EVE New Citizens Q&A

Is it viable to make profit just selling ore and refined ore? Or, do you really need to get into manufacturing? I'm a solo player with a Retriever and I pretty much just mine and manufacture items.

Raw ore (or refined ore, I guess) can be used to make whatever you want, whereas a crafted item can obviously be used only as that crafted item. Generally speaking, selling ore gives you a return that's consistently a little higher than manufacturing, to beat the ore-price in high sec (what I assume you're talking about) you have to either watch what you're making very carefully or somehow work out a local monopoly.

As for "profit", there is no running cost for mining beyond that of purchasing the ship. Everything you make past what you spent on your miner is 100% pure profit, regardless of what you subsequently do to the ore between extracting it and selling it.

A better question is "is the amount of money I'm making form this (isk-wise) worth the time I'm putting into it?" And the answer is no. Mining is never worth your time, you poor boring person.

Profiting from mining alone is viable. You just have to find a good place to mine in peace while still being close to the nearest lucrative market. Also, even if you managed to regain the ISK you spent needed to get a suitable mining vessel, not everything after that is pure profit. You are investing time at that point. Therefore, to get the most out of the ore, you mark up the price based on the going selling price of other Sellers while accounting for the time you put into mining that stuff and the time you are willing to wait for your sell order to be accepted. Time is money.

you can make profit with mining, but dont expect to get many isk with it, the average of profit in high sec is around 60 million. this if you play with a single account.

basically as said... mining is purely converting time/attention/energy into ISK.

the real complication of "profit" is when people behave as though minerals they've mined themselves, are free.

if you can't sell a product for more than it costs to buy the materials that go into it, then you are not making a profit on the manufacturing.

Usually you can sell unrefined ore for 80% to 90% of the value of the contained minerals. So the added profit from refining into minerals before selling is between 11% and 25%. Depends a lot on who you sell your ore to. Some places you can sell ore for good prices, other places the prices are ******. Even if you do refine your own ore, you still have the minerals to sell, and you sell them the fastest, without being cheated on the price, in Jita 4-4, so you'll have to move your minerals there first (in theory, you can do the same with ore, haul it to Jita, then sell there, but in practice ore has a very low value-density, making this problematic even if using a Freighter).

But figure that the profit from refining ore before selling is usually 12% to 15%. But it gives you a lot of hassle (you need to haul stuff). So might not be worth it.



What's the profit added on top if you build something out of your minerals before you sell them? So that you do ore->-minerals>-stuff>sell instead of just ore->sell or ore->minerals->sell?

I honestly don't know. I'm not in the manufacturing business yet. But most T1 production is highly competetive. I looked into several different T1 hulls, a few months ago, and the profit potential was very, very small. I'l consider myself lucky if I can find a couple of T1 cruiser-or-larger hulls that I can produce with a profit margin of 10%, relative to just selling the minerals I have.



There are also a couple of hurdles to production, compared to just ore/minerals:

Minerals move fast. Real fast. If you haul your minerals to Jita (or another major trade hub) and price your Sell Orders competetively, they'll sell within a few hours.

(In comparison, if you put ore up for sale, it might take months before someone buys it. If someone ever buys it. You should sell ore directly to other people's Buy Orders, in almost all cases (note that this gives you immediate profit). What this mean is that you look at the regional market, and see which systems have fairly priced Buy Orders for the kinds of ore you want to mine, and then you travel there to do your mining.)

Whatever stuff you manufacture, ammo, or T1 hulls or modules, or even T2 hulls/modules/ammo, will sell more slowly than minerals. Everybody needs lots of minerals. But do youknow how many Ravens are needed per day, per month? In your region? I'm not saying your stuff won't sell, but it can easily take days, perhaps even weeks.

When earning ISK, you don't just need to calculate your profit percentage. You also need to calculate your ISK turnover, how quickly you convert your stuff into actual genuine tangible ISK. Mining ore is instant ISK. Refining ore into minerals is very fast ISK, if you can haul the minerals. Building stuff to sell is slow ISK.

The second hurdle is that you need good, competetively statted Blueprints, in order to build stuff. You don't need sky-high ML and PL values; chasing after those is silly. Paying a premium for them is even more silly. But you do need an ML vlaue in the low double digits, in order to cut materials waste from 10% to 1% or 0.4% or so, because without that you risk having no profit margin at all, relative to just having sold the minerals instead.

So how will you get the Blueprints? (A) You can buy copies of the market, but I looked into BPC several months ago, and I couldn't see any profit whatsoever. (B) Buy researched BPO off the market? Corps who resarch BPO are producing for an unknown degree of need, their stuff might lie up for sale on Contracts for a long time before finding a buyer, so they tend to set their prices high, to make sure to profit. (C) Find a corp who can do the research for you, and tell them what you need, and ask them how much you'll have to pay them for it? That would actually work, and almost certainly at a price that's much nicer than B, but you'll have to wait a month or often much longer, because BPO research takes a lot of time.

(D) Set up your own POS (Player-Owned-space-Station) with some anchored Laboratories, and buy your own ML0 PL0 BPOs off the market, and do your own research? This will work as well as item C, but it still takes a lot of time, and you now have the risk of owning a POS that other corps might war dec, maybe even just for the lulz. And you have to train additional skillz in order to anchor a POS and the Labs, and different skillz to do the actual research, and different skillz again to defend your POS when it gets war decced, and you need a very high Standing with one of the great factions (e.g. the Caldari State) before you can anchor a POS, and most of the moons in 0.5 systems are probably already taken meaning you're more likely to find a free moon if you can do it in a 0.6 system, but that requires even more standing. And the Connections skill, which for other purposes is well worth training, doesn't help here.

Yes it is viable to make a profit just selling ore etc.
No, you do not have to get into manufacturing.

As long as you account balance keeps going up you are making a profit and doing just fine.
But if you want the account balance to go up faster or want to scalp some isk off to expand your game play then it might be a good idea to pay good attention to all the suggestions.

Maybe you should define what you mean by "viable".