Science & Industry

Hi all, I have a question about a theoretical PI project.

I recently scrapped my first PI installation and rethought the thing. I'd want a (mostly) passive income to support/fuel my main activities in-game and plex. So I thought up a factory planet. Whipped up some spreadsheets and came up with the following figures:

At current prices, importing Reactive Metals & Toxic Metals on a 12 AIF planet and exporting Construction Blocks would net me ISK 1,706,400 ISK/day/planet. This is taking into account 10% I/E taxes, buying P1 from sell orders and selling P2 to buy orders.
That, on 3 toons (1 account), 4 planets each, would net me > 600,000,000 ISK/month. Good money is good. A mostly passive plex/month with spare change to blow up is even better.

My main concern here is logistics. P1 doesn't always seem to be sold in great stocks and depending on imports I wouldn't want to get stuck because there are no PI's to buy. A 3 x 4 setup like I have in mind would require 138240 of both P1's/day.

I like the idea because there is wide room for improvement. Buy orders, sell orders, the 10% hi-sec tax... all of this can be improved. Also 12 AIF (and 1 launchpad, and 2 silos) fit snugly on a 2-times improved CC which is half of what I can do, giving me plenty of options to add more AIF's for P3 production in the future. Also, I can easily switch what P2's to produce based on current profitability.

What are your thoughts? Is this viable or am I missing something?

I've had setups for P1 to P2 production that would run for 160 hours between visits. With five of these planets, it takes two or three Orcas. You can visit Customs Offices with a freighter.

Also, the profitable P2 changes regularly, so you either need to keep changing or find a cheap way to stay supplied.

I find it all to be a PITA.

And if you're going through large volumes like that, going low-sec/WH is going to make it HARDER since you won't be visiting with little ships. If you do go with little ships and max production-min storage, you'll be making so many visits that it will need to be your primary income.

I wish you tons of luck. I only do PI when I forget how annoying it was.

Drox

200mil/month on four plantes in hisec?
That's very optimistic

Too much hassle.

Maybe try some lowsec p2 production. You can do it on single planet ( p0->p2 ). You can easily get 10p2/hour ( 15 for level 5 CCU ). Much less effort in hauling and you are not dependant on market orders ( for buying p1 ).
You can get 150 - 300mil doing that ( depends on planet count and CCU level + potential tax reduction at lowsec POCOs ).



You won't. Factory planets on high scale are never comfortable.

Dont assume lowsec PI will be better then highsec. To start the main reason players even suggest this is because chances are they own poco's. The more people in low sec the more isk they make (and the more ships they have to shot at).

Lowsec plants have a CHANCE at being better then high sec, they are not simply better simply because they are in low sec. Also chances are that if you find a planet that is good and is easily accessable it will be over run by other people doing PI on it. A corp put a poco up for a reason, and chances are it will have corp mates + anyone else who found it on it, turning a good planted into a garbage planet.

Also with high sec you have hundreds of planets to choose from to setup on. Do you want to simply accept 4 crappy planets and 1 maybe good (and most likley over run) planet because they are in 1 low sec system? Or do you want to choose 5 great planets with low player activity, ok yield and nearly no risk / reward costs. You'll also not have to deal with sending in alt scouts, waiting for sytems to be clear and safe etc.

In regards to hauling and logistics the best thing to do is pre-plan your setups. have your characters setup to use planets in a simple route (I never go past 8 jumps myself). This way you can easily warp around characters while on another account doing PI. I do PI on 4 accounts so every 2 - 4 days while doign PI on 1 account I have 3 accounts moving stuff. it requires multi tasking but cuts down on the time require for PI each week.

It took Command Centers 5:
16 Advanced Processors
4 Space Ports
4 Silos.
80k m3/week.
What I did was make all of the silos use the same material and the space ports use the other one.
Assign 4 processors per silo/pad pair with output to that pad.

Being a jump or two out of Jita does help, but the sheer volume also means you'll either need agressive buy orders or you will be forced to buy from sell orders. The other trade hubs lack the volume of raw materials you'll need. It all seems to go to Jita.

It is also a significant pain to reset your planets to another product. I wish I could just select all the processors and tell them do something else and convert your routes.

If you give up on storage and go for raw output, you can get 31h/visit (which is really just 1 day plus slop time to allow for when you want to visit.) you can have 2 ports and 21 processors with Advanced Command centers. (You might squeeze a 22nd on if the planet is small enough.) You have plenty of CPU left over, so don't do port+silo, that'll force you to visit the planet while filling up while with two pads, you just make sure your notes tell you which one gets which product. Thus, if you can get 20k m3 in your hauler, you can fill each planet with one visit. 4 or 5 planets, Every Day. Which is kinda good, that way your product stays close to the market timing. A lot can happen to your "profitable" thing in a week.
(16 h and 22 processors with 1 port: 1760 output/trip.
31 h and 21 processors with 2 ports: 2520 output/day.
164h and 16 processors with 4 ports: 1920 output/day.)

Good Luck,
Drox