Science & Industry

*cringe*

Don't build ships (or anything), unless you can guarantee a profit.

Everybody thinks it is cool to build ships, even when it isn't profitable. If your grandmother played EvE, she'd think building ships is cool.

Ships are by far the worst items for a new industrialist to build.


*cringe*

If your minerals are free, then send them my way please. Heck, I'll even offer you 1 ISK per so you don't go away empty-handed.


Otherwise I recommend not selling the final product for less than the market value of the materials + manufacturing costs + selling costs, plus a mark-up for the value-added service of manufacturing.

If you see a lower price being offered, it is most likely because someone currently has, or at one time in the past had, lower costs than you do.

The current market values are somewhat meaningless if you built them a year ago for significantly less.

When you can buy materials in bulk, then you might also negotiate for below market prices direct with material suppliers. You would probably need to buy a quantity greater than the supplier could sell themselves direct to buy orders without crashing the market, and potentially haul it yourself (or pay for a hauling service).


Of course there are also a significant number of people like yourself selling their free stuff below current cost.


So what is one to do? Why of course, build something else that is profitable!


Pick a price. List the item. Wait for it to sell. Don't play the 0.01 ISK game.

In the interim, build something else and do the same. Repeat. It is a LOT easier to earn say 100,000 on ten different items, than 1m from a single item. Learn what items you can sell profitably. When you have more items on your list than you have production capacity for, THEN eliminate the lower profit items ... but keep them in mind for later, because the market does fluctuate.


I recommend starting with items that everybody uses at some point. Items that are frequently destroyed are sometimes better than items that are rarely destroyed. Items that are used in quantity are sometimes better that items used singularly. Items that are frequently destroyed in quantity are sometimes better still.

Pay close attention to market volumes. Look at how much sells per day, per week, on Sunday (the busiest day), how many units are available on the market, and the spread between sell orders and buy orders.

Also consider time to sell. Too many industrialist only consider time to build.

Do your own market research! This is the largest part of industry.

Time is money. If you're spending time in-game to mine mats, they're not free.

I would add that the time you spend studying the market/hauling components and products could be spent doing something else which would make you earn money (mining and selling ore/ice, killing npcs in pve, scanning data/relic sites, etc... ). I mean that if it takes to you 30 min to create a product, haul it, and sell it, and you gain a profit of 10 millions, you could have scanned two relic sites and earn 20 millions (this is an example). So never forget that each time an activity is time consuming, its profit should be compared to the profit you would make doing another activity for the same time.

on the other hand, you may, as me, consider that industry and manufacturing is a way to earn money in a different way from your usual activity and prevent yourself for boring, since doing always the same thing (mining for example) can be really boring, even if the profit is better. Don't forget that eve is a video game

MINERALS AND ORE AREN'T FREE!

I value them at what I could sell them for, either compressed or reprocessed, which ever is greater. If I can sell a bunch of rocks and make more ISK than if I spent the time and energy turning them into stuff that's what I'm gonna do. Otherwise I'm leaving ISK on the table. I made a spreadsheet that figures out the best use for my ore based on the Juta market.

... and of course in the time you spent mining you could have done more profitable things, which earned you the ISK to buy the minerals.

* Combat (security) missions
* Incursions
* w-space sites & capital escalations
* Exploration & escalations
* Ratting & anomalies / complexes
* Station trading
* Trade hauling (buy low - haul - sell higher)
* Planetary Interaction (PI)
* Scamming
* Ninja-salvaging
* Pirating / extortion
* Drone recovery
* Ninja fullerne harvesting
* Reaction siphoning
* Gambling
...

The list goes on and on. The main limit is your imagination, and what you enjoy doing.

Continue to mine ONLY if you enjoy it. Same applies to any activity in EvE!

The term you're looking for is Opportunity Cost.

What was the 'Opportunity Cost' of making the ship instead of selling the minerals? Also: What is the Opportunity Cost of the time you spent mining those minerals? (eg: how much could you have made doing *something else*?)



In no particular order:

1: Incursions.
2: Gas Harvesting (ok, yes, it's mining, but far more profitable).
3: Anomaly ratting.
4: Wormhole Sleeper Site Running.
5: Level 5 Missions....



You'll discover, very quickly, that an AFK Autopiloting Freighter is a dead freighter. Hauling stuff through the badlands of HiSec in a freighter is flat out one of the riskiest activities in New Eden, using the AutoPilot makes it an almost guaranteed lossmail.

What is this? You cannot say to my post be closed that is a violation and report will made.

Come on guys, he starts the thread with "the minerals I mine are free". Obvious troll is... well pretty damn obvious.

Props for the community being helpful against all odds though :).