After crafting an Akoman, and realizing the cost of it on the market is nearly the same as the materials cost (even using a player station with material efficiency), I am wondering how people make serious money crafting at all. I am still new to it. I got the skills for material efficiency trained to 5, I think. I’ve checked, but I don’t know if I am missing some skill I am unaware of.
I got a bunch of blueprints awhile back in a bulk thing. Some of them net about a million or so isk in profit when crafted. Some of them (even efficiency 10% on it) have the end result cost less than if I sold the materials outright. Example: the Tristan materials value is 438k ISK, with a 30k crafting fee, but the market value nearby is 450k (cheaper usually in Jita, too). Why even craft Tristans at that point???
Next up is the materials… Rather, shipping them. If I were to get the materials in Jita, I probably could’ve saved idk, 10s, maybe 100mil ISK on the Akoman, but I don’t have a capital hauler, so hauling all of that would’ve taken a lifetime without hiring someone. It makes me wonder how people ship hundreds of millions of ISK worth of materials without always getting suicide ganked. Are the the giant hauling ships really that tanky? I have the skills to pilot one, minus the actual skill for it, I just haven’t had the need to get one prior, and always worried it’d just get ganked in less than a week of having it, anyway.
Tldr; what are all the relevant skills and whatnot to reduce material cost of production. I’ve got to be doing something wrong.
There aren’t any material efficiency skills. There used to be one called Production Efficiency, but they removed it, and it was sort of pointless. Everyone had it at 5 because you effectively had to have it at 5 to avoid pricing yourself out of the market. It was a bit ■■■■, kind of like learning skills.
Invention skills are effectively a material cost reduction to invention, in that a higher success rate means fewer resources consumed for the same output, but most invention is pretty cheap as a fraction of overall production costs.
Not everything is always going to be profitable to build, but there are an enormous number of items in the game.
An event ship like this is not a great item to look at. A lot of the value is tied to a BPC that is both limited (for now?) and still new. The price is in flux and probably falling, but it’s also the whizbang new thing and everyone wants to build it, so material prices (especially for things like NET resonators) are probably high.
Ships, in general, are not an ideal item to build for a newer industrialist. Ships are good if you have a ton of money you want to put to work and a good logistics chain for moving large volumes (both the material and the hulls back to market). They’re not usually the best margin, but they can turn over a lot of isk pretty quickly.
As a starting industrialist you should be looking at rigs, drones, ammo, deployable, and some modules.
re: freight - I’m a huge advocate for public courier contracts. Public courier contracts are brilliant.
Concur. Ships have some of the worst margins in the game. Subcaps, that is. Caps are a whole different ball game, but those are even harder for a new industrialist to master.
Material cost is reduced with BP ME number (highest at 10) and structure role bonuses.
You gotta take risks in this game to find out how things work.
There is no ‘crafting’ fee and we don’t make money ‘crafting’ items as there is no such activity in EVE. Correct term is ‘manufacturing’ and ‘manufacturing fee’.
Some know that they don’t but don’t care because they enjoy the process of gathering their materials to then build something other people will use, or they just enjoy the whole “production plant” idea of it all. They make their money gathering mats and doing market pvp but they lose money on the production side and they’re fine with that. Sounds weird but many people do things that cost them money, because they enjoy doing it.
Some just don’t really think or plan at all, and because at the end of the day their wallet goes up they don’t really know which part of it makes that happen so they assume it’s the whole process.
Some people think that the ores they mined themselves are “free” and thus they won’t calculate for those into their “profit” margin calculation.
Some people are ADAMANT they’re making profit, these are the “I make 30% profit lol you’re doing it wrong” but when you sit down with them and start analysing their costs (which they’re already not happy about) it turns out they had one half product they didn’t account for because “they had that lying around anyway”, and that’s their 30%
Some people just lie
And since you’re competing with these people on the market where they sell their wares at or below cost, you’re going to have issues. Solution, don’t build “cool” or obvious things like ships. Build the small stuff most people don’t think about.
You CAN make profit early on with some basic items in high sec but that requires a lot of market research. Once you gain more experience, skills, characters and start controlling more facets of the whole resource and production process you can certainly do well, but a large portion of that is market PVP, understanding trends and long term resource management. Still not so much production itself, until you get into the big boy league.
Beyond that it depends on where you build and where you sell, some areas are cheap to build with not a lot of competition, that is where you will do better. But having said that you CAN make profit as a starting producer in High sec within a few jumps of Jita, but generally it’s not enough to keep the heater on. Market is PVP, production is PVP, min maxing and planning where you try to outsmart most of the competition (really not that difficult tbh) before committing and doing is how you can make it work.
This kind of discussion was beaten to death over the years but we will always arrive at the same conclusions:
people see the Eve economy as a real economy but it’s not! It’s a game and the mechanics are differents.
We always hear “what I mine is free so it costs me nothing”. In one way it is wrong because it represents time and you could spend the same time on a more lucrative task in the game. But on the other hand, it is right because yes you mined it, you didn’t pay for that ore or minerals. It is just game time and if you have enough or multibox, it represents nothing, especially if you can mine afk in HS.
In the real world, nobody will have the basic commodities for free. It has a cost. So your cost of production will never be close to nil. And you have to make a profit to stay alive while you can never be bankrupt in Eve!
