Market Discussions

I was told from help to post here from in game so I thought sure. I have no clue or ideas on how much on average one could make a month with PI's. I was considering it but not sure how much it would end up costing. I do have a lot of time on my hands and how much do the skills make a massive impact lol.

Thanks :)

The problem is I honestly know nothing about it. I mean if I were to mine ice I can predict about 6.6 mil an hour. But since I have no clue how anything works on yields and such hehe. That is mainly why I was trying get a better suggestion from someone. Plus its a bit costly to start don't want to throw cash out the window doing so :)

0.5 PI?

It's not a mission.

There are crappy 0.5 PI planets and awesome (comparatively) 1.0 sec PI planets.

oh wow, 20-50 I guess might not be worth doing. Heck I thought it cost that to just set it up hehe. Plus that's daily indy shipping?

Oh so one character can do 5 diff planets? That is not really to bad then. Can we do it remotely also I heard something about that.

Also customs office how does that work I assume rather launch it just goes there and you pick it up and save a few bucks?

This is absolutely true, running nothing but factory planets is incredibly profitable but subject to one important limitation: input goods. The amount of raw goods to supply 1 factory planet of 21 AIF is incredibly high and hard to maintain a steady flow without depleting the market and creating demand and higher input prices. However if you have 3-4 pi alts it is infinitely easier and profitable.

Here is my experience with highsec factory (no extraction) PI.

After making a spreadsheet and calculating the best things to make I found p1-p2 give the best results. The spreadsheet showed awesome numbers of 15+mil/character/day. Which is almost good enough to plex an account each month just from those profits. Naturally, I decided to use 4 characters all running 5 planets with 20AIF each since "It is an easy way to PLEX my accounts and requires little work."

To start off it takes ALOT of clicks to set up 5 planets with 20 factories. Each with 2 routes from LP to factory(inputs) and factory to LP(products). Like break your mouse and get RSI numbers of clicks and that doesn't count the clicks needed for import/export of 3 LP on each those 5 planets. But it took about 4hrs to set up all my characters clicking as fast as possible and once they are setup you won't have to change anything unless you decide to make something different.(pray you never have too).

So I got that set and bought about 500,000 total P1 for each component to fill the storage of 3 LP and the CO for 4 characters (Yeah that was expensive) I loaded up not 1 but 2 freighter loads (yes you will need a freighter) as the total volume of my setup is about 1.2mil m3 to move it out of Jita. Once in my system I found filling all my CO with a freighter is LOL stupid so I got the next best thing a cargohold expanded Orca. It takes about 3-4 loads to fill 5 planets from empty and takes about 30min to do it for each character.

Once everything is going you won't have to check it for 2 days then just export the products to the CO and import what was stored in the CO to the planets and wait another 2 days. Takes about 30 min for each character for import/export. Total runtime is about 4 days. Once that's done you get to unload all the COs (only takes 1 orca load for each character) and then 1 freighter load to haul everything to Jita. Once it's in Jita hope the prices haven't fluctuated much in those 4 days and put everything up for sale. Then hope it sells. I've been sitting on about 4bil of P2 for about 2 weeks now and it looks like it might be a few more weeks.

After doing this for about 3 weeks I got fed up with all the hauling/clicking and have stopped PI altogether.So my advice is
1. Don't do it unless you have a freighter/orca
2. Don't do it if you can't afford having alot of ISK sitting on the market for long periods of time.
3. Don't do it if you plan on using more than 2 characters.
4. Don't do it if you see it as an easy way to make ISK

Highsec factory PI is profitable and an easy way to PLEX your accounts if you don't mind being bored out of your mind and putting alot of time into it every 4 days. Honestly, I would rather grind L4s than do factory PI anymore.

As for the 4 extraction 1 factory planet setup. You will be hard pressed to find enough good planets in highsec extracting P0 and making enough P1 to support even 1 factory planet. Your best bet would be to move to low/null as the planets are better and there is less competition for resources. If you are able you could look at W-space as the best planets are there. But then you will run into logistical problems of moving stuff out and hauling it who knows how many jumps to Jita.

The best thing to do is set up PI for the best profit with the least amount of work possible. That way it's more like datacores in the sense it's passive income. Granted, you won't PLEX your account doing it this way but you will help minimize the amount work needed to grind the ISK each month.

as long as you dont expect crazy numbers you should do pi. but yeah, you need a freighter and a good industrial (ittyV is a god send).

things to know:
dont use 1 day cycles
dont haul every day
dont use factory planets
dont produce anything over p1

if you will do PI on hsec, you have to kiss any dream of crazy profits by running factories goodbye. those days are over now.

on hsec you have some products that look good, with prices over 600isk p/u. forget those, the extraccion rate is ****. go for items with HIGH volumes traded and high extraction rate, something crappy, like water. a water planet on high sec can make a good 2k units of water a day and it sells like hot cakes, and if you hit a hot spot you will extract so fast your launcher will fill up with p0. compared to the ****** 500 units of chiral an over extracted hsec lava planet can make on a good day, its a no brainer.

just set your extractors at 3 day cycles. refresh everytime you remember it. a 3 day cycle will pretty much run like a 1.5 day one if you refresh it before the 1.5 day mark, and if you forget/dont wanna. you can just leave it. DONT set it to more than 3 days, cycle time doubles after that, and it sucks.

you DONT need to pick up your goods every day. just let them cycle untill your launcher gets 60% full then move it to the customs office and let it sit there untill the office is full. this should coincide with the end of the month.

then just make a trip with your industrial and move all the crap to your home, then load it on a frighter and unload at jita. where a sell to buy orders should net you a good 14 - 16m per planet. so youre looking at a free 75m isk per char, per month.


wanna know why you shouldnt produce anything over P1 on hsec and most of all STAY AWAY from factory planets? thats because currently theres NO reason why anyone would buy any p2 comodity for a price higher than mats + hsec tax. wh producers are happy with this because they still make quite a profit and hsec producers keep selling at those crap prices because they are too stubborn to give up on PI or because they never redid their calculations, anyone who tries to sell above mats price + hsec tax will see his stock rot on the market while WH producers sell their free pi producs.

pi taxes were a grand idea, indeed.

if you want to go with the Arcosian idea, your profit will be on volume, so dont focus on one commodity, make every alt specialize on one particular production. otherwise you will end up with his problem, billons tied to products on a market that, tnx to hsec taxes, just WONT let the prices go over mats + tax.

want a free advice? find an empty WH, ANY will do. in fact, find the ugliest, crappyest WH you can,so long you can fit a freighter every now and then from Hsec, drop a POS, and fill it with factories. in a few months you will get tired of printing money...

Good Luck with that Freighter in a Class 1 or 2. A freaking Blockade Runner is enough to close the hole.........

Restarting your extractors too early drains the planet faster. After a certain point in time (only the devs know for sure, but probably after only a few cycles), your ECU removes all of the "to be extracted" materials from the planet's pool and reserves it for you.

If you don't want to spend all your time moving ECUs / heads to chase hot-spots (a.k.a. "nuggets" in CCP parlance) then don't restart your extractors before about the 85% complete point (so not before the 20h mark on a 24h cycle).