EVE New Citizens Q&A

Faction Ship and module BPC can only be purchased through LP stores. So you run missions or do FW to get LP from a corp that sells the BPCs and then you trade in LP + isk for the BPC.

I am pretty sure that you can build ships that you can not fly.

Don't worry about making "lots of isk" right now. Just focus on learning the game. Most of the ways that can make you isk involve learning a bit about the game.

Just as a head's up there is isk to be made in industry but it is by no means a get-rich-quick scheme. Further you could actually loose money if you aren't paying attention.

Also another note that the market in this game is player driven. That, by definition, means that there is no formula on how to get rich in this game. Even if someone found a way to make good isk doing something simple, if they told everyone about it then by tomorrow that thing would be loosing isk not making it.

You will have to find your playstyle and your niche in this game. You don't have to go looking for it. Just play the game, try lots of stuff and have fun. At somepoint you will just have a playstyle of your own.

Confirming, there is no blueprint original for the Mallus Navy Issue (or any Faction, Pirate, or Tech 2 ship).

The only way to get faction and pirate ship blueprint is from the Loyalty Point stores found in each station.
And the blueprints will merely be copies (see: limited to 1 run).

Please note that Loyalty Point stores differ depending on the faction that owns them.

The only way to get Loyalty Points for a faction is by running missions for that faction.
Exception: Faction Warfare. There are many ways to earn Loyalty Points for the respective racial militia... however, this comes at the cost of being part of a global war declaration that will make you a valid target to any of the opposing militias anywhere, anytime in the game.

edit:
Fot Tech 2 stuff...
That has to be "invented" by players through a series of somewhat convoluted industry mechanics.

There are some legacy Tech 2 Blueprint Originals in the game (back when there was a "lottery" system for getting them and before players found out that some DEVs were playing "favorites")... but players typically do not sell these BPOs.

And when they do... it is usually for several tens of billions of ISK.

Be at ease though. While mechanically more simple than the invention process, they are not nearly as profitable as some people make them out to be.
And the only reason T2 BPOs have not been removed from the game outright is because there are some modules and items that see little movement on the market... making production with anything other than a Tech 2 blueprint unprofitable.

Categories of items:

Tech 1:
Maulus, Vexor, 125mm Railgun I, Light Electron Blaster I, anything with I (Roman numeral 1) at the end. These are manufactured by players, using blueprints purchased from the market. The market has blueprint originals (unlimited number of production runs) that are sold by npc vendors on the market. You typically need to perform "research" to improve the blueprint's materials and time requirements, to make a profit, because so many people have access to them.

Meta:
The name "meta" comes from the fact that at one point CCP was listing the rank of the item as a "meta level." This stuff is equivalent to blue loot in other MMO's; it is dropped by NPC pirates when you kill them, or sold as rewards for "being loyal" by various navies and NPC corporations (in the Loyalty Point LP store). Maulus Navy Issue is an example, or "pirate" ships like Dramiel or Cruor (you can see them in the Ship Chart app in-game). Or items with fancy names like Azeotropic Medium Shield Extender I. These items are slightly better than Tech 1, and often aren't that much more expensive.

Tech 2:
These items or ships will have a II in the icon, and/or their name will end with II (Roman numeral 2). The ships have specialized roles and high skill prerequisites, and the items have medium skill prerequisites and have stats that are better than "Meta". These are manufactured by players, but you cannot find blueprints on the market. To get a limited blueprint copy with only a couple production runs, you must start with the blueprint copy of the Tech 1 equivalent plus a few other ingredients and do "invention" to get the blueprint for T2. Then you use the T2 blueprint to manufacture the item or ship, and it requires not just minerals, but also advanced materials (salvage, moon goo, planetary mats, etc.).

Officer:
These items will have a green O tag on their icon, and are equivalent to purple loot; they only drop with a rare chance from killing BOSS pirates that only appear very rarely. They have stats better than Tech 2, but are horribly overpriced due to their rarity. Most of the time installing these items in your ship is considered "bling fit", and you'll likely get attacked even in high-sec just to loot them from your wreck. They're typically used in ships that are horribly expensive to start with, like capital ships.

CCP wants to make money, so paying for a subscription with money runs anywhere from $8 to $15, and PLEX costs $20. Costs in-game are controlled by players / supply and demand, but in general CCP seems happy with PLEX hovering at around 1 billion ISK; if it goes more than that they do a discount to increase supply a little.

