Science & Industry

For those of you who have made billions of Isk from science & industry, I'm curious the steps you took to get so wealthy.

(Example: You started doing security missions until you had 400 million, invested that into a drake BPO, researched that BPO to increase ME/PE, and placed buy orders for minerals in lower populated area of space. You went to sell drakes in areas of L4 security missions for caldari navy. After making enough money from that endeavor, you continue making drakes, and now make T2 ammo. One year later, you are a billionaire. Now you own 20 BPO's, and manufacture using same strategy.)

The previous example likely has several flaws, but that's the kind of back story I'd like to see. My post isn't to copy your method exactly, but to look at trends.

Again, I'm just curious as to how the successful billionaires made it to their level of wealth. Your progression may not be feasible in current markets, but I'm still just as interested.

Thanks in advance! Looking forward to stories!

Ah yes, I was once a poor EVE industrial pilot looking to eek out a meager existence through high-sec mining. From there I joined a 0.0 corp and began to mine in 0.0.

As I was mining, my other toon trained up scanning skills and began running sites out in Deklein. I still remember vividly when my explo buddy and me found a BPC for a caldari ship interface less than a week after invention was introduced. We sold it for a billion isk, which back then was more isk than I had ever laid eyes on.

After that I left 0.0 and started my own reaction POS chain (1 tower at first, then 3 towers) making fullerides. This was when technetium was only 3k per unit. Shortly there after I took a break from EVE. When I returned, technetium was 30k per unit and I had 30k units of it sitting in my hangar *lucky break*. I ended up flipping it into fullerides and selling those off, making myself a nice profit. I also had a lab set up and was inventing/producing Curses and Pilgrims for a short while. The margin was thin but since fullerides were 100% free since I was making them^, it was a good business venture at the time being.

^denotes sarcasm

With those profits I dabbled in cap ship building, bought 2 BPOs and made a couple carriers, but it was way too passive for me so I ended up getting out of that.

Then came PI. My brother and I sunk our teeth into it pretty heavily at first. Spraining many a right index finger in the process.

For most of 2010 I had 2 reaction towers and 4 toons utilizing 21 CCs. I made 4 of the P4s, my brother made the other 4. We were selling 5 towers per week for a while until the price crashed.

Following this I moved into a C1 WH and made buku isk running anomalies, gas mining, PI'ing and mining minerals. I took another break from EVE and returned about a month ago.

The moral of the story is that in each and every one of my endeavors, it was a rough road at first. The learning curve is steep, but once I got through that rough patch and learned the basics, the rest was easy. I was buying technetium 500 at a time for a bit while I got my operation going. Then soon after I could afford to buy a week's supply. I have no less than 14 spreadsheets in my EVENerd folder (that's just what I named it). It took a while to make each one, but they were indispensable in helping me turn a profit.

In all of my time in the field of industry, I made sure to never get too greedy. I like to spend ISK, but I ALWAYS had a purpose for my purchases. I had a creed that no matter what I spent ISK on, I should be able to make back the ISK I spent with that item in the future.

My apologies for the ramble. I tend to do that sometimes.

I really don't have an interesting story though

I just missioned for isk and then bought all the rig bpos (only one size at the time) because I thought it would be cool to have "all of them". I use like 10 maybe now heh.

I then just started to collect BPO's. I started with all frigs, destroyers, then cruisers. Then went on to drones, and modules. (I have a lot of BPO's but use only a few of them actually.) Then just started working on invention. Looking back I had no idea what I was doing (I'm not sure anyone does when you first start) but I was making all sorts of crap that was barely (if ever) profitable. 125mm Railgun II's! I got into a few lines of production that probably cost more than I'll ever know (hint: no one buy's vespa II's like you think). My worst adventure was when I bought enough mats to make 200 Large Capacitor Control Circuits.....about a month after the Noctis came out. Needless to say salvage took a dive in price and I lost a tad bit of isk.

Anywho, I set up my own PoS at one point and did ice mining so I could save money on fuel LOL. (Probably my only regret in this game was training ice mining skills. ) I would copy and research my massive amount of bpo's there and manufacture near a mission hub. I got into mining and some plexing in 0.0 for awhile, did some wormhole stuff, then just slid back into empire to mine and invent. The isk was slow ish...so I moved to where I am now. Wormhole stuff was probably the most fun/interesting. I loved the fact a corporation could have a piece of 0.0 (even with its limitations) and someday I'll probably head back into one.

I make all my profit from invention, manufacturing, mining now. I haven't done a mission in 6 months probably even though I can fly a bunch of different stuff. I did start PI just before the patch (maybe a month) and had got it fairly organized but now I'm just waiting it out until the prices better reflect the new taxes.

