Goodbye 2020, you will not be missed.

There’s only one thing that I truly hope for 2021, and that’s that we can go outside more than we did last year.

I have been working from home since March, haven’t seen most of my friends since then either. One lockdown after the other here in Belgium, but we’ll get there eventually.
They finally started with the vaccinations, maybe by the summer I’ll be on the list. As a 32 year old I’ll be one of the last ones, which makes sense, those that are more vulnerable to this shit virus need priority.

Past few days I’ve been trying to figure out the way I used to make ISK again, only to come to the conclusion that I no longer have some of the required skills to even make T2 stuff anymore. Not that I really feel like doing manufacturing but I found a container with over 100 T2 bpc’s in it and figured that maybe I should just create them. That’s not happening.

I’ve put a few other things on contracts, found a bunch of cruiser BPO’s that I once bought and researched with the idea of selling them at some point, well, some point is there. I need the ISK to buy new ships to die in.

The market confused me for a bit, I was used to having an alt in jita and one in Amarr and then just sell stuff in Amarr from what I bought in Jita, but due to the whole gate dissapearing between the route, that’s no longer a viable option. I’m not willing to make those 50 ish jumps myself and definitely not paying for it. So I’m doing a bit of station trading in Jita itself.

In theory I should actually set the buy orders up in perimeter but.. I’m lazy

For now the trading is working well, I made about 2b in the past week, so that’s not too bad. I could probably make more but I’m not a big fan of keeping an eye on it. So I put up a few buy orders and then forget about them for a few days, only to then realise I should update them.

Most of the things I’m looking at right now is around a 10-15% margin, I could do more for slower moving items but they move too slow to my liking, don’t want to wait too long for buy orders to fill.

Other than that I’ve also started PI in the wormhole. It took a bit of messing and a lot of clicking but I think I got it going where it needs to be. Only thing I need to mess around with a bit more is the extractors, seeing that I’m not extracting enough in the cycle I put it on. But I can fix that one too by just doing it every few days instead of every week.

I literally have no idea how long this took me
T3 PI is fun

I’m enjoying EvE again, and that’s what matters. The things joining a corporation can do.

In the past few days I’ve lost on ship, a Nergal. I had no idea they existed until a week ago, luckily I had a bunch of SP saved up so I just injected myself in one. Just training the weapons to V now, gives me something to do other than training for a Nyx I will never fly. I avenged the nergal’s dead though by sacrificing a few TEST people to BOB

Speaking of Nyxes, look what I made!

I'm blue
I need to print more things, like this Nyx!

I’m trying to find excuses to use my 3D printer some more, finally printing a few EVE Online related things to put around the appartment.

o7 Stay tuned

Army of alts

Unlike the title says, I don’t actually have an army of alts. I currently have 3 accounts, and 5 characters. Of those 5 there’s 2 I use on a regular basis and the other 3 are used for things like trading or bearing.

The other day I decided that it was past time for me to start training my Amarr trade alt into something useful. I’ve always wanted to start into capital production. So I’m training him to be able to fly an occator, jump freighter and into capital construction.

I got myself 2 plex, and 3 injectors. Because I’m lazy and I wanted the occator train to be done sooner so I could start hauling some much needed stuff from Amarr to the wormhole.

My Jita trader can fly an occator too so if need be I can now do two at a time. Making myself a little more efficient. Or a little bit easier to kill due to sucking at dual boxing. Either works.

The first thing on my list is making myself a Nidhoggur, just because I like the ship.

One of my other goals is owning a Nyx sometime soon. Unfortunately I don’t have the ISK to afford a Nyx pilot or a Nyx itself. But it’s on my list too. Owning one has been on my list for ages.

Time to start making ISK again so I can do silly stuff like some in the Alliance do.

Stay tuned o7

Industry and me

It’s been ages since I thought about doing industry.

The reason for this is because last time I did it, it started to become too much of a hassle for profits that kept on going down. I used to copy blueprints, invent them into T2 bpc’s and then manufacture those. It gave me a steady income of a few hundred million ISK on a monthly basis. But sometime last year. Actually, longer now, since it’s been since November 2015. The prices of that which I was making went down so hard that there was no longer a profit in it.

