Science & Industry

I'm just starting to dabble in manufacturing. My main started out as an indy toon before i went to PvP; I needed more income so I started a new indy toon.

Am I better off selling the minerals I get from the ore or should I be manufacturing things?

ATM I'm doing fuel blocks with my PI, which will continue.

BUT

I'm starting a collection of BPO's and before I get too many of them, or have too much money invested, I want to know if it is even worth it. Most BPO's i've done the calculations on seem to yield slightly more ISK for the product than the materials needed. But this does not take into account the time needed to do the production runs.


I've been making some ammo on a small scale, and it seems to get a pretty good return.

Can anyone shed some light on what (if any) are the best things to be manufacturing for Income's sake in High Sec?

Another good thing about manufacturing ammo is that you can relatively easily scale your production quantities to match the minerals you are producing yourself. It's a decent source of income for an alt character that wants to do some part-time mining and efficiently convert the minerals into profitable goods that are easy to sell.

Once you move from building ammo to building ships and equipment, you will find that you quickly outgrow your own mining output (unless you are in a corp with a large team of miners that are dedicated to your production effort). You then have to begin buying some or most of the minerals you need for production, which of course means more time must be spent managing buy orders and moving purchased minerals to your manufacturing location. Put simply, larger-scale manufacturing can quickly become a full-time job.

Our corp got it's start in this way. We mined for a brief period and began building T1 missiles used by mission runners (this is, like, 8 years ago). Our manufacturing team quickly outgrew our mining output, even with a 5-man mining team, and after about the first year, we stopped mining completely. Our time was better spent managing mineral buy orders and handling the transport and manufacturing logistics. Over the years, we graduated to equipment, ships, components, and now T2 ships. Definitely a full-time effort for us, but as industrialists, that's what we enjoy doing.

Download the program in my sig and play around with different items. You will find that many items will earn you a profit but the real key is finding out what items you can move on the market. For that look at build times and try and analyze the market data in game to see if something is selling or not. Use logic too like, is this an item someone is going to need a lot of skill points to use? (ie, 425mm Railgun II's) or not? (Large Antimatter Charge)

It'll take some trial and error but keep at it and you'll find your niche.

Thanks for all the replies.

I will probably be sticking to fuel blocks and ammo for now. Im making large hybrid and projectile atm.

HOPEFully...Saturday. If my wife lets me geek out

If not, then it'll probably be next weekend