Let me preface this by saying that Planetary Interaction in Eve is something I find enjoyable. It’s for the most part fun to manage, and it’s essentially free ISK. But I have to say after using it for multiple years, the overall UI for the system can feel very monotonous to use in certain scenarios and certain aspects are straight up frustrating. To list:
Visually losing the position of a single storage or launchpad is anxiety-inducing. There’s no easy way to inventory the facilities you have deployed on the planet, so if you accidentally delete a (visually) larger extractor or something connected to a storage unit and you don’t notice you just have something now built you may not ever find while doing PI on this planet. This leads to situations like "Power grid seems low. Do I have a storage hanging out somewhere? ~FURIOUSLY SPINS PLANET TRYING TO FIND~ '. A solution to this would be an inventory somewhere on the planet view or in the control center that outlines what you have deployed on the planet.
More buttons, little more automation. For instance: a way to re-run the last cycle in a click or two. On an individual basis this doesn’t seem like a huge reduction in clicks (it’s not a lot to get extractors goin again) but this in particular is a part of PI that I find to be monotonous. If changes are needed it’s fun, but if you check it and it’s good and just want to reset the extractors for a cycle or two until the node depletes this would be clutch. This is a bit of an odd example as it’s quite specific to my PI setup but overall I think cutting down on monotonous stuff liek this would make it more fun.
The cooldown on ‘expedited transfers’ is too aggressive. I must admit, I’m not 100% certain why there is a 4? hour cooldown on this but I suspect it’s to prevent people from cheesing it in some way/exploiting it for more ISK than intended. But when you have two separate resources in a storage and want to transfer them to x pile an y pile (two separate storages) you can’t do this in one fell swoop. Instead you have to move one of the resources, have that storage using up your powergrid in the meantime, wait 4 hours, then move the other resource before deleting the storage. This is not terribly difficult, but it just feels like a weird gameplay loop to resume the next time you log in. I often forget! Let us queue up the transfers?
With how old the whole PI system is by now, how little has changed with it, and hearing anecdotally from other players that they don’t do it because it’s boring etc it kinda makes me wonder if more people would do it and enjoy it if it wasn’t so clunky/annoying. I know I would!
I quite liked PI, I even recently tried to give it a go again, the tax levels made me laugh heartily and shout “nope.”
From memory, the expedited transfers are for exceptions, when something in your chain has gone wrong, the idea is that you set up your supply chains properly to match their inputs and outputs, I suggest you spend more time calculating these transfer rates and having supply lines that match.
I’ve no idea what your curent set up look like but something I remember using to great effect was to have a central storage, which everything went to, then a factory, that fed back to the same storage, with 3 factories all supplied by and fedding to a single storage, going from tier 1 to tier 3. reduced how many sotrages were necessary significantly.
I like these ideas, I made a post in the Small Things thread about how absolutely infuriating it is to try and find other players command centers when you select “show other players networks” a way to see all net works at once is something i really want so I know I’m not extracting the same resources as someone else in that location, or mainly my alts location but also a list of all facilities on a planet that you con double click and then the camera moves to like when you double click on the surface and it takes you to your command center. a “reset all extractors” button would be nice. these are the reason I’m gonna swap over to only factory planets, I hate resetting extractors every day for 6 toons, would make way more ISK just buying t1 mats and spitting out t3. also yeah the cool down on transfers is obnoxious and servers zero purpose, pi was supposed to go hand in hand with dust 514 so that probably why PI has been left to rot. I’m scared that if CCP does something with pi it will be drastic as I’m sure they would love to shut down another passive ISK faucet, eg. RnD nerf.
Yeah I think I do PI weird for sure because I went from Anoikis → HS, p0 rates kinda suck so I do a thing that goes in phases:
Stockpiling, moving the extractors around the planet just rippin’ up P0op and putting it into storages. This is also kinda how they get lost lol but you can store a lot of p0.
Manufacturing, setting the P0->P2 production I use up at a lower rate (12k/hr p0 equiv). Harder to have extraction going because of the storage units you need to hold it all, but kind of nice to not have to worry about tending to it every 12hr/24hr however long cycles. As the P0 runs lower the storages eat up less and can get some parallel extraction happening to be topping up.
This way I can not only have a consistent rate of production similar to Anoikis when that second phase is up and running, there’s also periods of time where the planets are producing with no input from me whatsoever as long as storage of the p2 is accounted for as it’s being produced. You can stuff a lot into the customs office if needed too.
Disclaimer: I have been doing PI for a long time but only recently started doing it this way, using a couple of alts to see if I can get it working well. I’m still trying to stock up the alts but it’s looking like you can put like 10mil of each p0 or so? before the extraction becomes inefficient due to powergrid restraints. Also not the whole picture!
You can reduce this cooldown a lot by upgrading the links to a higher tier on the route you wish to expedite transfer on.
The only time this happened to me is when I didn’t build next to my command center. I have built next to my command center ever since to more easily find my setup as the game automatically zooms in on it when you open the planet.
If you really cannot find a launchpad, it may be faster to just delete the command center and place another one. They’re not that expensive anyway.
This I wouldn’t say no to.
While I am generally against more automation, the amount of clicks it takes to reset extractor heads is way more than necessary.
Per planet you’re looking at a doublecick to open planet, doubleclick to open extractor, click to stop, click to start, doubleclick other extractor, click to stop, click to start, click to submit. This is 11 clicks per planet or 66 click per character to fulfill the straightforward action of ‘reset extractors’.
It’s a good example of how PI requires many more clicks than meaningful choices and could do with some QoL changes.
While I wouldn’t like this process to be fully automated, I welcome fewer clicks for this task.
Opening the planet automatically zooms in on your command center.
If you place your objects on a different spot on the planet than your command center and then cannot find those objects the simple solution is to place your command center near those objects instead!
Point 2 is related to point 1 and solved the same way.
Why would you want to ‘save’ your extractor positions? Resources are changing and moving all the time.
Not a bad idea, but it’s easy enough at the moment to set your routing to match launchpad order with the alphabetical order of the input items so you always know which item goes where in your factory planets.
I only mine for Water which moves around the planet so the command center never moves but my mining objects do. The save button would help you move your mining objects round the planet without having to start again saving clicks.
… if the trade volume allows you to buy and sell at current prices without your additional production impacting the market.
With 6 characters producing on all their planets, you’re producing 7776 units of GMBP a day. With your setup I think you have 8-day cycles, so every 8 days you try to sell 62k GMBP on the market, which is about the size of the average daily trade volume of GMBP in Jita.
I bet your margins are going to be impacted by your production.
Maybe spread your production and also produce other items than GMBP in your factory planets?
true true , I was thinking the same thing though I didn’t realize that it would make that much lol, spreading it out sounds like a good idea but then I’m dealing with more types of mats, but your advice is sound, cant go crashing the jellie markets. think ill add planetary vehicles and hazmat detection systems too the mix then I could also make integrity response drones. thanks for the guidance also I’m gonna need to get alts 7, 8 and 9 in the mix cause my theoretical max profit at current prices with only 6 alts would only just barely plex my accounts but with 9 cooking while I’m scoopin up the loots and blasting through DED sites as Xer.
especaily when i can make 8 bill a month doing almost nothing…
