Science & Industry

Standings play a big part in the refinery efficiency equation. I'll just assume that you don't have any standings towards the corporation that owns the station in which you are trying to refine.

This would mean that the value of the trit in the dense veldspar that you have is 3,546,464 ISK. Get your standings up enough so that the "we take" column is full of zeros and that is what you'd make after refining.


It would also be worth a look at the market to see if you can sell the trit for more elsewhere. Ore takes up massive amounts of space in comparison to the minerals that you refine out of it. So it *may* be worth refining yourself and then hauling the minerals weekly (or whatever) to somewhere with the higher price.

Obviously, if that higher price is a long way off then you may be better spending the time it would take to go there and back mining more ore to sell direct. It may just be too much :effort: to move it as well. It depends on what ships you have available as well as many other things.


It's a judgement call and therefore all we can do is give you the info. Be wary of anyone proclaiming "You must do it this way!", look at what they are saying and then check things out for yourself, then decide.

Ah, didn't realize standing affected yield. I'm mining in 1.0 space... in a Covetor, semi-afk. The income seems ok, seeing how much effort it requires. I attempted scanning down radar sites in 0.4-0.6 space, but the time it took to scan them with mediocre skills, and the huge competition (even though i searched for systems with low jumps/per hour), it didn't seem to be it worth it at all.

To get perfect standing, do you have any idea how long this would take? How many missions it would require?

you're off in the bolded parts.

Veldspar is 1k units of trit per 333 units of Veld (333 units of Veld is the batch size).
Dense Veld is 10% better yield (1100 units of Trit).

Anyway, the 356,312 dense veld is 1070 refines. That refines out to 1177000 units of Tritanium (before taxes, and inefficiencies).

Refining 4 and Veld Processing 3 gets you 90.5% efficiency at a 50% base station (at least per the tables I have, apparently the Ore Processing skills aren't taken into account until after you have R.E. level 1 ... though since your numbers are higher, I assume they have changed the maths since the tables I have were made). Getting The Refinery Efficiency skill to level 2 (with your Processing skill at 3) will get you 100% refining efficiency.

so 1177000 * 0.905 = 1065185

You will lose another 5% because of standings ( 5% is maximum, using that since I don't know your standings with the station you're refining at... 6.66 standings or better with the CORPORATION who owns the station will get you 0% tax)

so 1065185 * 0.95 = 1011925.75 (I forget how they handle the percentages, but I believe they floor it, so you actually get 1011925 units of trit).

Actually look at the refining / reprocessing window. It has three columns:

* You Receive = the actual yield
* We take = amount lost because of low standing (refining / reprocessing tax)
* Unrecoverable = amount lost because of low skill

The standing tax is 5% if you don't have standing with the NPC corp.

Tax Percentage = MAXIMUM( 0, 5 - 0.75 * standing )

So you need 6.7 standing to eliminate the tax (sometimes 6.8 because of rounding for display).

At the end of the day, your skills aren't the most important thing in determining the immediate value of materials, and neither is the prevailing market value; it's the orders currently available on the market that are close enough for you to ship to.

Some consumers buy ore, some buy minerals, some buy both. Some will use station orders, others will use area orders. Players desperate for materials will up their price hoping to get it filled, while players just looking to top off their stock will low-ball the price hoping to get a deal. Producers fill orders just as randomly. Some will haul, some cannot. Some will refine, some won't. Some will sit on their product untill they see a good deal, others will sell at the end of day at any price. You never know what offers are going to be available in your area from day to day or minute to minute.

It's up to you to determine if it's in your best interest to fill the orders for ore or for minerals, if you should haul your goods elsewhere, place your own sell orders, or simply sit on your goods while you wait for a better order.

Also, it's not a hard and fast rule, but generally ore prices trail behind mineral prices. When trit spikes Veld will go up too, but generally not at the same pace. The same when minerals crash; ore will drop but generally not as fast.

happens to the best of us

At least you weren't telling him that a titan takes 333 trit ^^

This.

You're selling to other players.

Some of those players make money by refining and hauling ore/minerals to other ports.

It's not just that they have better skills and standing, they may also have access to better markets.

Back to the OP, it is true that you can generally get more for the ore than what the minerals are worth refining it.

It is true that most of the time if you have skills and standing yo get a 100% refine you are slightly ahead as the ones buying the raw ore need to make some return off the minerals after refining. However a higher price for raw ore does not mean a higher return.
Raw ore takes up way more cargo space than the refined minerals. So unless you can sell it at the station it is sitting in or 1-2 jumps away you will make more isk/hr refining it and hauling full loads of minerals. Even at a slight loss you will get far more isk per load hauling refined minerals than raw ore.

My advice would be, until you can get at least 98% refine sell the raw ore if you can get good prices locally. But I would not haul raw ore 6-10 jumps to jita for such a small margin.

The same holds true of PI resources. Many of the P3 and P4 products sell for less than what the P1 and P2 components are worth. But if you factor in the customs fees for import/export and the isk per m3 you are better off selling the high end goods. True you can usually make just as much sell off the P1 and P2 resources as you would get from processing them into P3 and P4, but the big difference is the number of loads you will need to haul. The high yield planets are generally remote and many jumps from a trade hub. What is your time worth to you. you can run 2-3 loads of P1 and P2 products a week or one load of P3 and P4 per month and end up with similar profits. However it takes far less of your game time to haul on high value load per month than 2-3 low value loads per week. For those who have not paid attention to import/export fees they are quite steep on P0 and P1 resources. The raw resources have way higher volume that the products they refine into.

Get Refining, Refinery Efficiency, and the ore processing skills (Veldspar at the least) to level V
As others have said, standings are important too, but having the skills at V is just as important.
Don't be afraid to jump a few systems to get a better price.
Get your marketing related skills up to allow you to modify buy/sell orders from 5systems or more away, as well as having more open orders available.
Keep a watch on the weekly ebb and flow of the market prices, and save your trit to sell it at an opportune time. :)

Patience is key.

So no, you aren't doing it wrong, you just are lacking efficiency. :)

You can't use the percentage symbol in the same message with a URL tag, but you can if you use bare links and let the forums auto-linkfy them.

PITA.