Science & Industry

Planetology and advanced planetology are not only worth it, but necessary if you want an efficient setup.

To illustrate try this. When placing your extractor you will see the estimate of the units per hour you will extract. This is NOT your actual yield. It is an estimate based on your planetology skills. When you install the program, click on the extractor again and look at that number again. How far off is it from what the estimate said before you installed the program?

That is were planetology skills come in. When you look at a planet and see the resource distribution, that is not the actual resource distribution. it is a survey based on your planetology skills. The lower your skills the larger the margin of error between what you see and what is actually there will be. This really becomes evident if you scan a planet with two different characters with equally low skills. You can see two completely different surveys, it can look like two different planets. Which one is right? well if both characters have very low planetology skills or none at all neither of them is right. Placing extractors on a planet based on poor survey skills is a total carps shoot. Like you have seen, you get decent results on the abundant resource, but really bad on the more rare one.

the higher your planetology skills, the smaller difference you will see between the estimated survey numbers and the actual yield you get after installing the program. You get a nice break here in that you only need planetology to 4 to train advanced planetology. training planetology to 4 and advance planetology to 3 is what I would consider the minimum if you actually want to make isk off PI. All my toons have it trained to 4/4 which is close enough for me. Training it to 5/5 should make the survey numbers the same as the actual numbers but being off by 5% is not bad. with zero skill you will have about a 50% error which can make what looks like a hot spot a dead zone. Train thew skills you will not regret it.

I did the same as you when I started way back when PI was first introduced. I had a hell of a time finding enough noble metals. Now with P and AP trained to 4 I often find hot spots that far exceed what I need for noble metals. the skills do make a huge difference.

With Planetology at level 4 and Advanced Planetology at level 3 you will see VASTLY increased results from scanning. At Advanced Planetology level 4 I do seem to get more hotspots appearing as well.

I don't know about any further large increase at 5/5 and I probably won't train them past 4/4 as there are many other skills I would like to learn. I only wish I'd trained Advanced Planetology earlier than I did.