doesn't seem to allow pictures at all, but that's more work to setup Wordpress, find a theme I like, and then waste hours playing with various plugins and settings and such. Too much work for me. And I'd have to pay for that unless I'm willing to settle with blogspot or some other free platform which I don't like using.

I still have unused hosting space I could host you a blog if you'd like. can install wordpress on it at any time. Dont have a domain name for it though.

I like how you put so much love in your posts!

Project #3: 1000x Hobgoblin I

I'm going to do another batch of Hobgoblins tomorrow morning, but I want to get a higher profit margin. Since I have maxed out the 2 skills that would directly affect it (PE and Industry), I need to look at other ways to reduce my costs. The next easiest way is to get cheaper materials. Here is the price I paid for the minerals for the current batch of 1000:

4,000 Isogen (120/unit = 480,000)
2,000 Nocxium (644/unit = 1,287,980)
6,000 Pyerite (13.4/unit = 80,400)
458,000 Tritanium (5.9/unit = 2,715,940)

That was with buying from Sell orders. Today what I'm doing is putting up some Buy orders to try and get the minerals cheaper than the current market values:

Isogen - I just went and bought the 4,000 units because the seems to be some market pvp going on with it. It's selling for 117 ISK right now, but the best Buy orders are for 115.90 ISK so I won't save much money putting up a buy order. Total Cost: 4,000 x 117.04 = 469,160 (saved 11,000 ISK from the last batch)

Nocxium has a 20 ISK spread between Buy and Sell orders right now, for 2,000 units that's 4,000 ISK I could save, but apparently it's going to cost me 12,000 ISK to setup the Buy order in Brokers Fees (apparently I didn't train Broker Relations on this character...balls). Total Cost: 2,000 x 641.54 = 1,283,080 ISK (saved 4900 from last batch)

OK, since I'll actually end up costing more to put up Buy orders thanks to no skill, I'm just going to buy it directly unless I see an opportunity.

Pyerite is in the same boat, bought it directly: 6,000 units x 13.07 = 78,420 (saved 2,000 from last batch)

Even Tritanium is in the same boat. The current market price is 6 ISK (up 0.10 ISK from my last batch ouch), and setting up a Buy order I worked out it would cost me 6.05 ISK to buy...bummer. So I'm buying it off the Sell orders too. Total Cost: 458,000 x 6 = 2,758,000 ISK (60,000 higher than last batch).

4,000 Isogen (117.04/unit = 469,160)
2,000 Nocxium (641.54/unit = 1,283,080)
6,000 Pyerite (13.07/unit = 78,420)
458,000 Tritanium (6/unit = 2,758,000)
Total Mineral Cost: 4,588,660
Estimated Manufacturing Cost: 29,486.30
Total Cost: 4,618,146.30 (4618 per drone)
Expected ROI: 127.8%

Hmm...my profit margin shrunk a bit more this batch, not by a huge amount but I hope this downward trend doesn't continue.

That batch will be going into the cooker tomorrow. I'm probably going to look at other products I want to start manufacturing tomorrow too. I have Mass Production IV, so I can have 5 items being made at any time right now and obviously I'm not doing that yet. I'm also going to put together a spreadsheet of some kind to show all the numbers in a more clear format I think, maybe I'll have the time for that tonight.

Question for anybody: When you hover your mouse over a ship in your hangar it gives you an ISK value of the ship. What is that estimate based on?

The reason I'm asking is I have a Prorator (Amarr Blockade Runner) and the little mouseover tip is saying it's worth 99 million ISK, but according to the market it's actually worth 119 million ISK.

Picture showing both: http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/2139/eveda.png

Furthermore, why doesn't that little mouseover thing account for modules? That image was taken before I started fitting it. I dropped a Covops Cloak and some other mods into it that cost me about 20 million ISK, but it still says the ship is only worth 99 million.

Project #4: 1000x Hobgoblin I

Since I got gate camped, I'm doing another batch of drones since I totally lost the last batch.