I hope this is not the case. From what I have seen in my one year eve career there are plenty of market gaps to exploit in this game across the several regions in an honest manner. I have found no need to scam my way to riches by setting contracts for plexes at 400k instead of 400mil or exploiting margin orders...

Not on this acct, but like Forrest Gump who "just ran" I " just mined".

I was in a Hulk and I ran back and forth in the day before the gankathons and piled up lots of Trit and sold it around the time it was about 4 isk a unit.

Also i ran my Cormy around and salvaged system after system of belt wrecks.

Now in those days Salvage was worth something so I also made isk off of that before it was nerf'd too.

After that I had a good base of ISK to play with and did some long term investmets in ventures on the forums and invested more isk in some other corp adventures.

Ive been HI, Low and WH and Jita and its all good.

Mostly its the time invested and what you get back from that time.m ( and skills of course)

Im still not super rich I guess by some accounts ( only about 15 bil isk on 3 accts), but I'm running 3 accts on just PLEX and still having fun.

Hope that helps.

My advice would be diversify and dont fly what you cant afford to lose.

But hey, everyone knows that, right, right?

This was long before jita became so crowded, before the market bots and endless 0.01 isk wars. If I put an order up, it would stay on top for a couple hours – which was more than enough time for it to fill, given my rather limited ISK. I also started to see that the more money I had, the easier it was to make money! I was nowhere near close to capturing the entire refining market in those modules, so the only thing holding me back was how much ISK I had to make the initial purchases. I also quickly learned that the real profits were to be had in the meta 1, 2, and 3 mods. Meta 4 were the best there were (this was long before tech 2) and so were extremely expensive. Some meta 3 were as well. The prices for the base tier 1 products were a lot closer to their refine values. (I assume because they were being priced and produced by industrialists). But there was a huge gap between the buy prices for low meta modules and their refine value. Especially since some of them broke the rule where a meta module refines for ½ the standard tier 1 version and instead refined for the full value. It was possible to make a clear 600k profit on a SINGLE BATTLESHIP GUN with perfect refining and tax skills (which I had).
Soon I was just raking the money in and I was no longer poor.

I was amazed at how easy and risk free it was making so much ISK. I could sit in a station, place an order, go to sleep, wake up still in the station, sell what I had bought, and clear 50 million for just a couple minutes work! Soon my caracal was upgraded to a drake. I decided to try my hand at level 3 missions in low sec. I imagined I would soon be swimming in riches from all the wealth low sec would bring!

Well it didn’t take me long to realize low sec msisions was not worth the time it took. I had one drake exploded by pirates, another captured and ransomed by .. Mugen industries?. I began to learn to use the directional scanner, stay aligned, and warp out at the first sign of trouble, but that really cut down into my productivity. I even would offer to pay the pirates in the systems a small up front fee (maybe a million) if they would let me do my missions in peace. These were pirates that kept their word (Mugen and Vladimir Norkoff the taxman) so I was in fact allowed to finish the missions, but all the time spent talking/negotiating/dodging pirates I hadn’t paid made me think I was better off in high sec. Besides, I had enough money for a raven now!

Missioned in the raven until I had excellent, excellent caldari navy standings. Got bored of it eventually of course. Also my refining business was drying up: jita was becoming more crowded, the 0.01 wars more intense, and the profit margins dramatically shrinking as more people jumped into the market. It was time for something different! I had recently heard good things about exploration, so set about training up the skills and learning how to do it. This was back when you had to use, say, a magnetometric sift probe that lasted 10 minutes to find a site. Much much harder to do than today and correspondingly much less competition.

For a long time I found nothing (routinely hi sec sites would have nothing in them at all) but eventually I got some escalations that went to low sec. I was able to complete them and eventually I wound up with..a pith A type small shield booster and pithum C type medium shield booster! I decided to sell these rather than put them on my ships, as by this point the motto “don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose” was firmly ingrained on me. I headed to jita to see what they were worth…


Apparently, nothing. They didn't show up on the market at all. I asked some questions in jita local (this was long before it became nothing more than a haven for scammers/spammers) and found out about...contracts. I searched for contracts for these shield boosters. I noticed that there were people selling them for 300million and 500million respectively, which seemed like a TON of money to me. However, the people buying were only pay 200 million or 400 million. I thought about it a long time then decided to take the risk and put mine up as sells for just under what the next lowest sell was. If they didn’t sell, then I’d be paying millions of ISK in wasted broker fees. I put them up. The small shield booster sold IMMEDIATELY. I was overjoyed! I had just made 100 million with just a couple minutes work (putting up a sell contract rather than filling a buy contract) And yes, it was a couple minutes – the contracts interface was horrid, slow, and confusing then compared to today.
I was about to sail away with my new found money when I thought…wait a minute..what if *I* put up a buy order for 201 million and then try to sell it for 300 million? I put up my order and went to bed wondering if I would ever see my money again.

