Is Industry Worth It?

Industry Gameplay Center Science & Industry
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I’ve been doing some spread sheets and working to find an efficient way to mine and produce to make ISK. The issue I’ve run into is that when I tally how much the ore, or even the processed materials sell for (When selling immediately) within my own system, they add up to well over what the selling price of any given product I could produce. Ice sells for more than fuel blocks, Miners sell for far less than the ore or material required, Ventures and Catalysts, Same thing.

My question is, Why would anybody manufacture, when the ore/materials needed to do so are worth so much more? With industry costs and time, plus the fact that the finished product sells for less, you are losing money.

Any insight would be great, Thank you!

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Before anyone can answer that, we must know which math you base your assumptions on.

What “value” you assume for the Ore you mined yourself? Jita buy? Jita sell? Why? Do you mine in Jita? Have you counted in that prices go up and down over the months? Have you considered that transporting them to Jita costs time or money or both? Time in which you could have mined even more Ore? Or that, even when not making direct profits from the production, it could greatly reduce the volume to be transported? And it is easier to sell 10 Ships than it is to sell the millions over millions in Minerals?

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first off you’ll find far more activity on reddit than here.

Secondly… yes industry is worth it but its also a pain in the ass for many now.

T1 products are almost always sold at below refined value. because out in nullsec\Wh you can produce theses items for dirt cheap. so unless you can supply a none jita market for higher than Value… it will likely be a loss.

Faction and t2+ is the only real way to make isk with manufacturing and selling direct to jita.

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Gotcha, Thank you. My home station is only Two jumps from Jita so I use Jita prices for my calculations.

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I value my product at Jita Sell because My home station where I store and make everything is only 2 jumps away. Transporting to Jita in my case only take a couple of minutes in my largest ships, so the lost ore is negligible. And the size of a packaged ship is far greater than any of the minerals required to make it. Take the Catalyst for example, Packaged it is 5000m^3, which is the equivalent to 500,000 minerals in volume. The Catalyst only requires 101,000 to build, so the ship takes up 5 times the space, and sells for less.

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I found it too difficult to make isk from mass manufacturing, especially in jita.

Niche manufacturing, though, can be profitable. That means building and selling at a smaller market with less competition, or finding BPCs that people are selling too cheaply, and buying them to make stuff with a nice margin.

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Jita is the market where sell orders are under the highest pressure so they are usually quite low for products. On the other hand, you would probably not get the sell-price for your Ore or Minerals because if you offer it in masses, you’d be undercut constantly. So the “my ore is worth the current Jita-Sell for minerals” doesn’t really fit. First you’d have to pay sales tax and broker fees to sell it via sell-orders and you would probably have to lower the price a few times before everything is sold which again costs fees for adjusting the price (or leave it in the market and maybe wait a long time before it sells out).

Also you constantly fight against people who:

  • consider self-mined minerals as “free” because they don’t understand that they make loss while producing because they could have sold the minerals instead, just selling their built products for the cheapest sell-order.
  • just want to get rid of large quantities of X, not caring for profits that much, they want liquid ISK rather than getting the best price. Maybe they stole it, maybe liquidate their corp assets, no one knows. There are several reasons why people undercut market prices and often its not about the max efficiency.

But as someone else said: mass producing T1 is only worth it if you can sell it somewhere else than Jita or need the base products for making T2. I once used my own PI to build Battleships and Battlecruisers since I have all BPOs of them with max research level, but quickly realized that the profit came just from the PI components and I would get the same ISK by just selling them and safe all the effort of gathering the minerals for the hulls.

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when they made the big revision to industry along with changing what redions got ore, industry turned into an excercise in futility. after a few painful months they reduced some of the requirements but tbh, only the big industry groups could actually make a decent income from it. some of us still do industry because we like making things, or our corp/alliance mates need stuff.
personally, i lost interest in some aspects of industry as a result of the changes however i do enjoy production and continue to make things without regard to profit

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You also need to consider that some basic ships are given out by the career agents: Ventures, Catalysts, Thrashers, Rifters, Explo frigates…

Often you can buy them in the career agent systems around their reprocessing value. Might be one of the reasons why CCP introduced an artificial demand for these ships from the Paragon agents.

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If you want to be an industrialist, it’s best to move away from the core of trade, unless you are able to compete at those prices. There are other trade hubs you can supply, with wider margins and more profit that can be made. Ventures and Catalysts especially near Paramore stations should be making you profit off the lazy.

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Definitely worth it. It’s how I’ve been plexing 4 accounts for 2 years. I recommend doing a blend of PI and reactions. It only takes about an hour maybe two per day, depending on how streamlined your operation is and how adept you are. But if you do it with discipline, you may pull out anywhere between 2 and up to 4 billion per character per month. PI and reactions FTW.

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There are a lot of underserved places in eve where they are is gonna be a secret people will not normally divulge, but I will say this, take advantage of the distance from trade hubs, the further the better, then set the price for a good mark up.

I found myself not wanting to jump 15 jumps back to my home system for a module and just pay the mark up for speed sake, especially if you are doing combat anoms but didn’t bring say a data scanner or relic scanner, or you got an afterburner equipped but need a microwarp drive instead, or cargo expanders to take the extra loot home, etc.

All these little inconveniences stink and I definitely found myself buying at a higher price than I normally would.

