Hi everyone!
I have been trying different aspects of the game for more than a year including being in different alliances. After a break of 4 months iam thinking about coming back but this time i want to try something new and see if i stick with it.I have been thinking about starting with industry where i buy some of the materials and manufacture things.
I have been planing to pick a T2 ship which is used a lot and build a whole manufacturing operation around it but the other option is to make fuel blocks, so which one do you think is better and if neither then what do you suggest?
Currently i have two accounts and all of the characters can make PI products, do i need more than two accounts or is that enough to start a manufacturing project with?
I need your advice in the matter so any feedback is welcomed, thank you for taking the time to answer
Take some time to study the market for items youāre interested in building, How much does it cost to buy the materials, what is the average daily volume in the market where you intend to sell, what is the market cycle - many products are only profitable in the top half of their cycle.
Next, consider which links in the value chain you want to participate in - you can mine your own minerals, harvest your own PI, build components, invent, etcā¦ some are skill intensive, some are time intensive.
Right now, Iām mostly building T2 drones. Since Iām self sufficient in PI, itās very profitable but, at that scale, the PI is time consuming. My PI characters are fully trained so I can use the accounts for skill farming and also get them to copy blueprints for capital kits. These additional income streams take very little time.
Youāll need to find a combination that works for you. Itās important to remember that Eve is a game - weāre here for entertainment. As long as youāre enjoying yourself, youāre doing it right!
T2 ships require a lot of stuff to build. Most of the time when I check in jita the materials to build a ship sell for more than the ship itself. Adding on invention plus build costs and you are probably better off selling the components rather than trying to build ships.
I assume most ships are built in nullsec where the builders (and the people they play with) control the whole supply chain required to build the t2 ships. Need people mining the moons for the raw mats, running reactions to get the various other moon materials, then you can build components, then add the components, some PI items, and t1 base items to build t2 items. Citadel rig bonuses are the highest in nullsec and WHs, so everything they build is cheaper than in highsec. And at this point itās pretty much easier to build and move the built ships rather than all the materials. Also they are probably building enough components that they would flood the market.
Iād suggest building t2 components before trying to build ships, this should let you figure out parts of the supply chain so if you still want to build ships you understand more of what goes into it.
Congrats on the return and kudos on trying something new.
Others have offered some good insight, but let me add a couple of things to consider that may or may not be factors in how you want to proceed. This is more of a ābe ready for thisā kind of thing.
Materials
The first thing that you need to be aware of is the kinds of materials that you are going to need for this. T2 mods, and especially ships, require quite a lot more than T1 production. You are going to need:
Standard minerals refined from asteroid ore
PI components, usually P3 or P4 materials
Commodities that are made from moon goo (laser focusing crystals, etc.)
Datacores (optional, if you are inventing your own T2 BPCs)
Decryptors (optional, if you are inventing your own T2 BPCs and want to improve some of the attributes/yields)
Itās the moon commodities that may be a bit of a trick depending on where you are, what kind of sources you have, and what your supply chain is. It may not sound like much, but be sure to crunch the numbers on this as using everything can quickly kill your profit. Make sure to research what you need and figure out what your supply chain is going to be.
BPs and Skills
This will vary quite a bit depending on how you go about acquiring everything, but at a minimum you will need to train the skills to actually build the ships that you want. Depending on where you are now, that could take some time as you do need reasonably advanced skills with some prerequisites to make T2 ships.
Also, depending on what you want, you may also need specialized skills to do the invention of the T2 BPCs and also research skills if you want to use R&D agents to get data cores. There are alternatives to this of course, such as FW or buying them on the market, but if you really want to DIY all of this, there will definitely be some investment in ISK for skills and time to train them. Hereās a good write up of the general process of T2 production along with some of the skills that you will need to do this:
Finally, you are going to need BPs for all of this. Of course you need the ship/module BPs, but you will also potentially need the BPs for the moon commodities, R.A.M components, and perhaps other things along the way. Make sure to research what you are building to see what you want to build and what you want to buy- and yeah, thatās all going to take some start up capital to get this stuff.
