Science & Industry

Early stage, where you are, is BPCs. Buy them for items you can build for a profit, sell items, increase portfolio of items that you work with repeat. BPOs are longer term, for when you're making a profit and can afford them researched or afford the time to research them, and same kind of thing, keep diversifying, keep expanding your BPO/BPC collection so that when something you make goes unprofitable, you can make something else.

p.s. A massive part of manufacturing is market research.

p.p.s. You probably want to start with smaller stuff so that you don't have too much capital tied up in one set of items on the market. Diversify, don't throw everything into one item that may not sell. You want to avoid high-cost, low-demand stuff at first.

I'm fond of T2 production, but that requires lengthy skill training. Once trained, though, T2 is pretty low risk, you can find lots of items making 30% profit margins or more. Minor market fluctuations can cut your profits some, but they won't turn a profit into a loss. In T1 margins are much thinner. If you are making T1 stuff with 5% profit margins, a sudden market shift may suddenly leave you selling your product for less than it cost you to make. Too risky for my taste. T2 also means low blueprint investment, unless you are building bigger ships (which I don't, profit margins are too low). Researching blueprints for T2 is pointless since the invention process results in fixed ME/PE T2 blueprints regardless of how well researched the T1 blueprints you start with are.

It cannot be overemphasized how important market research is. You simply cannot pick up a random blueprint and expect to make a profit building that item. There are lots of third party tools out there for helping with market research.

As a starting point for T2 I usually point newbies to drones. There is huge demand for warrior II and hobgoblin II drones, and they can nearly always be sold at a substantial profit. There are certainly higher profit-over-time items you can make, but this is a good reliable starting point. The demand is so large that if 10 full time industrialists read this and immediately start making all these drones they can they won't significantly affect the market. Note that once you get away from warrior II and hobgoblin II demand and profit fluctuates, there are other moneymaking drones but you'll have to do the market research to find them.

Some people will tell you "you can make tons of profit selling item X at location Y". This is confusing production with trading. If you can only make a profit selling an item at some frontier location but not at a trade hub, you will usually do better to just buy the item at the trade hub and haul it to the high price market, without all the hassle of actually producing it.

And if you fall into the trap of thinking "resources I produce myself are free", be aware that every real industrialist in the game will make fun of you for being an idiot.

Here's a good item to look into: Core Probe Launchers.

They cost about 10k to make and sell for 15-20k. So by my estimation you can make 5-10k per unit (which represents a 50-100% margin) and they take 30mins to build. This is 500k/slot/day for a well skilled industrial character, or around 250k/day if you are new.

The best part about this is it involves zero effort. Because the margins are so high you can profitably manufacture in jita, and if you are really lazy you can sell directly to buy orders to get instant money to plow back into buying your business.

So to review the best parts of this:
1) Requires no research
2) Can be done in any hub
3) Extremely cheap BPOs (60k NPC price!)

Happy manufacturing!

I still do T1 production and earn billions from it My earnings are largely limited by my laziness.

My long-term goal is to collect every T1 BPO. So far I think I'm only missing supercarriers, titans, and outpost stuff.

Your goals may differ.

I started with one BPO, after asking myself, "What module would everybody in EVE likely use at some point?" I then moved on to a list of similar items, after checking the markets for pricing, trends, stock, and trade volume of course; no point in building something nobody wants, or that a lot of other people already build.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=5460742#post5460742

Market instability = larger profits to be made = more risk.

I'm really chicken when it comes to the market. My goal is to sell a complete production run in no more than 3 days. I get nervous if it takes longer.

I'm usually much more patient on filling buy orders. I have had some up for a couple of months (margin trading skill helps), slowly filling at my chosen price.

The market for my favorite T1 item isn't currently doing well, so I switched to another item. This other item's market collapsed before production had completed. I chose to go ahead and start invention for the T2 version (the T1 items I've already produced are a required base item); which will probably take the better part of a month given all the BPC and T2 components I need. If all goes well, I'll end up with at least 10% profit. I typically don't consider manufacturing anything below 5%.

Unlike many, I don't try to maximize ISK per production hour. Instead, I'll produce anything that will sell fast(er) and still generate a profit.

There's less than ten items on the list that I've been manufacturing for years, so I understand those markets really well. I don't try to understand the markets of every item in EVE. I'm sure there are better items than the ones on my list, but I'm satisfied with the performance & demand of the items I've chosen.

"Civilian" items are not something you should consider. These are rookie items, with a very limited market.

Example: Repackage and re-assemble any rookie ship, and you get an infinite supply of Civilian Miner and a Civilian racial turret.

There are a few BPO for Civilian items, and some are only BPC offered by the tutorials.

Summer is technically here, which traditionally leads to a slump, as people spend more time AFK.

I should have been less cryptic with my "mid to long-term" phrase.

There seems to be truth in Eve to the old saw "it takes money to make money". By the "mid to long-term" I meant that I am quite content to put some real-world cash (via plex) into my gameplay, and wait a long time (6 months or even longer) before the profits start rolling in. Contrast this to working up, very slowly, with only the ISK one can earn as an entry-level miner, manufacturer, privateer etc...

Start with high volume, cheap tech 2 modules.

Normally I'd recommend Drone Damage Amplifier IIs, but *right now* they are at a bit of a low price point due to nullsec meta shifts.

At present I'd buy one of each of a few different frigate weapon BPOs (e.g. 'Light Neutron Blaster I') and other cheap modules you think will sell, then immediately copy them (you will use these copies in invention). Then use some slots to research those BPOs to 10/14 while using others to invent from the copies, then start building.


Medium term, tech 2 frigates. Do not do these without serious research and understanding decryptors.

Sometimes you get really, really BAD ideas this way.

/looks at the ME 5 TE 0 Talos BPC I looted from a POS a while back...

But, of course, shooting POSes can be lucrative.


One thing you can do is ask around in the Blueprints channel (a busy player channel, usually has as many people in it as Dodixie) if anyone is selling bulk tech 2 BPCs. I recently purchased 10k runs of Hobgoblin II from someone that had been 24/7 copying their T2 BPO. You can buy in much smaller quantities than that too (I've spent about five billion on blueprints, mostly T2 BPCs, in the last couple months, building alliance stockpiles of things we use a lot of, but some of those purchases have been of a hundred million).

Vanessa,

I don't know enough to suggest at what level one stops but this is why one might consider stopping short of -20%.

http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/File:Research_time.png