What you’re after is the explorers, combat explorers, these people are normally away from their home systems, those that live in those systems normally don’t need because they should have already have all they need living far away from trade hubs.

TIP: an area to seed is where Cosmos mission area, lots of combat and exploration goes on there, also bring your own combat capable ship (cruiser/battlecruiser), run some anoms, good areas.

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Industry was ruined when caps got gas added to it.
Now its more a chore than fun

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The best way to make isk by Industry at the moment is probably to manufacure t2 items.

I recommend you to look for some niche items that have a decent demand but low enough that the big players don’t want to fill it. This counts for t1 and t2 items for example i made some good profit on gas cloud scoops 1 a few weeks ago. Rigs are often also a Item that can be manufactured for profit.

What also would work is to join a nullsec alliance. The markets there are often under less stress, and you can get your minerals cheaper in their trade chanels.

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In pretty much any null block you will make isk in industry. Modules, guns, ships and then caps.
Get your logistics sorted with good jf buddy to haul in materials not sourced localy from jita, fire up your indy machine and print isk

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Most items produced exclusively from minerals sell below their mineral cost. This is because of the widespread “minerals I mine are free” attitude. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule, with some T1 items in extremely high demand. I won’t tell you which.

However, if you move to T2 production instead, there is a lot of profit to be made. I am a small scale industrialist in high sec. I do it on one account with two characters. More precisely, what I do is manufacturing, planetary industry, invention and datacore farming. No mining, no salvage, no reactions. My profit is 1 to 1.5 billion ISK/month. Still not enough to plex my account. But there is room for improvement.

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Industry requires a lot of research, you have to enjoy playing with the numbers and searching for the good builds. There is definitely money to be made in manufacturing. And there are many ways to go about it, you have to find what works for you through trial and error.

Industry is also directly tied to trading. There are very many variables that effect prices of items.
Price changes occur from updates, as well, and people still have stock of materials which they got at a cheaper price and thus can sell their items cheaper. Or, just coming back to the game and offloading stuff. Or traders getting items at a much cheaper price and selling at below manufactured cost, but still a profit to them. Tons of variables.

I just wanted to pick a seemingly random item, and see if it was profitable for you, so here’s the numbers as of today. (An item profitable today, may not be in a month, ever changing.)

The following assumes max broker fee / tax reductions. ( 1.80% / 3.60% )
Also, material cost is found from buying the materials directly from sell orders in Jita.
Item is produced 5 jumps away, at an NPC station with low cost index.

5MN Microwarpdrive I - 10 ME / 20 TE
Material Cost: $ 64,662.48
Job Cost (2.04% Index): $ 892.00
Total Unit Cost: $ 65,554.48

Current Price in Jita: $ 69,840.00 ( After taxes, profit of ~$ 624.00 /unit – ~1.0% return )
Average 90-day Price in Jita: $ 77,079.23 ( After taxes, profit of ~$ 7,490 /unit – ~11.4% return)

You could easily sell many units of this item in Jita for around 75-80k, and it would likely sell out before your 3 month market order expires. There are roughly 500 units bought and sold a day. Prices fluctuate but stay relatively calm.

Additionally, consider selling in markets other than Jita.
For example, this item is currently going for $ 78,000 in Dodixie, and you could probably sell it for $ 80-100k in a region like Lonetrek, at a small hub, though smaller volume/daily sells.

This is the kind of base level thinking you need to apply when taking on manufacturing, of course it scales and changes depending on what you’re building. Chains can get pretty complex.

Keep in mind, too, that this was just a random T1 item, the first one I chose and it happened to be ~10% profit margin. Not terrible. You can get a lot higher returns on other items, especially T2. Modules typically have much higher returns than ships, but ships have much higher price points so the smaller return is still a lot of ISK.

I hope this explanation was worthwhile to you, please feel free to contact me in game via email if you have any questions. I live close to you, in Lonetrek. Would be happy to chat some time.

Thanks,
Deca Skyward.

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There’s more to it than just that.

The material efficiency gained from doing industry in LS/NS/Wh means that all T1 manufacturing NEEDS to be done outside of highsec else it is done at a severe loss – your only hope of breaking even is the generally low volume and far away marketing away from the main hubs (FW market hubs are generally better, but can still be competitive!).

Due to the extra volume of a ship vs components, it is usually best to ship the mineral/components around and then build the ships very close to where they will be sold.

There is also a very much untapped market for ready-staged-fitted ship contracts. Look at spectre fleet for example, look at where they normally stage their NS roams, and multi-fit 20 or so ships and put them on put them on public contract with a fair and reasonable mark up — and here’s the important part: ADVERTISE THAT THEY ARE AVAILABLE, a message every 10 mins starting 1 hr before that fleet time, and then every 5 mins at the 30 min prior helps. You can even work with the FCs there and they will advertise for you on comms.
Similarly, talk with some of the FW fleet FCs and corps. Put together a boiler plate eve mail and send it out to random militia people. You may be surprised as to how many get back to you.
There are a lot of people who would be very willing to pay a bit of a mark up to buy a fully fit and ammo’d ship for PVP, and save them 10 jumps in a pod to jita/amarr, buying everything individually, fitting the ship, and then taking 10 jumps back to the FW hub.

The main issue comes to advertising, as the contracts interface is absolute garbage and you really have to put in some effort to find what you are looking for – only worth the effort if you already know that it’s there.

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