For some reason the products I was making were suddenly being sold at the material cost. This was most likely due to null sec miners and manufacturers going with the whole “Everything is profit if I mine it myself” way of thinking.

So I stopped doing it. I haven’t even thought about doing it until a few days ago, while I was looking at my two industrial characters, wondering what to do with them. They are also both my traders, one in Jita, one in Amarr.

So I fired up a few of my spreadsheets, checked ISK per hour and whatnot to see if maybe, just maybe I could get myself to start doing it again. But, I can’t.

Looking at what I could be creating with just those two characters, solo. I figured that in general I wouldn’t be getting a big enough influx of ISK from the things I make. I’d be making roughly 500m a month. Which used to be good enough for me. But that was in the time where I also had moons of my own, where I did missions for fun.

These days I take my fun out of PvP, losing ships and killing them.

After having played with a Naglfar in a C5, 500m a month is peanuts when you can make double that in an hour doing C5 sites.

So I decided to strip my industrial characters.

I might just create a new one someday. But the only thing I am really interested in is making capitals. I would LOVE to make or help make capitals. Even if it’s just the parts.

But every time I try to win some information about it I get told off because I just want to use one character on it. Want to help an alliance do it with the one character I have for this.

But alas, I might someday try and do it but for now, I’m making peace with the fact that I am no longer an industrial.

Stay tuned o7

 

It’s not always about the ISK, but sometimes it is

Going on roams means dying. Not all the time of course but you can be certain that the loss of a ship and pod are inevitable. Which means that you need to make ISK one way or the other.

I have plenty of ISK to lose a few bill in ships, but as has been said in previous blogs. I’m somewhat of a space-Jew. I used to want ISK in order to pay for a character with the skills I wanted. Now I just want ISK to see that little line on jEveAssets rise.

In the past it went along the lines of “I want to have 1b” once getting there it was 5, then 10, then 20, 25. My next goal is 30b, and this is where I’m starting to have a few problems with. I have had a few lucky breaks in the game, some of my ISK coming from winning Moros’ on Blink and selling them. Some coming from lucky trades. I think half of my ISK came from T2 production.

Came, because for reasons unknown to me, this is no longer profitable as a solo industry player.

What I used to do is buy the parts I needed in Jita, haul them to my production facilities, make the T2’s from my own researched BPC’s and haul them back to Jita. Making a solid 200-600k profit per. After being semi-afk from eve between January and June this no longer seems viable.

For some reason that would now give me a 400k loss per T2 product made. So now, I need to look into another way to make ISK, good ISK. Because I still want to get to that 50billion milestone, and more.

Right now I’m wondering what I should be doing with all the industry skillpoints on that alt. Should I extract it, sell the injectors? That’d give me a nice quick ISK injection. But what if I want to start production again? What if I’m just not looking at things correctly and I’m missing out on a good way to make ISK from production.

And what about my science SP? Do I ever want to bother making T2 BPC’s again? I’m honestly at a loss on what to do with that alt.

The only thing I can do right now, is getting her accounting up, because silly me still keeps forgetting about tax percentages when I buy “low” and sell “high”.

Where theoretically I’d get a profit of about 20m per item, due to taxes that can easily go down to only 5mill. Woops, lesson learned there.

If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them out. I need an ISK printer.

Ps: I already do PI, making coolant right now, might have to try something new there too.

The joy of trading

I try to do some trading every once and a while to get my ISK flow going. But I don’t really calculate if I’m actually making a profit while doing so.

So I decided to start doing that and noticed something that I should have thought about a while back. due to the citadels and the new tax system, I was trading a few  items at a bit of a loss. Not large enough to notice but still, a loss.

I wasn’t paying attention to how much it cost me in taxes vs how much I paid for it in the first place. Seeing as I wasn’t doing that, I lost a few million ISK.

Not the end of the world, but once more a nice example of how I should be paying better attention to what’s in patch notes and start checking what that means for me.

Luckily I caught it on time.

Now the next step would be deciding if I want to stay trading in Jita/Amarr, or if I should move to a citadel one jump away. The main problem with doing that, would be my inherrent laziness. I don’t want to do one jump (I know) to put up buy orders in Jita or Amarr. It’s stupid but It feels like a waste of time.

