Science & Industry

Every way I calculate it, I'm not going to make any money manufacturing.

I screenshotted my calculation for making drakes. Why would anyone manufacture? Is there something significant I'm not taking into account?

http://img541.imageshack.us/img541/5384/whyv.png

Don't start with ships, they're a difficult market to get into, start with smaller cheaper items like ammo, missiles etc.

Make sure you research your BPO's, how high is up to you, my ammo, missiles are all at MAX ME - sure people say it's pointless going passed a certain figure, but I get the satisfaction that they can't be built any more efficiently mineral wise, it might take a long time to recover the difference in cost / lost profit between an arbitrary ME60 and ME330 but hey, eve isn't a quick game.

what software/website are you using there?

1. Market Bots.

2. Some T2 BPO's.

3. The "OTEC" lock on Moon Goo.


End of story.

Drake's haven't been profitable for months. After tiercide it's become even worse. I feel bad for all the noobers that come into the blueprints channel and buy BC BPO's because they haven't bothered to do the math.

If you really want to make T1 ships look into making frigates. You will need to make them in large volume to get any reasonable amount of profit out of them. Not all of them are worth making though.

forget what everyone is saying about not building ships. Starting with ammo and modules IS the best way to learn without losing to much isk, but you do not have to learn this way.

You need a few basic things to turn a profit.

- As already mentioned, you must have researched BPO's. A Drake BPO with 0 research will cost millions more to build than a BPO researched to ME 10. this is your bigest loss.

- Do not buy minerals from sell orders, place your own buy orders. many will argue that this creates trade profit not manufacturing profit, which is true, but what difference does it make, as long as you sell the ship for more than it cost you to make you have profit. Profit will allow you to keep building, no matter what amounts of that profit come from what activities.

- Never sell the finished ships to buy orders, but set up your own sell orders. Again this is trade profit, but it still goes into your pocket. Whether it is trade profit or manufacturing profit it is still profit from selling that ship.

These three points alone can make the difference between making millions or losing millions of each ship you sell. You need to really watch the market though as you can often get stuck selling a ship built with minerals purchased before a price drop in the mineral market. When prices are down stock up, when prices are high build from you stockpiles.

Many traders make really good isk just buying thru buy orders and relisting sell orders at 3-5% markup. A good manufacturer will increase these profits through manufacturing goods, not rely on this profits to keep numbers up.

This is why starting small is better. It allows you to learn how these elements relate to each other without going broke along the way. Also the BPO's are cheaper. Building from unresearched BPO's or purchased BPC's will often eat up the profits.

personally I jumped right into T2 manufacturing. The profit margins were much bigger giving me room to grow, but the cost getting started was much much higher. This is possibly the most difficult and risky way to learn, but I did it for the challenge more than the profits, so it worked out well for me, and was fun along the way.

This. It's amazing how many people will cheerfully buy minerals from buy orders, spend a couple of hours turning them into a ship, and then sell their now less-liquid final product on a sell order for less than they could have flipped the much-more-liquid minerals.


I am personally pretty disinclined to bother manufacturing anything if I can't buy my raw materials from sell orders and sell my final product to buy orders for pure manufacture profit. Depending on my mood, I may augment that with trade, but manufacturing is such a thin slice of my revenue these days that it's generally not worth the hassle.




No. No. No. No. NO.

All else being equal, as long as you sell the ship for more than you could have gotten for the minerals, you have a manufacturing profit.

If you can't sell the ship for more than you could have sold the minerals, you merely have a trading profit that survived a manufacturing loss.

If plugging a chunk of minerals into a manu-slot doesn't increase your NAV, you should skip it.

This.

Too many people get tied up in profit margins. At first, they're important. Because you don't have that much capital to play with. But they don't scale. You can only inject so much isk into the items with high margins.

The far more important number is how much isk you earn per hour.



For example (examples are right at the time I make them. Depends on the market if they stay right):

Phased Plasma S
http://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/blueprints/0/184/29/5/0/5

You're getting around 100% profit on what you're injecting. For every 1500 you put in, you get 3000 back.

Not bad to start with, when you're low on ISK.

However, this works out as (without any research): 18,000 isk per hour, per slot you're running it on.

Compare that to:
Armour Explosive Hardener:
http://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/blueprints/0/11303/17/5/0/5

For every 160k you put in, you get 260k back. a 62% margin. If all you pay attention to is the margin, you'd ignore this. But it, at the figures here, you're making 600,000 isk per hour, per slot.


That's a no-brainer. Assuming the market will absorb the volume you're going to try to pump into it (Which is why it's worth looking at the market history).

I did say:


I remember when I only had 10 million to inject into my manufacturing of ammo to sell (The Blood Stained Stars Epic Arc is handy for starting capital)

It's just that after you pass a certain point, the absolute margin becomes less important.