Market Discussions

As a T1 producer I make 10bil a month with 11 slots at a time cost of 10 minutes per day, so the answer is yes. Eve IPH is imo the best tool for identifying profitable items, but it's still out of action. I've heard others say Fuzzwork is useful, but I've found it severely lacking in realistically calculating costs.

You might find Science and Industry a more helpful place for this type of discussion.

I'm just going to make a wild guess here but I think there might be something wrong with his accounting ;)

Artostes, it's quite possible to make a good living from manufacturing. Obviously you have discovered that you can't do that by making rifters but there are many other items on the market that sell for double or even tripple what it costs to make them. If you take a look at some of my other posts it might give you some ideas.

Main principles I use are this:
1) make stuff in large volume so you keep down the amount of RL work. Every time you have to go to a hub to buy stuff is wasted time that lowers your isk/hr.

2) Trust the market. Don't go for the short sell. The end game in manufacturing is to view the market in the big picture.. You are no longer a trader, you a producer and that means that no trader can buy in the volumes it would take play your end game. For example, don't be afraid to make 5,000 of something that only sells 100 per week if you can sell them for 10 times what it cost to build them. You'll be playing a different game than all of the short sell station traders and you'll make better profits. Implication of this is (a) you *will* build up inventory but don't fear it and (b) you *will* need to diversify... Ultimately to play this end game you will need a metric butt-ton of isk to churn because you'll end up with a truly vast amount of money locked up in assets. If you don't have that now, start small and keep this as your guiding light on the horizon and build up to it.

I'm not kidding. When I started playing this game I borrowed 100mil isk from a RL friend and thought it was a lot of money. I tried everything, running missions, plexing, mining, salvaging.... but none of that pays anywhere near as well as manufacturing. Today (skipping several years) I play casually but make about 400mil isk per real-life hour that I put into it. And that's playing casually. If I played intensively every day (which I don't) I would have a yearly income well in excess of the total amount of isk I've ever lost from PVP.

So the answer to your question is, yes. You can make an awful lot of money from being a producer. But if you don't have a lot of isk to put into it then you'[ll need to throttle your efforts and build up. My message to you is that it can be done and it gets easier as you go. Have confidence.

3) Don't sell everything in Jita. In fact... don't sell *anything* in Jita if you can avoid it. I focus on nullsec for my sales because my big love in EVE is the nullsec game and I have access to markets. If you don't... then at least think out of the box.

4) Don't do everything yourself. I make so much stuff that I would be certifiably insane to try moving it around EVE all alone. I do make runs to Jita but I also use public courier contracts. When you're making 5 or 6 bil isk worth of finished product a week, you either get other people to move it for you or you spend valuable time moving it in multiple trips yourself. Moving it all at once (even if it fit) would be very risky. Couriers are the unsung heros of EVE. Use them. It's a win/win.

and finally

5) Read, re-read, re-re-read and understand the implications of patches. You're in a sand box and CCP takes great pleasure in ploughing the ground. It's part of what makes this game great but as a producer it forms both a risk and an opportunity. When the changes to the geddon happened I made a killing.... On the other hand, right now I'm holding a great many enyo hulls that I may have to wait months to sell. The new patch is coming out this week. Do you know what module tericide means for RCU's? As a producer you will need to develop a keen awareness of this.

Adapt, speculate, and adapt some more. Will all of your "guesses" be right? No. But 80% will. You'll make bad decisions and have to cut your losses sometimes but on the whole it's a numbers game and once you understand how the market is developing you'll be able to win the toss 8 times out of 10.

But ok.... Short term. I'm assuming you need to start making profits on the short term to get the train in motion. I'll give you a hint (since I'm not making them right now). Take a look at small and medium size rigs. Don't forget to account for demand. Run the numbers on T2 modules (check out the modules scheduled for tiericide) and start making certain T2 ammo that you can flip by direct selling to buy orders. That's not efficient but it will inject some isk into your wallet and give you more options after that.

T-

So you're building freighters, huh?

Nope, only smaller ships... lots of them



The problem with some other markets is that they don't support volumes on a large enough scale in a lot of cases to justify the additional effort of getting the stuff there. So if I can turn over ten times the amount of items in jita compared to some more remote location with a slightly smaller profit, I personally would stick to jita ;)

//edit to avoid double post

Some good advice from Tinu and the others above OP.

Some of the T1 frigates and a destroyer are given away in the New Player Tutorial missions so those specific ships are always going to be problematic for manufacturers as traders just buy loads in the rookie systems and move them to the nearest hub and undercut manufacturers.

Thanx for making me look at things from slightly different angle.

True Story. This is why most T-1 ships are cheaper to buy then to build.

I don't even know where to begin with the gall of this statement. First of all, my figures are calculated from API data direct from Eve. Every detail, from recording actual material costs, taxes and broker fees to applying per-day team auction costs are applied to all sales to provide a true profit picture. I've produced the most comprehensive production management application to date in all of Eve, complete with supply chain management, comprehensive team integration and comprehensive reporting, and I've documented its features in nearly exhaustive detail in my user guide. I don't go into details of my user demographics, but I am far from the most successful EPM user.

10 bil a month is only 1.25mil/hr assuming a 23-hour production cycle. I think it's at about 13:00 of my video which explains why high IPH is so trivial to achieve.