Science & Industry

Newbie mistakes huh. I guess I have a few suggestions for that.

1. Don't start making ships. Everyone and their mother thinks making ships is cool. You need to have a decent setup to make money on ships.
2. Produce what will sell in your area. You seem to have this one figured out already. If you are in a decent mission hub, sell ammo that the missioners use. If you are in a big mining area sell mining crystals or harvesting parts.
3. Determine a mid and long term goal. Having a plan means something to work for. It will give you motivation and rewards, and those will make the game fun for you. Do you want to make capitals, corner a T2 market, or maybe stockpile researched BPOs?
4. Plan for purchasing your materials. No dedicated industrialist mines their own minerals. There just isn't enough time in the day to mine enough minerals to keep your production lines going all the time. Factor in the purchase cost and possibly the transport costs into your overall production costs. This will help you figure out how much you can scale your business up in the future.

There are lots of very knowledgeable folks in these forums and hopefully they can give more input. You can also shoot me a mail ingame if you want to talk more.

Good Luck,
KL

Check the size of the endproduct, dont be the guy making 10000 cap charge 400s and 800s 10 jumps away from tradehub and only access to T1 hauler

Thanks for the tips! I'm enjoying it so far, a nice change from what I've been doing. Hoping you all can help with one issue I ran into:

I made me a googledoc (pretty basic I think) to do the usual pull market info and such. But I've noticed it gives me an #NA quite often. What causes that? I can easily fix it by removing one peice of the code and add it back in (literally takes me 5 seconds) but its annoying.

Thanks Steve. Used your stuff a lot over the last few days. Sadly when I look at that link to fix the googledoc its just way beyond me lol

I figure that will be my big starting issue, learning to judge the market volume. But starting with a small volume should keep it under control. I have noticed that some t1 stuff just isn't worthwhile even though it's technically profitable lol.

There are many community market calculators, the one I use the most is: http://eve-industry.org/calc/ if I already know what I want to be producing, Isk Per Hour is pretty good to get a base line for most things, but it lacks in the invention area, though it will give you good data for almost everything else.

TIPS: Don't put your eggs in one basket. Don't put all your isk in one hauler and don't just do one item.

A few quick and dirty tips I've picked up along the way:

1. Buying raw materials from Jita can cut down your production costs significantly. For example, I produced 30 units of an item yesterday. The total cost of mats was just over 1 billion ISK. I saved at least 70 million ISK buying some of the materials from Jita, and that is after the cost of shipping was considered.

2. Don't be afraid to import and export. You don't have to haul anything yourself, and you don't necessarily have to pay a lot to get your items moved via public courier contracts. More on pricing courier rewards and collateral in this thread.

3. Depending on the blueprint, building items in larger batches can make the difference between great profits and negative returns. This can be especially important when the quantity of a given material is less than 100 on a job.

4. POS arrays give you discounts (usually 2%) on all sorts of things. If you can produce in a POS, this can make a big difference to your bottom line. They also drastically reduce job durations and help you avoid paying NPC taxes.

a pos doesn't really make things more profitable (fuelcost + added risk + added work vs 2% material reduction and less taxes is a zero-sum game) it only gets you the profit faster. the 2% ME should NOT be the decisive factor here.

as long as you stick to T1 production, a pos makes sense when you have money laying around but no other way to increase your investment per slot (or increase slots). by using a pos, you can invest 25% more over the same time.

That is true. The 2% material reduction is hard to justify a POS by itself. If that is all you consider, then you would need to manufacture jobs with raw materials totaling 13.5 billion ISK in value per month to break even on a medium POS's fuel costs. That 2% savings will still give you a slight advantage over competitors, because you can produce goods at cheaper costs when all other factors are equal. That edge can aid you in market PvP situations and give you more flexibility in market manipulation.

The more important factor is the job time reduction. A 25% reduction in production times allows you to achieve higher market saturation on products that have long manufacturing times, where you cannot produce as much as the market demands.

This can become worthwhile if you earn as low as 1 billion ISK in profits per month. Below is an example comparing the production of an item with high demand (sells as quick as you can produce it). For the sake of this example, let us say the item has a base production time of 1,296 seconds and a profit per unit of 500,000 ISK.

Without a POS:
Max units produced in one month: 2,000
Profit per month: 1 billion ISK

With a POS:
Max units produced in one month: 2,667
Profit per month: 1.333 billion ISK

This difference of 333 million ISK in extra profits more than covers your additional operating costs (about 270M per month last I checked).

Dont buy expensive bpos till you really get a feel for the market. Sure that 1bil bpo could have higher returns than t2 modules but if you're just starting out and capital is limited, this can really slow you down. I bought a brutix bpo as one of the first things I did. Returns were great but they are slow to sell. Having 500m-1b sit on the market for a week or more from a single days worth of producing was not the best move. Fortunately I was able to sell it for the same that I purchased it for, even though that was a high market price. Thats another thing, pricing bpos takes experience and you can screw yourself over if you set out to buy a bpo right off the bat.