4,000 Isogen (120/unit = 480,000)
2,000 Nocxium (639.97/unit = 1,279,740)
6,000 Pyerite (12.92/unit = 77,520)
458,000 Tritanium (5.97/unit = 2,734,260)
Total Mineral Cost: 4,571,520
Estimated Manufacturing Cost: 29,486.30
Total Cost: 4,601,006.30 (4601 per drone)

Project #5: 1,600x Phased Plasma M

I have a researched 50/10 Phased Plasma M BPO, and everybody here always says to make ammo when you are first getting into the manufacturing business so I'm going to give it a shot. This will produce 160,000 rounds of sweet sweet ammunition.

The market price for this ammo where I am is 71 ISK.

20,800 Isogen (120/unit = 2,496,000)
6,400 Mexallon (59.97/unit = 383,808)
51,200 Pyerite 12.92/unit = 661,504)
963,200 Tritanium (5.98/unit = 5,759,936)
Total Mineral Cost: 9,301,248
Estimated Manufacturing Cost: 30,061.84
Total Cost: 9,331,309.84
Cost Per Unit: 58.32

At a market value of 71 ISK, I'm looking to make 2,028,800 ISK profit or approximately 23,319.54 ISK per hour for the manufacturing slot.

Revised math, somebody put up some cheaper Pyerite and Tritanium between when I did the research and when I actually bought it:

20,800 Isogen (120/unit = 2,496,000)
6,400 Mexallon (59.97/unit = 383,808)
51,200 Pyerite 12.90/unit = 660,480)
963,200 Tritanium (5.96/unit = 5,740,672)
Total Mineral Cost: 9,280,960
Estimated Manufacturing Cost: 30,061.84
Total Cost: 9,311,021.84
Cost Per Unit: 58.19
Estimated Profit: 2,048,000
Profit Per Hour: 23,540.23


As an added bonus, all the materials for both of these projects fits with lots of room to spare in my Bestower.

Aye, good thread.
I started out making Salvagers instead of Drones, but my thought processes were much the same at the beginning. Looks like you are off for a terrific start. Good luck.

Playing with PI

So now that I have some manufacturing running, I’m going to look at getting some PI going. I have already trained up most of the PI skills to IV so I have enough to work with for the time being, and since I have a Blockaide Runner I should be able to get in and out of lowsec relatively unscathed.

PI is used for making T2 components and POS fuel, and a few other things. My immediate focus would be to be able to manufacture fuel blocks because down the road I’d like to run my own POS. Fuel blocks are also in very high demand everywhere, and fetch a decent price.

I worked out before that I could manufacture a batch of fuel blocks for about 11,000 ISK/unit with my skills and the blueprints I have, and they sell for 13,000 ISK on average depending on where you are. That may not seem like a huge profit, but when you factor in that you can product 40 at once and it only takes about 5 minutes to do that the profits add up very quickly. But that’s assuming the prices stay that way and you don’t get into a bunch of market PvP crap.

Anywhere, all fuel blocks require the following:

Coolant
Enriched Uranium
Heavy Water (you get this from Ice)
Isotopes (the specific type varies, you get this from Ice)
Liquid Ozone (you get this from Ice)
Mechanical Parts
Oxygen
Robotics

So of the 8 components needed to make a fuel block, 5 can be provided by PI. Here is my revised list along with their PI Tier:

Coolant (P2)
Enriched Uranium (P2)
Mechanical Parts (P2)
Oxygen (P1)
Robotics (P3)

P1 stuff is dead easy to make, but it takes up a ton of space to haul around. So I’m going to focus on the P2 and P3 components for the time being. I’m going to skip the P3 stuff just for now and focus on the P2 items while I get this setup.

With that in mind, here is my planet shopping list:

Coolant
Planets: Gas or Storm
P0: Aqueous Liquids, Ionic Solutions
P1: Water, Electrolytes
P2: Coolant

Enriched Uranium
Planets: Plasma
P0: Heavy Metals, Noble Metals
P1 : Toxic Metals, Precious Metals
P2 : Enriched Uranium

Mechanical Parts
Planets : Plasma, Barren
P0 : Noble Metals, Base Metals
P1 : Precious Metals, Reactive Metals
P2 : Mechanical Parts

So I’m looking for a lowsec system (or group of adjacent systems) that has those P0 materials in good volumes.

I loaded up my stealthy runner with 5 command centers and I’m on the hunt for a suitable location.