I came here seeking answers to simple questions, but from the looks of it I doubt this will be much better than the flames and rants I got in game chat and other sources. First I watched this video and others and they seem to be full of bull ■■■■. I don’t know how else to express it. It is like everyone overlooks or ignores some basic math here.
Maybe I should not say anything at all and let everyone think these videos like this are pure gold. I am not picking on this youtuber, there are others, this is one of many tutorials. After long thought on this, I decided to come here and ask, if anyone else realizes what I am talking about here? If you never watched any of his videos, this person is very spastic in his speech and mannerism. He just gives us the most hype about planetary industry.
Now here is my issue. He says you need to use 3 toons across 6 planets to make 400 million isk in one month or 30 days. Why? Hopefully you watched the video or understand the concept. Why would I do all that stuff, when I have 1 toon, with 5 planets, cranking out as much as 900 million per month without any of this extra effort? The video and method described makes no sense to me. These videos should be titled Let me show you how to make minimum profit from AFK planet farms.
Maybe no one talks about the elephant in the room, because we don’t want the market to take a dump? Here is the math.
I have a toon on 5 high sec temperate planets. I am farming nothing but these Complex Organisms. which sell fast for 8 isk each or hold out for 13 isk over 3 months. The end.
These alone will sell in market and I am farming 480000 of these per day on one planet. At 8 isk each, 3.8 million isk per day or 14.4 million units per month at 8 isk is 115.2 million isk from one toon on one planet. Multiply by 5 planets and you get 576 million isk. If you can wait and pay a broker fee, the 13 isk each will reap 936 million before taxes.
Anyone here want to explain why I would use isk to build a factory to make these into tier 1 items? Please remember you need 3000 units / 24000 isk worth of any raw to process those to tier 1. I am amazed anyone goes beyond farming the raw material. Please explain what I am missing out in this convoluted process. I still have all this raw material to sell at the end of the month, or did I screw the pooch and the market sales will suffer?
You could try your own method and see for yourself!
Some things you may encounter are that P0 (complex organisms) are huge and fill launchpads and your ship in no time. Their ISK per m3 is incredibly low.
It also is no effort, in fact even beneficial if you take taxes and hauling time into account, to place a few basic factories so that the extraction planets produce P1 rather than P0.
So Proteins, rather than Complex Organisms.
People will use and buy P1 for their factory planet inputs.
I cannot think of why anyone would want to make their own life harder hauling huge P0 instead, so even if their ISK value appears good on the market I wonder what the market volume is. I suspect very few people trade it at all. This means the price may drop as soon as you are producing and selling P0 from 5 planets.
But give it a try, maybe it is better than in the video!
(I haven’t watched the video by the way, but if he describes a P1 setup it’s a better idea than P0).
I don’t watch tutorials, but 400m/month (is that per character or per account?) is incredibly low. You’ll only make 400m per month from PI if you set your extractors to the longest cycle and even then forget to restart them.
You simply can’t compare PI setups without talking about extraction times, taxes, region and hauling runs.
If you restart your extractors daily or even multiple times a day, of course you make more profit than someone who runs 7day extraction cycles… but you also put way more effort and attention into the activity.
The video looks like a guide to some semi-passive income that you just take in addition while doing other stuff and just invest an hour or two per month, then get your ISK on top of what other stuff you are doing. And for that, 400M (per char?) isn’t that bad.
I doubt I will get ‘burn out’ on it, since I plan to leave the one toon micro manage those 5 farming planets. I am not out much isk from even someone as new to this as myself. My set up is 2 extractors directly linked to the launch pad, I hit reset on these from dock, and go about my other business in game. If the lauchpad is getting full I can transfer it to the customs office. Hauling it to Jita is about 10 jumps and under.
No. I cannot find the exact time index, he mentions multiple toons on 6 planets each over 1 month time to make 400 million. I trained one for 5 planets and I am looking at a lot of raw materials. Here is what I am getting at about the processing. 3000 Complexed Organisms at a market value of 24 k isk makes only 20 Proteins at 750 each with a total value now of 15 k isk. Not only did I lose out making 9000 more isk I had to build a factory and wait more time to lose the 9000 I could have selling at raw. Selling at raw is the most profitable.
This person in the video is ramping it up using more toons to harvest multiple planets. I could do the same with my one omega account and have all 3 toons doing 15 planets and still make more selling at raw. However currently, I have 1 toon AFK farming 5 planets, making more isk than what they claim is better somehow.
All people want to do is argue in game chat and it is not the best place to discuss it. I came here to ask, if there was something magic I was missing. I feel like an idiot when people show me I did it wrong, so PLEASE make me feel like an idiot. I have watched 3 different youtube tutorials all explain this and they all gloss over this elephant in the room. Everyone is taking more time to make less isk.
Never is in real life. When you make a dashboard for a minivan, you need resin, the resin has freight cost. Then it gets melted by a machine that runs on electricity. Then we pay a worker to remove it from the injection mold and trim it. However this is just game. Simple and direct. I am hauling this to Jita to sell, there is no cost for me to haul it.
Once again no, I am certain he mentioned in that video he does this spread out over several toons. If I find the time index, I will post it.
I will just track my progress this February and let you know exactly how much my one toon on 5 planets makes in the end.
I don’t think I personally know anybody extracting PI just for R0 (P0) resources, but if you can make it profitable and you’re satisfied with the results then nothing wrong with that. Do it how it best suits you. I produce all the way to P4 but I manufacture citadels and other stuff that need it. I have bought R0 resources off the market though, when I need volume and my extractors can’t keep up. So, there is demand there for what you’re doing.
If what you were asking was why are P1-P4 even needed outside selling them on the market, it’s because they are components for various items in the game.
