EVE General Discussion

AFAIK, impossible to know what you're doing without a spreadsheet. That sheet grows over time. The next step is to make a more advanced spreadsheet that already "knows" what builds what with what (simply saves time typing). You get that from the SQL data dump. Next step is scraping market data to fill in the blanks (saves time with copy/paste from Eve). That's ambiguous in terms of the EULA, but according to devs it's OK as long as your tool isn't botting. That is to say, automating buying/selling for trading and so on. You still have to do that manually.

Now given that a few places have gone ****-up today, I'm thinking CCP has sneakily changed the cache format to prevent scraping, or at least make it much harder. I hope they've just changed the format a little, but I've got a feeling they've hit it with a hammer. This means the tool I'm working on won't be able to automatically get (relatively) recent prices. I'll have to put them in manually. But even if I do that, it'll still be better than using my damned spreadsheet.

Just for fun, I thought I'd demonstrate why serious manufacturers like their tools. Here's a paste-bin of everything needed to build 1 x 10MN Microwarpdrive II (the quantities are off, ignore them). Yes, that's a breakdown of the entire tree from finished product to simple moon goo + invention. Long, isn't it.