Science & Industry

To set the scene here, I am quite r*tarded and not very familiar with industry so help me out on this please..

Previously you could build mods, or compress ore and then haul the lot and then refine it at your chosen destination with practically or no loss at all.

After the changes, the new max skill refining gives you around 76%. Then in the dev blog they go on and explain that to compensate for this, the mined ores have their individual quantities of minerals increased so that miners don't lose out.

But say that I want to buy ore in Jita and haul them somewhere else, if I compress them in a POS or whatever, surely I'm gonna need more base materials to get the compressed end product? And then consequently still lose 25% of that?

Am I missing something here? Or does this mean I should only buy compressed ores, which should be 25% cheaper than the individual minerals to compensate for the loss when refinining?

Compression doesn't affect the amount of minerals you will get out of your ore.

However much trit you can refine out of 100 Veld is the exact amount of trit you can refine out of 1 unit of Compressed Veld( 1 unit Compressed Veld = 100 units of Veld).

Just worked out the maths by refining something, taking its compressed ore jita value, then working out the jita mineral prices for the refined product. In a 50% facility, with a 2% implant and lvl 3 ore skill this came out to the equivalent mineral value being 71% of its compressed ore value.

Even with the extra 2% from the implant, lvl5 for the ore skill and a few more % from a POS or upgraded minmatar outpost this still seems for from a reasonable end product?

Edit: I should add that taking 100 units of the non compressed ore worked out to a even higher market value.

I appreciate that, but even taking non compressed ore the difference seems huge. 20% extra mineral cost on the ship build is quite a large chunk of the profit margin..

As you said, you are new to industry, so some pointers:

1) You are looking at a market that is still in flux from two industry-heavy patches. Much of what you are seeing may not make sense because of that.

2) You are building in the same environment everyone else is building in. Expect margins to be tight, because large margins attract builders that will soon flood the market and bring down the price of what you thought you were going to get rich off of. This also means more efficient operations will eat your lunch.

3) Read through your posts again. There is a business opportunity there because of 1. You might want to put your plans on hold and take advantage of it before 2 comes around and closes it. A successful industrialist is a flexible and alert industrialist.

Thanks for all the replies.

I can't argue with the math, but maybe you can explain what's wrong with what I did. I took a unit of compressed spodumain, flew it to the outpost and refined it. I then took the resultant minerals, added their Jita values together and compared that to the price of the compressed spodumain. I'm not at home so cans get the exact figures, but the spod is 318k from memory, and the combined minerals 226k.

That's around 28% loss, or 20 with more skills/implants. Did I just use the wrong ore? Or miss something? Because if I use the example to buy ore to get mins to the destination I'd have to buy more 20% ore to get the requires minerals.

Thanks again.

Because in null sec they can get an 86.8% refine yield.

All V skills, 4% implant at a 60% minmatar station.

First, from an earlier post of yours:



Your skills (and implant choice) are sub-par. You should fix that before you start figuring you're "x%" short one way or the other.

Furthermore, you're checking the price of an import as compared to (for example) checking the price of something that can be obtained more locally - e.g. veldspar. Not to mention that there are still likely huge stockpiles of the minerals laying around from pre-crius.

in general, compressed ore prices will be a result of the following:

1. 1h POS Fuel
2. Jump Fuel
3. Hauling Time
4. Mining Time
5. Supply / Demand ratio
6. Resultant Mineral Value

Since it's simpler, I'm sticking with Veldspar....

1 Trit = 5.3 ISK/unit
100 veld = 300 trit, therefore 100veld = 1590 ISK / 1 Veld = 15.9 ISK
1 Compressed Veld = 100 Veld (1590) + 10 * {Racial Fuel Cost]

Now, obviously, this is an extreme example, showing the most expensive single unit of Compressed veld in a small POS. Taking it a little further ...


Repro Array = 2 000 000 m3 (per the "Reprocess all the things!" devblog anyway, assuming I counted the zeroes right)

2 mil m3 Veld = 20 mil veld
20 mil / 100 = 200 000 Compressed Veld

Compressed Veld value = 318m ISK of veld + 10 * [Racial fuel Block] + [Hauling] / 200 000

checking with Oxytopes / Gallente fuel, and a 15 jump trip (according to RFF)... (16k ISK) = 329 960 000 ISK / 200 000 units = 1649.8

Seems to be selling at around 2k/unit ... so 20% markup over "cost", before figuring taxes, etc. and considering that this is in hisec where we can get away with offlining a POS for 90%+ of the time.

Note also, that this assumes you have 20 million units of Veld to run. less than a full load of compressed ore makes your costs go up.

Bottom line: compressed ore is selling at a premium because of the convince factor for hauling. That's it.

In terms of ISK, Mineral value of compressed ore does not equal mineral value of non compressed ore because people are willing to pay for convince. As long as the market supports this behavior miners are better off compressing their ore and selling above the ore's mineral value.