Science & Industry

Hey guys...yea im aware that there are probably 6 dozen and a half threads about this already on the forum, but i'll be damned if i could find any threads entertaining the exact same questions i have in my extensive (3 1/2 minute) search for HOW THE HELL TO MAKE SHIPS AND SELL THEM FOR PROFIT.

So i have a blueprint (whew.) Now what? I've completed the tutorial missions, so i know how to physically manufacture the items. But where and how do i get the materials? Do you experienced industrialists have some mineral wholesaler that you buy from? Cause last i checked, buying the minerals alone costs more than buying the ship pre-made from someone on the market. And that doesnt include the possible cost of contracts to transport it. (I priced it out for an Abaddon...cost in minerals alone from different sellers was over 300 mil while a pre-built ship on the market runs for about 250 mil...) thats a savings of about 50 mil, which is a really significant number to me. How the hell do you guys make money off of this? Tell me everything you're willing to share, please.

Thanks in advance, (But please leave out the eve-lingo...Theres a big noob in the room)

Check out the Manufacturing entry in the Evelopedia.

You have to face the reality that some ships after you construct them, you will never make profit on, ever. I've made some profit on battlecruisers but not nearly enough to make it a full time pursuit and I wouldn't even look at battleships The sad fact of the matter is people will indeed sell ships at a loss because they came into their minerals either cheap and they're dropping the price in the market to compete with other sell orders or they're in the "minerals I mined are free" crowd.

That being said, there are however, certain ships that you can indeed make a profit on. You just need to look and find them.

The blueprint will have some waste, in both materials and time. You, yourself, will have some waste in materials.

To eliminate your personal waste, you get Production Efficiency to 5.
To eliminate material waste in the blueprint, you research Material Efficiency on the blueprint.
To eliminate wasted time in the blueprint, you research Production Efficiency on the blueprint.


Sample: Drake Blueprint On the upper right, it will show the various materials consumed during manufacturing with different levels of Production Efficiency skill.

A raw BPO that comes fresh from the NPC merchant has ME:0 and PE:0. That's a 10% waste in each of materials and time. Getting a blueprint down to under 1% waste is desireable. Getting them to 0% waste is usually impractical (some need dozens of years to get to 0.00% waste).

BPO calculator: http://zofu.no-ip.de/bpo
Type in "Drake" in the text box and hit submit. It will show you the various times to manufacture an item with various skills and blueprint values. You will see that it takes about 1 year in research to get a Drake blueprint down to 0.1% wasted materials, and more than 5000 years to get to a perfect - 0.000000% waste - blueprint).

At this time, I don't make ships for sale. I usually make them for myself, or my corp. When I make them for myself, I'm frequently mining the materials myself, and only purchasing the materials that I cannot mine myself (perhaps the ore comes from places I am not comfortable mining in, or cannot get to). In such cases, a Drake takes about 7-8 million isk in materials I had to purchase. Similarly, when making them for the corp, the minerals (and other bits) are provided from the results of mining operations. If I calculate the cost of the materials I mine at market prices, and add the cost of materials I cannot mine, I get within 5% of the Jita price of the hull.

This part of the game needs very sharp Excel skills to determine what is profitable to make, and for what price. The horrible lead time involved in high-sec research stations means that you have to plan things out several months in advance. This will result in lots of mistakes, and things that were profitable back in February will now bleed isk. When you are calculating the cost of materials, you may also want to calculate the time it takes to gather those materials. Finally, knowledge is critical for making money as an industrialist. You will do a great many hours of "homework" on the web outside of Eve to find out details. There is no shortcut for this homework.

We all started at the point you're at now - the other guys have said all that needs saying except I would start small and work up, you will then be able to absorb the financial hit from your mistakes as you learn. Yes you will make some. If I were you I'd look at ammo manufacture - a perfect beginners project.
Look on contracts for researched Blueprint originals - go to chrukke.de eve site and look at scaling of research values. Most BPO's are overkilled on ME levels.

if you're seriously interested in industry start with ammo (someone already probably said this and I missed it, but just in case...) it's cheaper overall, and has tight margins which imo can help you identify issues you have before you loose a ton of isk on something big like a ship.

That analogy couldn't be any more wrong (or irrelevent to EveO) if you'd actually tried.

So what analogy would you use, when someone uses a buy order to buy 1000 trit at 6.1, makes some ammo with it, and sells that for a combined total of 6500. When they could have sold the Trit on the market for 6.6 each?

I don't understand this whole ' don't build ships ' mentality. I do just fine making ships, and I've only been doing this for 6 months. 200 mil+ profit on one 2 day production run, for just one of my bpos. I might get a lot of indy hate from this, but here's what I've learned over the past months producing ships;

Make a spreadsheet with all your bpos, etc. All you now have to enter in is the price of minerals at your hub, the price of the ship, and the spreadsheet you create should give you an isk/hr ( if you set it up that way). Takes all the guess work out of which bpo you should be using.

