I play Eve for fun, not to maximize ISK / hour or anything like that.
That being said, I’ve always been curious - what’s the general return on real-life hours invested into PI assuming max skills, logins every 24-48 hours, but high-sec only? I know it’s not TOTALLY passive - but I figure if I’m logging in every day to perform some other activities, why not look into tossing PI into the mix. If I can snag an extra < X > million ISK a month with a few minutes of effort every day, why not? Just curious how many digits are in X.
A maximum skill character making P2 in highsec can realistically expect to harvest 1000 units/week/planet. You will be adjusting programs on a 2 day cycle and harvesting on a 3 week cycle. Pick a quiet area far away from the major trade hubs - that way fewer players will be competing for the resource and you’ll spend less time chasing resources around the planet. Also look for planets with a small radius - that way your links will be consuming less power/cpu.
Transmitters are currently selling in Jita for 15K ISK. 6 planets X 1000 units X 15K = 90 million ISK/week. In highsec the export taxes are high, With Customs Code Expertise skill at level 5 you should be able to find lots of good planets with a 10% export tax.
Most of the time requirement will be adjusting programs - this can vary from a few seconds to several minutes per planet depending if you need to move extractors. Keep your planets reasonably close together and harvesting doesn’t take long. Allow an hour/week.
You can train 3 characters on an account to level 4 in the time it takes to train 1 to level 5. Yields will be lower but with 15 planets you can realistically cover half the subscription cost with a couple hours effort/week.
I build my PI into T2 products - mostly drones. This requires more skill but not a lot more time and adds significant value.
Every two days (when I remember) I restart the extractors. Half the time I can not be even bothered to move the extractors when the fields go yellow.
It does not take too much time. All four planets are in the same system, which is close by. So collection is easy too.
The biggest time involved is when I haul the oxygen to the nearest trade hub. When I sell, I check the buy orders and only sell enough to satisfy existing orders.
to me it’s more like, how often do I need to move extractor(ECU) ?
It seems like once per 2week is the way to go. so
destroy
switch overlay to correct resource
find a red spot
select build, ECU, clic
validate
add link, select resource, place heads, select time
export resource to buffer
validate
that’s like 4 min average. You can do faster but it’s not a race ; realistically you will do that in 4 min. so that’s 2min/week/ECU.
then, resetting non-modified ECU is … 30s ? per planet with 2 ECU. let’s say 15s/ECU, this means 52s /week/ECU if reset every 2d.
total it’s 172 s/ECU/week
A character with 5 planets, 2 ECU each will thus require 1725s of activity each week to restart the cycles.
then there is the production, the taxes, the sale, the transport.
I was making P2 in perimeter when the taxes were 3% (with perfect skills). This granted me around 50M worth of items per week, with a 5 min to take the items, a very small tax of (10/2+3 = ) 8% so 56M per week(yeah this is not the correct formula I know), after market tax it is more 54M/week.
Time was 1 min per planet to extract and warp, then 5 min to place SO in jita and come back, total 10min every 2 week, so 5min/week.
grand total was 54M gain per week, for 30 min of activity (I was not using 2d cycles but 4d cycles). this makes 108 M/h per character with max skills , on a 3% planet with low people (trust me few people were actually extracting in perimeter). The travel time can be mutualized with other accounts(not the cycle reset).
However you also need to check if the taxes change and stop extracting when this happens.
I just destroyed everything when TEST took over the customs office and put them to retard level taxes.
You also need to have some margin on your extractors, just because you may want to go somewhere. And have a prog that reminds you to reset them.
Finally, maybe going in lower sec would result in better yield for ECU.
