Pi for Noobs (Easy setup)

New Citizens Q&A
1

Expected Return:
2.0 to 2.5 million isk a day per colony.

Expected difficulty of maintenance:
Minimal - less than 15 minutes a day to operate, all the time investment comes from haulage.

Skill required:
Command Center Upgrade lvl IV.

Market Strategies:
Sell to buyers - this takes advantage of sales tax. The spread between long-sales-prices and brokerage fees is often underwater unless you have amazing brokerage rates.

Definitions:
P0 (Raw resource extracted from Extractors)
P1 (Made in a BIF from P0)
P2 (Made in an AIF from 2 types of P1)
BIF (P0->P1 Factory)
AIF (P1->P2 Factory)
LP (Launch Pad)

Ratios:
1BIF consumes 3,000 P0 to make 20 P1 every 30 minutes (40 an hour)
1AIF consumes 2 types of 40 P1 to make 5 P2 every hour.

So - it takes 2 BIFs to fuel 1 AIF.

And it takes 1,500 P0 every Extractor Head cycle to fuel 1 AIF.

The setup:
The best Set-up uses a split base to get more coverage over the entire planet. This is a strange split, but I’ll explain. It costs nothing more to operate, but it gives you the ability to reach more resources since resources move around, preventing you from having to move Extractor Heads around as much

Base 1 - Colony 1: Just a Silo

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Base 2 - Colony 1: Launch Pad with 4 BIFs fueling 2 AIFs

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Visual representation of why 2 bases the way I showed:

  • Black represents base and extent of links or of maximum range of Extractor Heads from Extractor.

  • Yellow represents the links between base and Extractor Head.

  • Red is the Extractor itself.

  • Blue is the temporary link between the two bases when needing to Expedite Transfer from Silo to LP

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  • The method is when you shut-down your Extractor programs for moving the Extractor Heads to better resources, you remove all your Extractor Heads, you build a link between Silo and Launch Pad. Doesn’t matter how far, you can always upgrade it. And you Expedite Transfer the resources you need to your Launch Pad where your factories will be.

  • This method is very easy, is a lot less point and click while giving you better access to the whole planet.

  • This method also takes advantage of the fact that on most planets, you won’t be able to extract enough resources for more than 2 AIFs to continuously operate.

  • If you consider how much you can operate at CC upgrades level 4, you will find that you are probably NOT going to harvest the 18,000 P0s per hour needed to continuously run 3AIFs.

And to use 3 or more AIFs you will have to sacrifice the dual Extractor Head, which needs 36,000 P0s an hour (9,000+ P0s per cycle continously) to make-up for switching the Extractor Programs between the two required P0s.

This is not unusual, it’s just what it takes to go from 2AIFs running off 2 Extractor Heads (more common in High sec and Low sec).

But if you can extract more than 9,000 P0 per cycle, then you can run one Extractor Head, switching between both P0 programs required, and continuously run 3 AIFs.

2 Likes
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Who am I?

I’m your actual Pi master. I understand the production chain better than anyone. My P4 mega factories (1 Mega factory per colony, not per character or account…) consume 1,512,000 units of P0 per cycle.

PER CYCLE. PER COLONY

So next time you see your P0 cycle at ~20,000 and think that’s king.

Come to me and let’s talk, I’ll get you set-up for the big leagues.

3

This seems like an interesting setup and I may give it a go. I am currently in a C5 WH, the PI yield is pretty good and I am mainly making rocket fuel to make my own ammo to sell on market, however 17 days into the month and I am only up 140m on last month balance which is a bit disappointing, given that ive 6 planets per character and 5 characters, So I know it can do better.

I think that given the fact I am in a C5 then I need to be doing at least P3 stuff to keep down on the M3 that I have to move out, Do you have any suggestions for WH based PI? Ive CC V on all characters.

1 Like
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Thanks for taking interest Giddy. I haven’t worked on the numbers yet but I can provide some kilometers of links versus fully supplied AIFs…that’d give us some data about how much AIFs you’re sacrificing on a high-yield world (such as in a wormhole), if the resources land on the other side of the planet and you have to stretch a long-upgraded-link to get them.

Let me know how you feel on the numbers. I should believe you can get 4 or 5AIFs running from your WH planets?

I’d be interested to know.

24,000 - 30,000 P0 per cycle? (x4 per hour?)

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This setup gives you the materials you need to do P0->P3.

You can sacrifice 1 of your planets and run P2->P3 jobs from all the others. This factory build is very straightforward. You have the AIFs you want, and storage/LPs to supply it. A 30 hour buffered factory usually is 2LPs and 1Storage.

It will entirely depend on how large your P0->P2 production chain is. Off worlding the P0->P2 to a “factory planet” doesn’t make much sense, because the AIFs have to continuously run and unless you’re buffering P0 in an all-in-one planet set-up there’s no reason to have a factory planet.

P4 is actually larger m3 than P3 inputs, so that’s not an option.

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My current set up (mainly as I do have a few single planet P2 setups) is this.

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Having put my planets today on a 3 day cycle, i generally reset after 2/2.5 days), If each BIF takes 3k per 30 mins (6k per hour) then the last estimate if 29.7 avg per hour is just under what they need to run 24/7 and because I reset after 2/2.5 days it is probably over the 36k needed.

I then move that stuff to a factory planet once a week, I dont care if this is running 24/7 (i dont want to spend ages doing PI), And I top these factories up with spare materials, I normally drop 25k p2 units in each LP and i think it takes just over 2 days to go through it all (ive not actually checked exact times.)

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I then use the rocket fuel made in order to make T2 missiles, but am not sure if im better off just selling the rocket fuel to be honest, again a math i’ve not done.

7

This is the most interesting question. I’ve been getting into “hunting” for good Industrials to convert Pi into, and so far I’ve found that in Jita it almost always is better to just sell the Pi.

The margin on industrials seems to come mostly from the ME% and fee advantages, and the profit from your Pi is mostly baked into the cake (there hasn’t been a lot of value added that I’ve noticed).

The biggest advantage comes from mass-reduction on your wormhole transit I’d suppose.

8

Perfect, then you are getting about 5AIFs per planet, pretty cool.

The factory planet should be much larger capacity than whatever you’re running. One P3 factory planet should easily run 20+AIFs.

So running it once a week to burn-off everything you produced over the week sounds about right. It won’t run all week and at CCUV you can just add storage to increase the buffering.

For CCUIV that’s not much an option.

9

You have too many links in your set-up preventing you from getting an extra storage likely. Or you just didn’t bother with the storage.

But you can run

  • Left-side-to-LP.
    *LP-to-LP
    *LP-to-Right-side
    *One-link to interconnect each bank on each side should be sufficient.

At least 3 redundant links not needed.

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my first pic with the 6 factories are all BIFS, these are just extraction planets, they get moved the the factory planet which has 20AIFs. So it sounds like im on the right track (bar some extra links on the factory planet which I can remove), but that is only 1 extra link per side.

So I drop 25k Electrolytes on the top LP and 25k Plasmoids in the bottom, they feed all the 20AIFs then the end products goes to the LP for launching to the POCO

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Yep.

For a full run of 2 inputs of p2s works out to like 26640 units exactly.

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Thread bump, cuz was hard to find!

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Standard CCU IV factory planet:

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