It's been said already, but don't but minerals from sell orders. However, I've found that there are some exceptions. Minerals like zydrine and megacyte sometimes don't get shipped in quick enough. On top of that, because the spread on those minerals are HUGE, you tend to get .01 isked really quickly in most hubs. In all honesty, when you find that a specific mineral you are in the market for isn't getting into your pocket quick enough, just buy it. Theres no point in you sitting there for 3 hours .01 isking to get your last group of megacyte. By that time, if you had just bought the material, you would have probably already made back the spread between the two. If you're not producing, you're not making money.

If you have an alt ( you can just make one ), then don't just buy minerals from one hub, and sell from that hub. Chances are, multiple people do this out of laziness, so the profit margin on your ships are going to be very thin. Instead, compare prices from multiple hubs. I buy from at least from 3 different hubs. Let me provide an example;

Currently, with one of my BC bpos, I stand to make just 87 mil for a 2 day production run, at jita prices. However, if I grab some minerals from the other 2 hubs that I buy from, that profit turns to 203 mil. That's a 100+% INCREASE in profit, for maybe 45+ mins more of 'waiting' time.

Trit and pyerite should be your main focus when placing your buy orders. Don't let those buy orders sit too long in the hub! The reason being that the .01 isking can be devastating if you're dealing in low ticket items like trit. Having to add .02 isk to your buy order on something like, 80mil trit is 1.6mil out of the profit you calculated. If you leave that order over-night, theres a chance it could go up .4 isk (due to the crazy volatility of the market these days), which would be a whopping 32 mil. So, if you have the time, get that trit and pyerite out of the way asap.

Get a freighter, or 4.

There are tools online that help you calculate what levels you should research to, in regards to your bpos. Sometimes, it just isn't worth researching a BPO if the time it takes to research it outweighs the money you would be making if you just started to produce it.

I would note, however, that you should start by using BPCs. This gives you a fairly good understanding of which items you could make money on. If you buy a batch of say, drake bpcs, and the finished product flies out the door with you making bank, then rinse and repeat until you're sure its a good, sustainable item. Only then should you buy the BPO. It is crucial that you understand that you havent made a PROFIT on the item until you make enough to 'pay off' the BPO.

Watch out for undercutters! Sometimes if you have your item out there on a buy order, you can get into a .01 cutting war with another seller. If you're on top of it, sometimes you can get him to rage, and post the item at a price FAR lower than what you were cutting at. If this happens, and the quantity isn't too great (1-5), just go ahead and buy him out, and post at the price you were .01 cutting from. Most of the time, you wont be making a huge profit from this, but you're not wasting time having to wait for his orders to sell. However, be VERY careful. There are some people out there who wil undercut you like this, and keep putting up items at this price, so you buy them all out. They just ( most likely ) made a profit, and now you're stuck with 30+ of your item. If you see someone doing this ( usually after the first one ), just pull out. It's not worth the effort and money.

If you have an item that's selling well, don't lump all your cash up and use it on one production run. Instead, buy enough minerals to do half the production run, and while that is being produced, start putting up your orders to do the other hald of the production run. This way, you can keep that line going 24/7, instead of having to wait for your buy orders, wait for the manufacturing, and then wait for your sell orders to get the liquid cash back. If you're wasting time, you're wasting money. The key is to be ALWAYS producing something.

These are the things I've learned from doing manufacturing in EVE. Now I'm going to give you some tips from a RL standpoint that I've learned are effective in EVE ( I'm a business-Econ major, so basically principles I've learned from school that are relevant).

Your BPOS, and everything you have is an asset. Don't ever think of BPOS, or the like as money that is 'gone'. Think of it as an investment. The price of this investment may fluctuate over time, and you may make less on it than you paid for it initially, but it is still something you could make money back on. Given that, you have a property of assets known as liquidity. Liquidity can be either strong or weak based on the need for the item that you're trying to get rid of. Something like a drake fully researched drake BPO is going to have more liquidity than a osprey BPO, simply because of the demand for it. So the rough definition of liquidity is the ability to sell an asset for liquid cash.

In good business practice, you want to make sure your business ( in this case, your manufacturing ) is remaining as liquid as possible. You don't want to have too much of your liquid cash tied up in assets, or the reverse; too much liquid cash and nothing (cont.)

In the end I would say only buy BPO for ships you will use yourself. Build your own and if you can make a profit at times then build some for the market as well. But in the end this is the reason why profit margin is so slim on T1 ships. Because anyone can get the BPO's and build their own. Supply and demand is a little diffrent on hard to find ship BPO's and T2 ship BPC's.

Profit margin on those are a bit higher.

Also consider markets where your customers are unlikely to have the skills to build their own ships. These customers are traped consumers and have to buy your wares. But you will not be the only guy in those markets so competition is involved.