You always have “costs” doing anything actively in the game. That concept is called “opportunity costs”, because in the same time you could have done something else that could have given more or similar profits. Not doing it is your free choice, but you still had an investment: time. That is why “minerals you mine yourself” are not free. They did cost you time to mine and they are worth their market value in any production chain, no matter if you bought them (and saved time) or mined them yourself (and spent time). Depending on what your character can do and what you like to do, the decision to make is: What is worth more? Time or resource?
Tracking your business is always a good idea.
Regarding to your question earlier: Yes, making Proteins out of Complex Organisms is one of a few cases where you’d actually lose value. For most other raw resources you gain value AND reduce transport volume, which is why in general you are well advised to never extract raw resources but always make P1 out of them directly on the planet. You save yourself lots of hauling runs and the fewer amount of extractors the planets can hold because of the factories that convert raw to P1 is offset by the increased value of P1 over P0. So it’s in general a win-win situation to do that.
However, all prices for PI mats and products are market drive, so at the moment where the price for Complex Organisms is at an all-time-high while Proteins are on a medium price level, that isn’t profitable right now. So your way of selling P0 directly actually is the better decision. You will have to check the market in the future to see how long you can do that and at which point making Proteins and selling these becomes more profitable.
I know very little of PI, but I agree with your math. I am not omega so I can’t say for sure, but I suspect it is the same reason for a lot of trade imbalance in this game. It happens often in a lot of trading econo games.
What happens is new miner enters the game and never establishes a cost for their time. They end up selling their product fast and cheap to get instant rewards. In your comparison above about the minivan dashboard, imagine if you could get away with not paying the worker. You could sell the product and get away with lower costing product. However what I see happening is a worker cutting his own throat by assuming his time is free.
This is a fair point. When you are producing the end production, the minivan and not just the dashboard, then you can sell it above cost. The issue is people selling P1 to P5 below cost, I say let them. I mine ore and gas for profit not production. The same thing occurs when you convert the ore to minerals and up the chain until you hit ship production. Anyone selling as middlemen are bound to not make the profits the miners, farmers, and the end production people make.
I watched the video, and didn’t find your claim, he just says you can make several hundreds of Millions of ISKs, and it’s recommended to start well skilled.
Numbers is not the aim of the tutorial, but how to set up PI in the first place. All after is maths and Excel. My Excel says a filled P0 Epithal makes 30m ISK. Sounds nice, but a filled Epithal P1 makes 100m ISK, and if I fill my Epithal up to the brim with P4, we talk about billions (and have to think about safety).
Like most actvities, the more time you invest, the more money you can make - and the more you get bored.
I’m happy with the billions my P4 planet network is generating, and I would totally hate to haul vast loads of felsic magma through dangerous space. Overal value per transport is a thing when you have to wait/search for good connections to Jita. And I personally like the jigsaw game to craft a nice production network.
Well I did watch about three of those videos, so may have been another. The point I am making here, isn’t about making an alt army to get rich, but the fact is everything above raw is creating a loss of time and isk.
I am glad you are, but consider this, how much raw material did you dump into the P4. I am not saying you are wrong, but look at what I am seeing here. Assume I want to make a 2 m isk P4 Wetware Mainframe. Not because I am building anything, I want to make 400 m isk. I need to build 200, I need to build 1200 each of biotech reports, supercomputers, and cryoprotecant solutions. To just to make the 1200 biotech reports I will need 4000 nanites, constuctor blocks, and livestock. To make the 4000 livestock, I need 32000 proteins and biofuels. My raw complex organisms can make 32000 proteins, but I need 4.8 million to process them. This is only tracking one production line back to raw. I get 8 isk for a fast sale on 4.8 million is 38 million isk or 12 isk on the long 57 million isk.
Actually this is one load, I just picked up over 20 million isk worth and have stored all this stuff in a nearby station. Transfer tax is 12% to 20% on these items, but we all have to pay to move our goods off planet. I will project the higher tax on my 20 m isk and say 16 m isk per day. Thirty days at that rate is 480 m on 5 planets without factory time or progressing to the next level.
This ship appears to haul more than 30 million isk. I am basing the price on the 8 isk times 2.5 million and not the 23.9 est. price. Also the cargo hold has room for almost 3 more loads of this size. That should be close to 80 million per load. If you are talking units, that is less than 10 million units. Not bad for a 24 hour wait.
Malcoy I ran a simple exponential chart for that Wetware Mainframe. It would require you to harvest 86,400,000 raw items on several planets to make the 200 Mainframes. I was going to figure out the total ISK value of the P0. However even at 3 ISK average that would be 259 million ISK. By my estimation, they make +140 million ISK at most grinding all the way up the ladder. I didn’t want to figure taxes, factories, and hauling materials. I would probably sell at raw myself, unless I want to make something to keep for myself.
I have been at this for almost a full week now, averaging 25 to 30 million per 24 hours on 5 planets. It would seem hauling raw isn’t as big of a chore as generating the higher tier items. I would have to say this is better than mining, since it is very inactive work. I am currently skilling my other 2 toons up to work the same way giving my account an estimated 2 billion per month for tossing a switch every 24 hours.
However it would seem, I might should have kept my dumb mouth shut. I noticed the price dropping in Jita on the raw complex organisms from 13 down to 9 isk. You win some, you lose some. Maybe it will bounce back up after a time or I will find another raw material to sell.
This ‘selling just P0’ only works temporarily if the price for P0 is anormal high. Thats can happen by normal price fluctuation for some PI products. That doesn’t mean the system is broken or ‘makes no sense’. Usually producing the higher tier goods will always increase your profits. And the smaller hauling volume comes on top.
… Farm Safe 
