I’ve been doing Planetary production in EVE for almost two years now. Yesterday, I was told something that made me absolutely cringe.
When discussing PI with some other players, one player asked me if I had upgraded my links. At first, I was surprised because I didn’t know you could do that or even needed to. I’ve done many expedited transfers and never lost any goods or resources when doing so. But this player told me that your links could only carry so much. “If your extractor picks up 10,000 resources,” they said, “But your links can only carry 1250 maximum, you lose all those resources.” I was floored! I had never heard of such a thing and I have read several guides and watched videos on PI. If this was true, I have lost billions in resources for the last two years. Naturally, in a panic, I went in and upgraded all the links running from my extractors. This used more power and I had to turn off some extractor nodes. But, hey, I don’t want to lose anything!
But after doing a little more research, I wonder if that player was right. Recent articles talking about the PI change and guides say upgrading links used to be required until a patch was done to eliminate the need. Now, upgrading links is only to reduce the time delay between expedited transfers. I’ve yet to read anything that says a link’s capacity means you lose resources.
What is the truth here? Do you have to upgrade links? Have I lost resources because they only carry so much? One way or the other, I suspect I’m about to feel stupid again.
I don’t know anything about PI, but I do know you should never do anything in EVE in a panicked hurry unless you’re about to die.
If you’ve been doing PI for two years and making money at it, why would you feel the need to rush out and change things based on the unverified claim of another player? You’re profitable; you have time to investigate the claim and decide what to do. The only thing at stake is if you could be even MORE profitable.
If your links are too weak for regular transport (from extractor heads to storage / factory) you should get an error message.
You can see the load of the link by hovering over it. There is a % value displayed.
Most of the time links only have to be upgraded to minimize the period between two expedited transfers. Minimum time is reached here at upgrade level 6 (expedited).
To my knowledge Links have no effect on the cooldown on Expedited Transfers, however there is some truth to what your friend said. In Planetary Industry (Productions) there can, normally there wont be cause for it, be time where you might have to upgrade a link, it all depends on your planet’s logistical layout.
Will have to test the theory on Expedited Transfers…
I’m just trying to figure out why you are doing so many expedited transfers…those should be quite rare and are usually only done when you messed up the routing and need to move the materials around. And as someone else mentioned, expedited transfers are not affected by links, they are a special case of moving stuff.
For the main question though, you can lose resources in a way if your links are not high enough. The main place I have seen this personally happen is when I’m harvesting from a rich planet and my extractor is producing so many resources that the lvl 1 link cant keep up, then I usually have to upgrade it once to accommodate the large volume/cycle of materials.
The last time I did PI, you had to upgrade links if they couldn’t handle the carrying capacity they needed to handle. There was some way to know whether they were overloaded - I think they turned red, or maybe you had to mouse over them or something.
This, you get notified when the links can‘t carry what you request, then you have to upgrade. Never heard about reducing transfer cooldown reduction, but rarely used it.
OP, your friend is right! Hover with the mouse over your connections, if they are showing <100% capacity you are fine, else upgrade the connection, or reroute your stuff using a different connection. I think the overloaded lines are displayed red.
I used to do PI regularly, but got lazy and not maintaining my farm. Didn’t try the new interface.
When you have factory planets and don’t want to do shipments every day for example.
I’m knowingly sacrificing a little yield for a lot of convenience.
See the left and right launchpads? - They are used to import P1. Then I do expedited transfers to the storage facilities which in turn feed my factories. When full, the setup can run for 6 days without the need to haul.
That’s what I need lots of expedited transfers for.
Faster transfer, however, there are conditions when this is useful, namely when the cost of transfer to launch is greater when using a Customs Office.
The improved links lets you output more product faster, so that you can do better than the higher cost (due to tax).
Of course, this implies to proceed with maximum size launch with payload pickup in space instead of using the Customs Office higher tax rate.
That also allows you to make 1 launch at max load every 2 to 5 minutes or so, instead of 30 minutes or 1 hour.
Verify the numbers.
as far as I know… I have only seen a waring on the link now having enough powergrid or cpu when I was routing to any given destination after I had done an estimate on the extractor head. It usually is just the way I ran things…
So it wouldnt actually allow me to finalize the changes unless I upgraded the links. that said, lets say you get a small pool of resource and your per cycle count is rather low. then say you move something and the extracted amount is greater than the previous cycle, will I loose material?
the only way to know for sure is to test it.
Im not feeling really motivated to do this for you, but I bet you can easily find out on sisi in about a day or two.