By the next day it had been filled. I put up my sell order. By the next day it had sold. +100 million. This assuaged my worry that there just wasn’t enough demand for these items to serve as a middleman and pay the associated fees. So then I got into this in a big way. I had to set up a shell corporation with a different character that trained corp contracts, because I couldn’t put up very many of my own. I started with the shield mods I was familiar with and slowly branched out. Again, the only limit on how much I could make were my skills (how many contracts I could put up) with how much liquid ISK I had. I started to learn which items moved fast, and it was better to shift a faster moving item with a lower profit margin than sit out there with a high margin order that was never fulfilled. I got burned several times with orders that never sold and cost me the several million ISK fees, but by this time I was rolling in money and didn’t really care.

I ran towers before PI. I tried to verticly intergate my supply chain. I had some crusier BPO's which i researched at my towers and did invention for t2 crusiers. Produced carbides, which were used in T2 production. I also had datacores from my agents. When i wasnt at the pos's fueling and swaping materials i was mining for ship production and mining for pos fuel..

I then played the market the best I could with the excess materials.

All you have to do is keep in mind that even though your initial investment may be high, when you sell it, in the end you get your investment back.

Alot of people get cought up in the fact that ooh the BPO's is expensive or the towers are too much. As long as you make isk with it your going to win. If the prices drop dramaticly then you have an issue, but in general you get 100% of your investment back at the time of sale + what ever reveneue you generated from the item. So automaticty you have a a ROI of 100%+...

So the only question you have to ask your self is how much isk do you have to spend..

My story is fairly simple. I got a lowsec Pvp corp to take me on as their mining operator back in 04-05 because they were too broke to buy ships and too lazy to mine them. We locked horns with FUCO around Gonditsa and I ran shipments of basic supplies to every side in the loot/rangers/BoB/Fountain Alliance/ cluster frag and got paid in nullsec mins that I sold for fortunes, as well as set up some of the first of the old 'Death Star' type POS for FA at a sizable profit.

Then a pal got lucky on the T2 lotto and we made mind bending amounts of isk on the backs of every miserable player in this game. It was enough that I bought myself a nice Guardian Vexor before I traded it for several Bhaalgorns (at the time this was a good trade) .

I did some PvP alongside FA, goons once or twice, Rangers quite a bit, Foundation a few times, Black Sun a bit, helped out MC once or twice,

Then I dabbled in high sec carebeardom a while, took up invention when the lotto ended, lost a few billion here and a few billion there on plans that went nowhere and outright theft. Got tired of running a corp so I set up my own solo corp, then started running around wherever suited me doing whatever the hell I wanted.

A jump freighter is a lot of fun if you have a pal or a trusted merc to set up cynos.

Much to the irritation of several alliances, who's policies on things like visitors and NBSI I tend to ignore. With much hilarity on occasion.

I generally don't get into PvP much anymore, since I generally find it's no longer a test of skill, but how many people are in your blob. I have met a few worthy players, but most of the time it's just a bunch of losers that hide when they can't jump haulers or outnumber the target enough to guarantee a lossless win.

I do miss the old days. Facing down people like loot and STK Scientific and even mo0 used to be fun. Now it's kinda... blah. I go get my PvP jollies in WoT, it's more fun.

Quite frankly, datacores and insider trading.

Every character I have starts out with a 4 month training plan that gives them research project management 4, and some datacore skill 4. That's for seed money.

Everything else is just watching what CCP announces and being sure to have enough in commodities when they do it. When CCP says they're going to increase taxes on PI, I know that no matter what prices will go up. When they say that customs offices are destructable on the highest worth planets, I know that production will go down, which means prices will go up again.

So I buy. I buy a lot. And then I wait to cash out and buy my next toy to go break people's nice things and ruin their fun.

Because in the end the only thing you can count on in EVE is that commodities are worth something and the currency isn't. ISK isn't wow gold, it is neither hard to come by nor hard to buy in a literal sense. If I wanted a billion ISK to hold I could have it in an hour for less then the price of a movie ticket and popcorn (these days... ). The great question is what you plan to do with it.

If you have a plan that will very certainly net you three billion isk if you start with one, and just need the one, then obtaining the one is easy. Most people just don't have that plan.

PI literally prints isk in 0.0, generated half a billion worth of uranium so far (1% tax owns)