Science & Industry

The following is the content of an article I recently wrote in the EPM User Guide. Enjoy.

Perhaps the most fundamental task as a producer is to decide what to build, and with the wide range of items in the Eve static database, that can be an extremely daunting task. Eve Isk Per Hour used to be my go-to research tool, but even before Crius wounded it, it was very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Recently, I've found a tool that is brilliant at finding the good items, called Eve Manufacture Tool. It's still in a fairly rough shape, but with a bit of patience, it's possible to find juicy items within a couple of hours. I find it superior to other third party tools (Fuzzwork, etc) in that it uses pricing in your region, allows you to integrate existing teams, and allows you to quickly sift through a large collection of items. Here are the steps I've used:

• Create a batch on the Manufacturing tab.
• Set your pricing region and build system.
• Click on Add All.
• Wait quite a while
• Save
• Sort by ProfitPerHour and start deleting all the things you obviously can't build, e.g. drugs, faction, meta, plus T1 or T2 depending on your target. Deleting from such a large list is a bit slow, so this phase is the most time-consuming part of a research session.
• As candidates bubble to the top, jump into the the market window in game to see the item's average daily volume, and eliminate anything that is obviously low volume. Also, make sure you can buy the blueprint and make an educated guess as to the ME that you will be producing.
• Save

I did this until I had ten viable candidates at the top of the list, and then I multiplied the item's markup by its average daily volume to get a comparison of "profit in play" for each item. Profit in play won't be a direct indicator of an item's probable value, as it ignores the number of active competitors, but it will give you an indication of how healthy an item's demand is. As always, adding a blueprint to your portfolio is going to be a bit hit and miss, even from month to month, as market dynamics (demand, competitors, teams) fluctuate.

Correlating profit in play and IPH to my current top eight sellers, we can sort of see that both factors play a part in an item's net profitability, which might be useful as a point of comparison as you attempt to upgrade your blueprint portfolio.
IPH PIP Profit
5.5mil 500mil 410mil
5.7mil 300mil 400mil
1.8mil 250mil 340mil
2.1mil 750mil 150mil
1.1mil 50mil 140mil
480k 17.4bil 110mil
610k 120mil 100mil
3.9mil 100mil 100mil

It just occurred to me that with a bit more work, you could divide PIP by the quantity of an item listed on market. That would help to factor in the level of competition to improve the point of comparison.