Science & Industry

So Ive began looking at what I can use some of my currently unused alts for other than PI mules. One area I've never really gotten into is Industrial/production.

I sat down and did the first thing I could think of - spreadsheeting. Factoring in my trained skills, BPO/BPC ME and such (not counting standings on sells and buys though). Came up with a pretty decent sheet that takes my cost to build and compares it vs the current sell min in the 5 trade hubs.

My problem is I wanted to compare what I have to Isk per hour, and there is what I am not understanding. I can show a profit on an item but IPH shows a loss. Has anyone seen that before? Is there something I missed on my end (likely) or a setting I could have wrong in IPH (also likely)?

I've always enjoyed this aspect in other MMOs, and while I dont have hopes of billions per week I do want to turn a profit lol. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

*One thing I am having trouble accounting for is the industry index, is it worth trying to move around often to take advantage of that or will a few % really impact a small production that much?

Markets are cyclical. There will be times when competition pushes prices below cost but this will attract more buyers, clearing the under valued stock and the price will bounce back up. The key to profitability is discipline - set a floor price you are comfortable with, make sure that floor price is in the normal range for the product and don't chase the market below that price - wait for the market to come to you.

Build things that use the PI you harvest. T2 products and structures all incorporate PI in the bill of material, Vertical integration can significantly improve margins with the current trading fees.

If you have idle research slots, research high value blueprints and sell copies, or fully researched BPOs, on contract. This has a long lead time - some prints will take years to research but I am quite happy with the investment I made in capital component prints and am currently working on structure components.

Also note that building out of a POS atm is cheaper and more economical than building from a station.

You will make more money here because there are reductions in build time + material costs for jobs when building in a POS (Iook at the modules' you put on the POS, descriptions and it will tell you stuff like 2% reduction in material costs etc...)


Mining barges are always good to build.. as they are in constant supply.
as are T2 mining crystals and strip miners (T1 AND T2)

Good theory
More probably due to station traders manipulating the market

In general if you put 5 different people to calculate profit / item, you are likely to have 5 different results.

Eg. one might state that the production price for an item is based on Jita sell price. Sounds simple, right?

In reality there can be several complications:

1) if you operate near Dodixie, it would not be practical to have Jita prices there.

2) you will rarely/never have perfectly up to date price information, how do you take this into account?

3) your item requires 1000 pieces of material A. If you look at min price in Jita, but there is only 1 item sold with that price, it gives very wrong results to you. Should you use average price? Should you calculate average prices of items with lowest sell prices until they add to 1000 items? Should you leave some error of margin just because you have no idea how old your data is.

4) you should most likely use system cost index of your manufacturing location. What if you have 2 locations next to each other and you use both? How old is your cost index data, is it reliable at the point that you want to manufacture something? How should you take this into account?

5) what if you operate between 2 trade hubs. It is possible that 1 of the hubs which is not Jita has items which are regularly sold cheaper than in Jita. If this is the case, is this just extra 'lucky' profit which you should subtract from your win calculations?

6) What do you use as sell price? Long term average? Min sell price? Last week's average? Forecasted price of tomorrow? Again if you are selling 1000 items it might not make sense to use min sell price if there is only 5 items sold with that price.

7) Are you looking to sell it aggressively with low price? Are you willing to wait for a few days to sell it with slightly higher price? The choice is yours but it may heavily influence the answer to the equation.

=> All in all, if some methods show profit, some loss, there is not large enough room for variation
=> Try manufacturing some other product which shows you to make profit no matter which calculation system you use.

My rule of thumb is, if the buy price rises above manufacturing costs and the sell price promises a good profit >50% it is a good time to start building ...

When i was building stuff couple years ago i used EVEIPH to look for good items, and EVEMentat to track the ISK.
Basically i was just looking my sales of items vs my purchased materials and was happy when the green bars were higher than red ones. I purchased everything, didnt gather anything myself.

Sadly Mentat has been abandoned and i havent found as nice program to replace it, did try couple ones like Everus but didnt like any of them as much. I knew i was making profit since i knew how much the stuff cost to make but looking profit graphs and bars is just so satisfying.

The good thing about ammo is that you can 'flex' with the prices/costs. If one type of ammo starts to lose value, shut that down and switch to another, more profitable type.

Keep an eye on SVR...another variable I recently learned about that I'm learning to use to my advantage.

I labeled batches with their cost and sell them accordingly. Gets a little cumbersome, but that was just part of the game. T2 ammo in the right location at the right time can be pretty profitable. Did that for a while and threw in a couple of specific T2 rigs as well that I found a niche location for.

KB