Science & Industry

I have been building carriers in low-sec for a little while, but had a break over the summer. I'm now looking to get back into it, but I need to update my spreadsheets to match the changes that came with Crius, practically the swap from compression minerals through 425mm railguns to compressed ore. My spreadsheets are currently set to use mineral prices, but this doesn't give me accurate costs anymore due to ore being more expensive.

So heres my question: How did your spreadsheets change after the patch? Did you change from mineral prices to just using the price of ore / compressed ore?. If you still use minerals and just take ore prices into account what sort of formula's are you using?

My math isn't great, but I get that it's just the ore Price divided by the amount of unit I get once the ore has been refined and this is fairly straightforward with ores such as veldspar, but what about ores where you get different quanities of different mineral types?


Any help would be much appriciated.

Well now you're just teasing me :)

I will answer your question from the perspective of an ore & mineral trader as opposed to someone who builds carriers in low sec. This will still give you the same answer though.

Being a born luddite I don't use spreadsheets either (Don't worry - my advice is sound as a pound. ) :

1) Presuming it's possible to do you will get your spreadsheet to base calculations on you buying minerals at the highest buy order prices at Jita.
2) You will NOT be buying any minerals. You will only buy compressed ores and preferably the 10% varieties or failing that the 5% varieties. Failing that you will be buying ore from MIMAF idiots who have little knowledge of the value of time.
3) You will look to buying compressed ore based on the maximum high-sec refine value which is obtained by using a reprocessing array in high sec multiplied by the highest buy order price at Jita.
Numerous buyers are looking to buy at these prices on the main mailing lists so that seems to be the way to go.
4) Once you get the compressed ore to low sec you can refine it there at a higher rate and make a bit more profit on top.

The Jita sell price of tritanium is 5.4 isk ea.
The Jita sell price of pyerite is 11.33 isk ea.
Etc.

Now buy all of the compressed ore you need, fly it out to your station and reprocess it. Calculate how much your new pile of minerals would be worth if it happened to be in Jita. Compare this to how much you paid for the compressed ore. Say (for ease of math) you paid 20% more for the compressed ore than the Jita mineral value. Multiply that by the Jita sell price.

Your tritanium actually cost 5.4 * 1.2 = 6.48 isk ea.
Your pyerite actually cost 11.33 * 1.2 = 13.60 isk ea.
Etc.

Or, other systems are valid too...

You've got an equation with 4 unknowns but only one equation. You need 3 more. One way to do that is to assign 3 psudo values (jita buy to minerals though this can give very wonky results because the last item bears all the implicit profit/extra cost) the other is to compare refining margins across the board (ie cost of all inputs with the value of all outputs) so you're solving for only a single variable (the overall margin, or let your spreadsheet do iterations (solver in excel) to find the minimal cost, hauling space, or some index you create for both to get the required inputs to build your capital.

Here's a simple tutorial to use solver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfy8fxnZEWk
You'd need the ore to mineral relationships, mineral requirements for the ship, (to be the constraints) and solve to minimize isk or m3 of the compressed ore.