Science & Industry

I'm learning PE lvl 5 right now, so i'm about to plunge into the world of production. I'm a miner by trade, and pretty efficient at it. So my question is, for all of you producers out there, do you generally mine your minerals, or do you buy your minerals?

A serious producer would have to buy the materials anyway, because there is no way that you can mine all those required minerals by yourself.

In terms of money, obviously the latter.
In terms of - I want to make my things from start to end - the former.

Depends on your gameplay

We (me and my corpmates) usually mine all the minerals ourselves, and turn them into stuff which we then sell.

From a pure production perspective, you don't bother about mining anymore. Try not to get into the "what I mine is free" trap, ignoring the opportunity costs. For med to large scale hull & capital production, you will never be able to mine enough to sustain the production line with a single account (or two).

Production is all about calculating profit margins over the base material costs (obtained at market prices) plus any other associated costs (slot time, BPCs, sales tax etc.). Treat it as a new ballgame. What all that mining does, is give you a working capital to start with. Now the margins for T1 & T2 production, are usually in the 3-20% and 10-100% (possibly more) range, respectively. It'll take a bit of legwork finding the right items to produce, keeping in mind that the market is always in a state of flux.

When looking for minerals to buy in bulk, if you want to save some cost and have a character with both ore and scrap metal processing skills, set buys for for Meta 1 mods (guns usually have best mineral compression ratio) and drone loot. These normally sell for slightly below the market price for the minerals they contain. However, you need to keep in mind at all times the logistics required to move these stuffs around, as the time spent on it will form part of your production cost.

Bottomline, the core idea is to maximize the isk returns for the amount of time you spend doing stuffs in Eve.
Arbitrarily, 1bil/month income sounds great, until you minus the 500mil cost and 40hrs total spent on it - which averages 12.5mil/hr.
Not that much higher than a Hulk mining trit in highsec.

If you choose to mine, mine what will give you the best isk/hr and buy what you need.

As for choosing to mine or mission, missions pay better but this is a game. Do what you enjoy.
People may say you're doing it wrong, but if you enjoy what you do with your game time, you're doing it right.

I'm a miner and producer. I mine the high-ends and buy the rest. As someone said above, if your producing in any serious quantity there's no way you'll be able to mine all the low-ends needed for production. Hell, at a certain point it becomes a PITA to even freighter all the trit needed for some jobs.

As Sturmwolke said - always base any manufacturing profit calculation on the market price of the input materials, not what you bought it for via some low-bid buy order or because you mined it. Assume that you can't mine enough and that you'll have to pay market price for your inputs.

As you move up the production chain and get into the need to have 500M or more of materials each week, it becomes impossible to mine it all yourself (even with say 5 accounts doing 20-30 hours of mining per week). For one thing, you'll be spending a lot more of your time doing logistics (tending to buy/sell orders, moving material around) and you won't have time to sit in one spot and mine for a few hours.

I still mine a bit, but I have less and less time each week to do so.

MINERALS YOU MINE ARE NOT FREE.

Production Efficiency. If you don't have it at /at least/ 4, then you're going to have significant problems making any profit. Ammo can, often, survive at lower. but you're just throwing away an extra 5% materials per level you don't have. Researched BPOs are nice and all, but the (normally) 10% waste doesn't matter as much as that 25%. And an ME of 1 halves that 10%.

Once again. Production Efficiency.

Of course, you do run into people who that what they mine is free. It's hard to beat them. Though if you get scrap metal refining high enough, you may be able to run a profit taking what they sell, and refining it. If they're stupid enough.