In any case, the game has various methods of making ISK:

1. Slow and steady: mining, missions, ratting, PI, courier contracts, production (and selling the products).
These scale up if you go to more dangerous space (low sec, null, wormhole), but then you have to deal with a sharp increase in risk from PVP, so the methods change from slow and steady to "do you feel lucky" (see below). These also scale up with better ships appropriate to the task, and Alphas are quite limited in what ships they fly, so they're limited in the income they can make.

2. Do you feel lucky: exploration, scams, theft, suicide ganking, begging.
You can wait days or months before hitting the payload, but when you do, you're set for a while. For success, you have to know the game a bit, know what you're doing. What ships are best for killing industrials or fast frigates, how to set up a camp, etc. A lot of Alphas try this, but don't have the patience, knowledge of the game, or cunning to pull these off.

3. It takes money to make money: trading, POCO or citadel hosting.
You have to buy before you can sell, you have to finance and set up your citadel before you can collect taxes from it. For trade, as an example, with typical profits in the 1% - 5% range, you need approx. 100-500 million to make more than you would mining per hour, so typically people start with "slow and steady" then move to this method. Citadels are at the "billions" range.

4. Pay RL money for it: buy PLEX and sell on the market, pay Omega for alt and extract skillpoints each month (skill farming).
These cost money, obviously. And in many cases, it's MUCH more efficient to work an actual job to get the $15 or 15 EURO that 1 month of subscription costs, than it is to "work" in-game to get the 1 billion ISK for a PLEX. Like, a few hours of work vs. 5 hours every day for a month no breaks.

So these are the broad categories for making ISK. As noted, Alphas are limited in what ships they can fly, and thus unable to do anything more than dabble in the various methods. The Alpha option is more like a trial than a F2P way to play the game forever, and it's been set up that way by CCP because they want your money, like any business.

Currently building Thoraxes (and many many other T1 items) is not profitable, you would make more ISK by just selling the minerals or even better the compressed Ores.

Sure if you like industry, by all means build stuff, but you are making your profits by mining, not building :)

There are many other items which are actually profitable to make, the real industrial guys dont mine, they just buy materials, build and repeat.

Compressing ore is only done on some types of player owned stations or on some types of specialised ships. NPC stations do not have ore compression facilities.

You cannot get 100% ore reprocessing efficiency on an NPC station, the best you can get on an NPC station with all relevant skills at max level is around 70% efficiency. To get higher than that, you'll need to use a player owned station.

Player owned stations are currently going through a slow transition. CCP intends to replace some older types of player owned stations with new types. At the moment the older types are still useable while CCP adds the new station types and the new modules required to do various things on them, but they haven't covered every type of capability that the older stations have yet. Ore compression is one of those capabilities the new types of player owned stations can't do yet.

The older types of player owned stations were designed to only be used by the owner or by a player corp, they were not meant to be a version of an NPC station that happens to be owned by an actual player.

The newer types of player owned stations are more like NPC stations. The owner can control if the station can be used by anyone, or only by themselves, only their corp, only their alliance, etc. The new types of player owned stations currently have two basic types, a general purpose type, called a "citadel" and a more specialised industrial type, called an "engineering complex" which has built in bonuses for blueprint research and construction/manufacture of ships and other items.

There is a third type of new player owned station coming later this year, called "Drilling Platforms" which specialise in collecting resources (ore/ice/gas). CCP hasn't said exactly what their capabilities will be yet, but I expect them to have mining bonuses and compression capabilities, and the release of these new stations may include a module that can be fitted to the other new types of stations (citadels and engineering complexes) which will let them offer compression as well. http://updates.eveonline.com/coming/fall/#

We'll know more about the new drilling platforms once CCP put them onto the test server and players on that server can try using them to see if they work properly, but we don't know when CCP will do that yet.

Cost of these new stations? The smallest size citadel costs around 1.5 billion isk to buy and set up. Engineering complexes are supposed to be cheaper than citadels, so the smallest one should be closer to 1 to 1.2 billion isk (but engineering complexes have fewer hp's than citadels, so while engineering complexes are cheaper, they are also easier to destroy). We have no idea yet how much a drilling platform will cost or exactly what it's stats and bonuses will be.

All of this is to say that you get the best reprocessing efficiency from a player owned station, as well as compression capabilities, but player owned stations are being changed. The older types of stations are going to be phased out and the new types of player owned stations that will replace them are still being added to the game right now. The next type of new station is several months away from going into the game and CCP haven't revealed it's exact details yet, but it should be the type that will have the most benefit for mining, reprocessing and compression.