Supply Chain
Think about this one carefully. You are going to need to bring in a lot of material and then move the stuff that you build, so think carefully about where you are setting up and what kind of market you are going to be aiming for. How are you going to move it around? Are there choke points that could be risky for haulers? How easy is it to get the stuff that you need to build all of this?
Ultimately, this is a bit of a learning and investment curve. Iām not pointing out any of this to sound discouraging. Rather, I know that feeling of training that last skill that you (think you) needā¦only to realize you are missing a ton of other things and canāt get started yet. That sucks.
I definitely agree with @Chainsaw_Plankton to dip your toe in the water with some T2 modules to get a feel for all of this and decide if you want to keep moving on and up to ships.
I canāt thank you enough for taking so much time and care to reply to my post @Chainsaw_Plankton and you are both right, this seems a lot bigger for a starter so i think i will take slow steps to study this even more.
More than happy to help. Again, I hope none of that came across as discouraging. Doing all of this stuff is fun and can be worthwhile, but I know a lot of folks who have started down this path only to get discouraged as they discovered all this stuff. Wanted to point it out for you early in the process
Industry is great in Eve. I refer to this as the intellectual part of the game because you have to plan, calculate, crunch number, study the market etcā¦
You can become a full industrialist, building stuffs from A to Z. It implies to mine, refine, make the reactions, invent, build the components and then the T2 shipsā¦ The satisfaction to master the whole chain is really great. Or you can join the chain at any stage. Some industrialists only buy T2 BPC and the components and only build the final product.
Anyway, I really think that industry require a specialized toon. T1 industry is really simple but the profits are really limited, sometimes even non existant while T2 industry require a lot of skills if you want to make your own T2 BPC and build the components needing reactions and PI.
So Itās a long process, Donāt be discouraged, months after months, your skills will improve and you will be able to build new stuffs and master the whole chain a little better than the month before.
Be prepared to crunch a lot of Numbers and Excel or google Sheets will be your next best friend for the incoming monthsā¦ You will discover that some stuffs are cheaper to buy rather than manufacturing. Also that sometimes it is better to stop at a stage of the building chain and sell the components rather than reaching the last stage (T2 ship build). Same with the reactions, for some, it is cheaper to buy the final product rather than making the reaction yourself. But what is true on week 10 could be outdated the following weekā¦ so more studies and more Numbers crushingā¦.
So to conclude, it you really like maths and Numbers, you will love industryā¦ if you prefer guns and pvp, industry will bore you in no timeā¦
I also did some industry when I was an alpha clone way about 2-3 months back. The way I do it is just buy BPCs for now since you got limited research slots (I think only 1).
How I did it?
1) Dock in Jita (or maybe amarr in this case)
I choose jita is because I buy the minerals so that I will not mine them and waste some time in the process. And it is guaranteed that your stuff will sell quickly
2) Open you market window and find a good item that has a good volume per day and also got a good profit margin. (I suggest looking at ships)
3) Calculate how much ISK will you make per ship:
Expenses 1: Bringing raw stuff to your system of operation (find a good system with low manufacturing index) BPC Cost + Minerals Cost + Manufacturing Fee = Expenses 1
(I also suggest you get a Kyros to haul minerals yourself)
Expenses 2: [this is option if you canāt haul the stuff yourself or just feel lazy.]
(transporting the output to jita or maybe amarr to sell)
Logistics = Expenses 2
Calculate: Expenses 1 + Expenses 2 = total expenses
Jita Sell (to maximize profit) - Total Expenses = profit
4. Finding a good system to base your manufacturing
Find a good system with a manufacturing structure in place and has a low manufacturing index to lower the manufacturing cost (high manufacturing fee is a big part of manufacturing since it can affect how much money are you gonna make or gonna lose.)