Add to this that there is way more industrialist that needed by the game. that’s a drawback with Eve: some people have dozens of accounts and it is so easy to skill an army of producers that can produce 7/7 and 24/24. As I said the ressources are infinite so you can always produce and flood the market.
So yes, even if with the costs of the material, it “costs” 438K to build a Tristan, some players will think it cost them 0 isk and nobody will be bankrupt if they sell it for 120K. You are short of money? Go kill some NPC or mine a few more ore that you will sell. After all, the ore exists in inifinite quantity in Eve.
So no, sorry, the Eve economy is far from being close of a real economy and that’s why most T1 stuffs, particulary T1 ships are not interresting to produce.
Now, you can also turn it to your advantage. I live close to amarr and recently produced 24 Storks. The Corax were really cheap in Amarr so I bought 24 Corax instead of building them. So I lowered my production costs on the Storks.
It really depends on if your making the mats yourself to produce the product and what the demand for that product is and where you are building said product
I tend to do things like mine specifically for isogen when building catalyst hulls, ventures and barges. Whether it’s light neutron blasters or mining lasers the idea is to cut costs if I’m doing a run of say 600 catalyst hulls the isogen is like 80 to a 100million alone so now I can sell the same price but leave with a better piece of the pie.
It most certainly does not. You’re one of those dinguses the above posters are speaking of.
(Vertically integrating production lines can help reduce costs by avoiding market tax/profit margins of the people that would have done that job. If you can farm out the least profitable steps to some schmo who will spend a slot-day making 10k isk then do that instead though. YMMV, do the math yourself.)
You’re analyzing my operation through an awfully narrow lens. Cost reduction isn’t my end game; it is the structural optimization that funds my multi-account loop to steadily build a PLEX vault. By securing the price floor on manufacturing, my assets remain entirely insulated from the volatility you chase.
That said, I respect your mastery of market velocity and rapid capital deployment. We just approach New Eden from opposite ends of the economic spectrum, you ride the macro waves, while I anchor the floor beneath them. There is definitely value in studying both philosophies.
But if op wants to know how they sell hulls at cost and are making profit that is how they are doing it.
In a sandbox like eve there’s more then a few ways to get that Plex.
Overall helpful comments, ty. Yes, I know it’s not “crafting”, but manufacturing, I couldn’t recall the exact word when typing the post out, so I just used a similar one. I’ve learned to not consider it as a crazy ISK source, like some youtube video made it seem to be. (They also said planetary interaction was crazy money, but my experience with that has shown it to be pitiable ISK income. That should’ve been my hint they were full of it, I guess.)
Some people make YT videos to inform folks and teach them things, many people make YT videos to get click and views. You can easily recognise them simply by looking at the thumbnail, the title of the video and when checking the whole channel.
Super “engaging” thumbnails following all the meta ideas on how to do those, with catchy titles and YT a channel that pumps out those videos on the regular if not pretty much daily. Assume they’re full of ■■■■ and entirely useless. Not only is it simply impossible to have so many videos and still actually cover important ground, you can tell they care more about making videos than they do about informing you. These are the Lorus, the Benzies, the Acefaces and all other derivatives.
Then you have videos with boring and to the point thumbnails, with factual titles and done by folks who make videos once in a while. They also tends to be shorter videos that are to the point and get started right away. Those tend to be the ones with actually good info.
Most of the secret is in finding the items that turn profits. And hint: these items are not static, i.e. it’s different items at different times which are profitable. It’s in constant change. Today Tristans are not profitable, but 3 months from now they may be. You have to do some research, there are items which allow you to make pretty good money with industry.
If you like the industry game play I encourage you to experiment with different items. Also going to a different region for sales might help as well.
That’s the best advice you can get without telling you straight up what to manufacture.
Some people do it on 24 alts (8 accounts). So, it can be crazy money.
For Akoman specifically, the input materials went 30% up.. If you were already producing blood raider ships already and had the net resonators stocked, you are fine and in green. If you just hit buy all in jita, you get rekt, because there’s hundreds of people doing the same with you.
This is same for all events with new blueprint, you need to pre-stock on components and kinda prayge that ccp will not alter it much compared to other stuff from that faction.
no i just wont participate in the BS, they want to ruin eve let them, i will never build an akoman and the same issue occurs with the losers who control poochvan and low sex and Null sex.
these losers have to realise the mechanic they abuse is the one that would drive the game into oblivion.
The way I approach “vertical integration” personally, it’s not so much about reducing costs, as it is about reducing reliance on external supply… Market buys just tend to be very unreliable schedule wise, so being able to produce the intermediaries is just more convenient, that being said, it is not easy for a newbro to get there, as it requires extensive bpo library, as well as shitton of slots/planning to keep going.
Best way to make isk in manufacture for someone new, is to join a corsp that gives you access to blueprints for free, and/or has a chain set up with buyback program so you are sure whatever you do gets flipped fast.
Because there are places where you won’t be able to sell your ores or minerals but you’ll make a killing on Tristans. Jita is not everything. Unless you produce hundreds upon hundreds of them to sell them in bulk to other manufacturers there’s no point selling them in Jita.