Science & Industry

Is the only way to be a solo industrialist in Null to haul it all in yourself, or have someone else haul it in for you?

I was interested in a new challenge, so I moved some blueprints out. Now that I'm out here, I can't get any buy orders for minerals and moon parts filled. Any tips for getting established would be appreciated.

It is generally a good idea to produce stuff that is harder to transport than to manufacture locally if your station has a limited amount of resources available. Rigs and small T1 ships have negative compression ratio so that their materials take less space than the finished products. Other good candidates are products which require a lot of PI materials like T2 missiles.

That was very helpful, Substantia Nigra! I have been trying to work out of an NPC controlled station in NPC controlled space. Mining is difficult, as there is a lot of traffic in the area, and quite a bit of it is players looking for prey (currently working on the skills for a covert ops fit mining frigate, though). I am a long way from flying a jump freighter and am too "small potatoes" to justify a contract, so the equilibrium I seem to have found is scanning data/relic sites, and using my null sec NPC base to invent and manufacture TII rigs, since I can supply my own materials. I can see in the future that being part of a larger organization will be the way to go when I'm ready to grow. Your post has given me a good idea of what direction to work towards in the future, and for that I'm grateful.

why d F anybody whould buy for more than jita sell?

And if corp buys for less, just sell in jita.


For cap and massed t2 prod that makes sense to do stuff for SRP stacks, just to avoid hustle of actually sell stuff. But you won't be able to make that amount of stuff ~solo~

Davinthan suggests that a solo indy person is at a disadvantage.

Vibiana asks why people would buy at a price higher than the Jita sell price.

My entire industry effort depends on both of these suppositions and assertions not being true. Mind you I view 'solo' in the context of being the characters controlled by one player, rather than one character.

A solo industrialist can do rather well. I build and sell a range of items, mostly capital ships and modules, and also import-sell others. To do this I have an extensive solo industrial supply chain researching and copying BPOs and providing the BPCs I use in null, and variously sourcing the other things I need to build stuff. I also have several jump-freighter capable characters and virtually all of my people, even my scouts and cyno alts, are able to fly covops frigates and blockade runners.

As for prices, people are willing to pay extra to avoid having to source cheaper items from Jita. They do this either because they cannot easily source direct or they simply prefer the higher-cost convenience of local purchasing. My nullsec home is just one jump-bridge and ten gate-jumps from Jita, but even that close people are quite willing to pay convenience markups. For larger-cost items those markups vary from 5 - 50% while for smaller cost items they can be 200 - 1000%. Depending on the item, the cost, and the convenience people either accept the markup, source independently from elsewhere, or complain about market gouging.
So, if I build a particular capital module I can often sell locally for a 25 - 50% markup compared to hisec sales. That may provide me with a 10 - 50 million isk profit per module. Importing a particularly popular microwarpdrive allows me to readily sell at a 1000% markup ... but I need to sell 100 or so before I make as much isk as the one capital module. Of course my main line of 'industry', bookmark packages, provides isk return on time and background 'research' effort and is not dependent on ingame industry dynamics ... except for the small containers I use for packaged collections.

Even with a decent alliance freight service available people are still willing to pay a markup for the 'I wants it naow!' aspect of local purchase. Like real-life eve dwellers are willing to pay a premium for convenience as well as for perceived status.

Don't be put off, and be prepared to experiment and learn from mistakes. Pursue your intended goals and you'll most likely find yourself somewhere enjoyable, and possibly even profitable.

in NPC space you don't necessarily need to be part of an organisation to profit of them. sell the stuff they need in the system they stage in.

check killboards for their doctrines. aside from killboards, people will always need bubbles, cloaks, ceptors, probes, scripts, haulers, cargo expanders, drones, and many more things that aren't that obvious.

while you are already exploring. find wormholes to highsec and use them to bring stuff through.

o/

That was a long time ago, in galaxy far, far away .... and I had a collaboration of industrialists working with me. Back then I was equipping medium-sized T3 fleets on short notice. I could not do that today.
It's great to keep on bumping into ppl ingame years later. Survivors, despite CCP's best efforts!

The key of Null industrialist is to actually make full use of ridiculous buyback programs like Jita -20%.
The trick is to feed this one. But! Once you did it, you are pretty much covered.

For a time, I ran a business on another account where, I would provide the manufacturing capabilities, bpos/bpcs (including t2). The client would provide the materials, I would provide the bpo(c) and build it for them for a nominal fee. Freed me up from having to deal with mineral prices, mining, hauling et al. Worked damned well until the russians showed up.

I can agree with much of that. When I live in drone space, it was much harder to get materials out of empire and all the way out to our section of space (pre JF). Since people ratted and mined up huge sums of materials, they found it easier to just pay me a modicum sum to build them their ships, ammo and modules, especially T2, since they would rather train PVP skills. That fell off over time as JF's came into being and our jump bridges were sorted out, but still made me a tidy profit while I did other things.