5. If you are lazy to haul the stuff, you can open a courier contract. Join the Haulers Channel ingame (a calculator will be found in the channel) and post your contract there, donāt forget to include the tip in the reward so that people will be more interested and will have a higher chance that your items will be shipped.
6. When you got your stuff to a trade hub. (I prefer the trade hub where you calculate your profit earlier, if you did) Open a sell order (the one that you need to wait for a bit for someone to buy it) to maximize your profitā¦
Last time I sold to buy orders, I lose some ISK, thatās why I suggest to wait for your stuff to sell in sell orders
I hope this helps, I am a bit rusty in industry and writing stuff. If you get confused, read it again, send me an eve mail and i will get in touch on discord.
This is how I made my ISK long time ago, if I recall it right, with 1 manufacturing job running I am looking about 50M profit in under 24 hours job run because I was too lazy to put up a job in the other 3 slots available as an alpha clone.
And by the way, what you do and how you do your manufacturing is your secret. You donāt want your competitors to know what you manufacture and where you actually sell it.
For me the secrecy stuff doesnāt really matter since I moved to null and manufacturing there is a bit better with the high class ores and far away from jita.
Thank you very much , i was in null before i took break so iam heading there again soon, your reply helps me a lot since this seem to be very grand in scale compared to other activities in game.
I am happy that you find my tips helpfulā¦ looking forward on hearing from you soon.
I myself is relearning industry in high sec and thinking about going back to it since I got a stable source of income in null and enough starting money in my trader alt to do some bulk manufacturing.
Also, if you are gonna āindyā you need to do it in a procedural fashion.
You have 2 accounts. First you should dedicate one to fly an Exhumer, and the other to fly a mining booster up to at least an Orca.
Once you have that you can focus one on PI and the other on Blueprints/Manufacturing. And then vice-versa.
Once you have an operation in motion then you can top-off the skills in areas you think you can be most effective. Get your booster into a Rorq and the miner into a Hulk. Then maybe bring in a 3rd toon mainly for PI to manufacture Tier 4 items and use the other 2 for harvesting as many Basic and Tier 1/Tier 2 items as you can.
Yeah i didnāt like the mining part much tbh, i was in Delve before and had a Rorq and another alt with procurer but got tired of the mining fast, Now iam regretting the decision to extract the skill points from the rorq pilot, that was a stupid move tbh.
I will try to stick to one plan this time and follow it no matter what because reallocating skill points just lost me a lot of time.
To that end, having alts are good. Iām not a heavy industrialist by any means, and I primarily build stuff for corp use instead of selling. But I can build T2 mods, capitals, etc.
Iāve got my main that I use for PVE, PI, and Orca duty. Another alt that is an exhumer pilot, PI, and does my refining, then a third alt that does my invention and the bull of my research and building. Add a couple more alts to cover 20-or so PI planets, and thatās my small little crew. I canāt even imagine doing that with one toon.
That said, Iām a HS dweller, so you can definitely do a lot more in NS, but the training and SP requirements to get deep into this are pretty darn tough to do with one alt. It can be done, it will just take for freaking ever
Oh that sounds like a nice operation
Now i wonder, when you say alt you mean a second account? or just the three characters which you can have for each account? and if yes then how do you usually skill them up, do you just disable the queue on one and reactivate it on the other or do you just buy the multi character queue token?
I do have multiple accounts, but these specific toons are spread across 2 accounts. I did that so I could have two online at once for Orca/Exhumer mining, hauler and web alt, etc. All are Omega, of course, but I do have an Alpha account as well that I use for unrelated things.
For training you could use MCTs (which can frequently be had for a deal when the various packs come up for sale now and then) or by pausing and training different characters. It totally depends on what works for you.
Also, donāt discount the option of looking for toons that you can buy on the Character Bazaar if that is something you might want to do.
