Science & Industry

So I have a planets setup in Low-sec making P3 materials. This means I need 4 different P0 materials, so I have two extractor's with between 2-5 heads (2 for huge Gas planets, and 5 for Lava) extracting two materials at a time, and I switch them daily. On each of these planets I have:

-4 basic processors, 1 for each of the P0s.
-3 Advanced processors, 2 for P1 -> P2, 1 for P2 -> P3

From there, I move those materials to another planet and make P4 goods.

I switch the heads every day to whatever material I'm lowest on. For example, I generally have to mine Felsic Magma more often than other materials because it is less present in lava planets. This is probably not the most efficient setup, but I wanted to extract the most that I could out of a planet. Do other people have their setups like this? What is your setup like? Is it more efficient to just have planets producing P2, then have a planet dedicated to making P3 and P4s?

My main question has to do with exporting PI data out of Eve into some kind of tool. Instead of me calculating in my head what P0 I'm lowest on, I want a tool to tell me what I should be mining next. Are there any tools like this? Is there any way to export PI data? It doesn't look like it's part of the Eve API.

No, that's great information. I never thought about it that way. I use PI to make P4 materials to make customs offices. I don't sell any of the P0-P4 items directly on the market. I never thought about opportunity cost, so it might make more sense to do that calculation to see if it would be worth it to sell those instead.

The only reason I got started with this is shortly before the patch, there was a huge shortage of the P4 materials I needed to create customs offices. I thought to myself, what would it take to actually just make those items. 10 days worth of PI training later, I made myself a nice little setup. Now that I am getting more into PI, it might be worth looking at other options, like vetting the opportunity costs of moving P2 materials to a factory planet, instead of P3.

Thanks for the update. And darn, that would have been nice. I hope they think about doing it in the future.

Apologies that I don't understand the original question so much. I don't know why you would need a tool to check inventories. It makes more sense to me to find out how much extraction per hour you need to keep the p3 processor running 24/7. This does not require any tools. Keeping up with the derail!

Some number tips:
P0:P1 ratio = 150 : 1
P1:P2 ratio = 8 : 1
P2:P3 ratio = 10/3: 1

so if you need to make a P3 item, you need 150*8*(10/3) or 4000 extracted units of each material. An advanced industry building makes 3 P3 items per hour. So, 12k basic per hour is needed to keep it running. If you're alternating, the actual active cycle should be 24k or more per hour. Note that a basic processor goes through 6k per hour.

In terms of taxation, it is objectively better to move the items at lower tiers.

For example

Cost to transport a P1 item, assuming 10% tax for both planets : 40 + 20 = 60
Extrapolating that cost to a P3 item which has two ingredients : 2 * 60 * 8 * (10/3) = 3,200
P1 phase transfer tax = 3,200 isk per P3

Cost to transport a P2 item, assuming 10% tax for both planets : 720 + 360 = 1080
Extrapolating that cost to a P3 item which has two ingredients : 2 * 1080 * (10/3) = 7,200
P2 phase transfer tax = 7,200 isk per P3

Transfer cost of one P3 item , assuming 10% tax for both planets: 6000 + 3000 = 9,000
P3 phase transfer tax = 9,000 isk per P3

As mentioned in at least one above post, specializing planets for one resource also considerably reduces grid bloat, allowing for greater extraction volume. If there are less than 10 extraction heads between the two control units, you're losing some volume by splitting it up.

All of that said, many people know all this and still build P3 items on-world. This is because it takes a lot more hauling to move P1 units around. Low-sec extraction planets cap out at 3mil-ish per day if you're bringing in 36k units/hour of a top 5 valued material on a 10% tax world. Many would gladly drop it to 1m a day if they only have to bust out the Epithal once a week. From there, you then have to figure out if processing it further actually improves the value.

I really have no idea if any of that was helpful but there you go.

Well, to put it simply, 3m/day is an estimation on several fronts. The variables come from my personal spreadsheet and my experience doing lowsec extraction. Since you're giving me an excuse, though, into the rabbit hole!

We can place a theoretical limit for extraction at the factory level. I'm going to ignore the idea of exporting P0. With infrastructure upgrades 4, the absolute maximum amount of of processing on a planet would look something like this.

With level 5 upgrades, you can add 2 more basic factories, giving you a limit of 12. Each one processes 6k/hr, so with infinite abundance you would be looking at a maximum stable extraction rate of 6k*10 or 60k/hr for upgrades 4, 6k*12 or 72k/hr with upgrades 5. (All further calculations are going to assume infrastructure upgrades 4, because that's what I've extracted with personally. Arbitrary decision.)

This is of course impractical on several levels. First of all, you're only going to be able to place the extractor that close to your launchpad for like 2-3 cycles before you have to move it. After that, the powergrid will be limited by the link to the extractor. Also, a single launchpad will fill up in about 2.5 days, so I would assume most people would drop 1 factory for a second launchpad at the very least.

With 2 launchpads and some wiggle room for the extractor, you're looking at 8 factories or 6k*8 = 48k/hr. I was rarely able to maintain 8 factories over time. Eventually I'd have to move the extractor too far from the launchpad, leaving me with a lack of grid. For our actual somewhat-accurate limit though, let's use 8.

The next step is finding out what our materials are worth. To address the market point, yes, I am using Jita percentile sell orders for all calculations. The figures I'm using for further calculations reflect the market at about 20:40 evetime today. The top 3 valued P1 materials are Biomass, Chiral Structures, and Precious Metals, all at around 500 per unit. let's use Precious Metals for an example.

Part of my personal spreadsheet values base materials in all possible forms. The assumptions made for its calculations are:

• Jita percentile sell orders for all sales
• 10% tax rate at both extraction and industry planets
• Materials transferred (if needed) at P1 to industry planet, at which point it is made into whatever final product
• Extraction taxes are applied to the final product as well, but not market taxes (broker, sales)

The listing for Precious Metals looks like this.

Abstractly, those are the values per basic (P0) unit of Noble Metals in all the products that Noble Metals are a part of. The calculations are a bit complex; the short version is that this is the value of the product, minus all taxes, divided by total number of P0 units of any type that go into it. So a Broadcast Node for example ends up taking 288,000 P0 units to build, assuming I didn't make an error. This can help to find the best use of a material you are extracting. In the case of Noble Metals, the best use would be Self-Harmonizing Power Cores at a value of 4.03 per unit. There are some nuances to interpretation here, but let's assume we're making Power Cores and extracting every material to do so. Every material involved would be worth 4.03 each when transmogrified to a Power Core.

8*6k = 48k/hr
48k*24 = 1,152,000 units of Noble Metals a day
value of a Noble Metal in a Self-Harmonizing Power Core = 4.03

1,152,000 * 4.03 = 4,642,560 isk per day. (Command Center Upgrades 4)
1,440,00 * 4.03 = 5,803,200 isk per day (Command Center Upgrades 5)

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Can lowsec planets support this? Aside from certain gas planet rings, this would almost never happen with high value materials. From personal experience, I would rarely see over 1.6mil on 2 day cycles, which is 33k/hr. This is why I used 36k/hr for my estimate before. More typically it was 1.1-1.3 million over 2 days. In nullsec or WH space though, maximum industrial throughput may be possible. I wouldn't know, as I quickly found industry planets to be more lucrative and never bothered with WH PI.

edit- Good luck with your nullsec endeavors. Sounds like you have your work cut out for you!