I’m setting my PI from the same system where the installations are, have everything trained to lvl3 (except advanced planetology), and the change from when I set the extractor heads to after submitting the changes is a decrease in total extraction of nearly 70%. This only appears to have started in the last week. What gives?
Example, extracting Ionic solutions shows a total output of 1.013M units. When I hit submit, this dropped to 349.3K units. Is this a bug, or did CCP add a massive error rate into the calculation?
It is down to your skills, I cannot recall the skill name, maybe planetology or advanced planetology. Essentially this determines how accurate the readings are, the higher the skill the less difference between estimated and actual. This is how someone explained it to me once.
Your survey pane will show the average extracted per hour over the entire program. Accuracy will improve with the planetology skills.
The extractor info pane will show current cycle output - 30 minutes. The expected value for this is half the program average per hour but it will vary a bit.
I think you all are missing my point. I get there is some discrepancy in the system, but it appears to have magnified in the last couple weeks. Before I had a 10-20% difference margin on extraction rates. Now it s almost 70%. I’m wondering if CCP revamped the calculation and added or increased a margin of error. However, I didn’t pay that much attention before (because it was never a huge factor), but now I’m getting negligible returns on PI. Where it once took 3 days to fill my storage unit with P1 materials, on the same planet, with the same pilot, it is taking a week or more.
Cycle times vary from 15mins onward depending on how long you set your cycle. If people look the small bars you can see the huge drop in output after initial cycles, then it evens out to slower drop which lasts until the end of your cycle.
Faster cycles = more stuff but more work.
Was ionic the stuff for coolant from storm planets? I didnt really notice any huge problem with them when i did hisec PI on storm planet. I did move to 0.1 lowsec after bigger profits though. Hisec is just for training or factoryplanets if you dont have to pay huge taxes.
You can vary the length of your program from 1 hour to 14 days but cycle times are fixed - 30 minutes for extractors and basic industry facilities, 1 hour for advanced industry facilities. I have a couple of highsec storm planets making coolant and have noticed no reduction in ionic solutions. Yield will reduce over time as the deposits are depleted and you’ll need to move your extractors but that hasn’t changed as long as I’ve been playing.
If anything, I’d say CCP may have buffed highsec planets a bit - I’m getting excellent yields.
Ok. My point still appears unclear. Everything is the same on the user end. I run 23 hour cycles, with 10 drilling heads. I don’t really look at the division per chunk other than to determine how many processing facilities I need to keep pace, but rather the Program Output Total Units shown at the bottom right of the extractor control unit survey program interface. When I am placing the head the total output will show, for instance, a program output “Total: 1,033,418 units” before I hit the “Install Program” button and then “Submit” the changes. If I go back to the extractor head after submitting it shows the program output “Total: 343,728 units.” This is on the same lowsec planet I have been doing PI on for the last 4 months, but it is only in the last couple of weeks that such a huge discrepancy has shown up. I have not changed my skills, or anything else (number of extraction heads, length of program, where I survey from, etc.), but the difference has between survey estimate and actual extraction totals has become huge. The pilot is basically a PI/SP farming alt that sits in the station and (used to) go out once a week to collect the resources. Now, it has been a week and the storage facility isn’t even 1/3 full because of the drop in extraction rates.
Did this change this year ? They used to start with 15mins and go up from that doubling in duration roughly.
Edit: checked this out for fun, extracting is still 15min to 4hour cycles depending on how long your program is as i remembered, my values did change roughly 20-40% from estimates into actual numbers when i hit submit. I have lvl 4 on both planetology skills but i was on opposite side of New Eden, which afaik doesnt matter. The factories are ofc static 30 or 60min cycles as always.
When i did PI i did accept that the values were just rough estimates and ballpark figures, i learned to live with it and just swap the extractors around every now and then.
