Science & Industry

generally profit is pretty simple

Sell price - cost to manufacture and sell item = profit

This includes sales tax in stations, or contract fees etc - basically every isk you use to build and sell it

I use mineral price for what I pay - I don't care what buy orders or sell orders are, I care what it costs me

Yes, so either:

A) you shouldn't buy the minerals
b) you should sell the minerals and not produce

I can't tell you what makes a profit and what doesn't, you need to decide that for yourself based on literally dozens of factors

Thanks for this.

This is pretty much what i thought but just wanted some assurance. It seems like most of the blueprints i have result in a loss.

For production materials, sell order prices are purely academic. If you want to post a billion trit at sell minimum, it's going to sit there precisely until the buy maximum increases to that level. Average prices are pegged almost identically to buy prices because that's where the volume lies.

Jesus the spreadsheet jockeys in this thread explain SO MUCH. Keep on doing what you do guys, I'm loving you hard.

I never said you should buy all your raw materials from sell orders. I only said you should value them as if you did.

Imagine I have a stack of 1,000,000 tritanium. My market currently has buy orders for tritanium at 4.9 isk ea, and sell orders at 5.1 isk ea. I have a blueprint for an item which requires that stack of tritanium. There are sell orders for that item at 5.0M isk. Is this a profitable thing to make?

If you value your tritanium at 4.9M isk, and assume you can sell your item at 5.0M, then you may think this is profitable. However, you could have simply sold your tritanium for 5.1M isk and made even more profit. So in reality, manufacturing this item would have lost you 100k isk (plus installation costs.) So make your profit calculations assuming you are buying from sell orders. If you cannot make a profit under that assumption, then you should be building something else.

Of course, take advantage of buy orders to get your raw materials more cheaply. However, sometimes the market doesn't give you everything you need exactly when you want it. If you have found something profitable to manufacture, then you do not want your production lines to go idle. You can go out and immediately get that last raw material from a sell order and know that you will still be profitable, because that is the way you calculated it in the beginning.

Factoring in BPO costs is tricky. Unlike tools in the real world, BPOs in game don't depreciate. Definition-lose value with use or over time.

You obviously know what you paid for the BPO. Then you can add what it cost you to research it. Remember POS fuel if that research is done in a POS. After this point, there are two ways to do things.

A) The quick and lazy way (this is me.) Assume that the BPO is a capital asset. I always have the option to sell that BPO via contracts, and can probably get approximately (purchase cost + research cost) for it. Therefore, I do not need to factor in a blueprint costs into each item I sell.

B) Build quota. Assume that over the lifetime of a blueprint, you are going to build X runs. Divide (purchase cost + research cost) by X to get the per run cost to add to each item you build. After you have built the X runs, congratulations, the blueprint is now paid off. If you sell it now, then whatever you get is pure profit. If you sell it before building X runs, you can still calculate how much you still owe on the blueprint. Subtract that from the price you sold it for, and learn how much isk the BPO made for you.

The second method is probably "better" from a business perspective. I currently have a number of BPOs in my library for which I am pretty sure I'll never recoup the cost. Then I have a number of blueprints for which I have no clue if they have made me money or not. However, I don't like method B for three reasons: first, it is extra bookkeeping which isn't strictly necessary if you go with method A. I prefer to avoid unnecessary bookkeeping in a game I play for fun. Secondly, how do you choose X? That is a big headache which can be avoided simply by going with method A. Thirdly, method B may subliminally push me toward building sub-optimal things. "The widget blueprint is not quite paid off yet. I should build some of those even though the profits are a bit slim."