I’m new to manufacturing and industry in general. I know what I want to make but I’ve noticed that there are economies of scale that begin to appear when you perform many runs of a single blueprint at once (i.e an item that needs 7 of component A for 1 run will only need 13 of them for 2 runs)
For the sake of logistics and calculating profits, is there a way to determine exactly how many components i will need for a set amount of runs, ideally in a way that I can integrate in the excel sheet I’ve been working on ?
Each component can be different so it’s not easy. Classes are ruffly the same I would say but then sizes are not within a class. Plus your skills, station bonuses and a few other factors also change things.
I think Fuzzworks has a great tool to help calculate things and there are other 3rd party tools/sites out there also.
So let’s just say that you have a ME 10 blueprint, and you want to make a widget that requires five doodads as an input. The ME will reduce the doodad requirement by 10%, so you’ll need 4.5 doodad, but you can’t have half a doodad so the requirements round up to 5 doodads. If you make two widgets, you need 10 doodads, and the doodad requirement is reduced by 10%, so you only need 9 doodads for the entire job.
TL;DR: Decimal material requirements can exist but will round up to the nearest whole number.
What I do is to pretend to run the job and set the quantity to 1000 and then check levels manually and adjust my multipliers on my spreadsheet accordingly.
Have a look at Fuzzworks.
A very useful calculating tool that I normally use - there’s a few things I’d like to be able to do, but that’s a coding project waiting for time to finish it.
But you are right, there are efficiencies of working at scale, but remember that you still have to have sell them.
A hypothetical expensive item may have a delightfully large profit. However if there’s only typically one or two sold a day, then making fifty and rubbing your hands in glee at the profits you’ve made may suddenly feel really bad as all your capital is tied up on sell orders that don’t move. And you can bet someone else is making them and suddenly you are in a cutting-your-own-throat race.
One think in my Eve life I’ve always wanted to get into is to run the production schedules and manage resource for a large corp. I think that would be a blast BUT it would be a second job…
Thanks for the help everyone ! So I guess the best place to start is to look at how the ME affects the actual quantity of items needed and see how that scales with more runs.
edit: so yeah, i finally managed to predict the exact quantity of item needed for a specific amount of runs by taking into account ME rounding. Had some rogue extra units here and there compared to what the game told me, which drove me mad for a bit, but that’s because I forgot the 1% ME bonus from engineering complexes. Thanks again for the help everyone !
Not sure if that’s what you asking, but what I do is park at jita, open my industry window, select the BP I need to run , set amount of runs, and right click the símbolo Just next to the BP icon and select buy all. Then i got exactly the mats I need ( course after checking profitability). then just haul stuff to factory. Hope I could help.
IMO what you are looking at is important but sourcing your base materials is actually more important. I always found that getting cheap base ingredients to where I was building was always the toughest part.
So actually with my current setup of taking into account the % reduction from ME research and engineering complex, then rounding the result up, I have gotten accurate results for smaller batches. But when the numbers start getting larger (around 10k ish raw materials) I start seeing deviations again, but this time the game tells me I need more than what my excel says.
At this point I think this may be a floating point error somewhere causing the difference, and I’ve simply fixed it by adding 0.5% to what i need to buy, which I just consider to be acceptable waste at this point.