Despite the fact that I can literally save a few hundred million ISK in taxes in the long run.

We’ll see what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll start a few production lines again but most of the T2 stuff I produced is getting made at a loss by other people. Which I still don’t get. The whole mindset of “I’m mining it so it’s not at a loss” is so wrong.

Stay tuned o7

Round two, start.. Preparing

Little over a year ago, me and a friend of mine tried to settle in a C4 wormhole. We failed, but it was fun.

In the past few days we got to talking again. He had joined a C5 corporation but still felt the itch to settle in a lower class one. Which brings us to yours truly.

I’m enjoying myself in the Null sec corporation I’m in, however, I have other alts. Alts without a purpose, they are just sitting in shiny ships in Jita or Amarr or whatever other system I logged them out in last.

Which brings us to another little plan that has been forming up and coming to closure. We’re going to try out another wormhole adventure. But this time! We won’t be going into a C4, no we’ll be settling in either a C3 or a C2. Since that’s a bit easier to run sites in solo without having to scan more exits, pay a LOT more attention etc. etc.

We’re currently busy scanning down holes, checking if there’s any activity in them, checking out the planets etc. etc.

Once we find a hole to live in, the move will start. I’m looking forward to starting another adventure in w-space. I have tried before, I have failed, but it was a lot of fun and that’s what matters. And if we can make some more ISK in the process, well, that’s even better isn’t it.

While doing all this I’m also training up an alt as a jump freighter pilot. This was done with the idea that it would make things easier for me to start a little Null sec trading hub in my new home system.

This freighter pilot will also be used as a bit of a service for the wormhole, so two birds, one stone kind of thing.

I just need to learn how it works, but I’ve got Singularity for that, once the skills are trained at least.

Now to figure out if I want to keep producing T2 stuff or if I’m going to be giving up on that. The profit on some of the stuff I made has literally dropped 80% in the past few months, on some things even going as far that the price to sell it, is the same price as the resource cost. Something I’m used to when talking about ships but never about components.

We’ll see what happens, the good thing is, I still have a few other sources of income and I just keep expanding my little empire.

Stay tuned o7

post

Let’s talk, Planetary Interaction (PI)

Let’s talk about, Planetary Interaction. Bear with me here, this is going to be quite a bit of text but worth it.

For those of you who have no idea what Planetary Interaction (PI) is, you’ll find out here. And even find out a bit on how to set it up.

PI is basically the extraction or reprocessing of materials from planets based in any given system. You can do it in High, Low and Null sec.

High Security planets are slightly worse for extracting materials but if you feel like setting up a factory planet (we’ll get there) it’s perfect.

The extracted and processed materials are mostly used in the creation of T2 items or fuel. Meaning that the items you extract and process, are worth quite a bit of ISK on the market.

In order to start with PI I urge you to get the following skills: Command Center Upgrades (Get it to lvl 4, your command center needs to be upgraded in order to get more buildings on your planet), Interplanetary Consolidation (Each level in this means one extra planet. At 3 you have 4 planets, at 4 you have 5 planets and at 5 you can have 6) and remote sensing (this is so you can check out the goods on the planets from a few light years away).

The main reason people do this, is to make a passive amount of ISK each month. Why passive? Well because you need to do a minimal amount of effort for a few hundred million ISK a month.
In general all you would need to do is set up your planets (20 minutes, ish) and afterwards come back to them every other day, press a few buttons (not more than 5 minutes) and be on your way again. And in the end you go get your materials (30-60 minutes) and get them to a market hub for sale.

Lava? I'm not afraid of lava!

Lava? I’m not afraid of lava!

Now! On to the good part. Setting up your planet.

I’m not saying that I know much about correct set ups or even what works well and what doesn’t. I’m just going to show you how mine are set-up. I’m sure that there are things I can improve upon and if you have any comments, feel free to drop them below, I’d be happy to discuss and improve upon what I’m doing now.

The first thing you need to do, is decide in which system you want to start your PI endeavours. Do you want to do it in your home system, or do you have a system your industry is based in? Well, click on the name and check which planets are there. You will see all different types of planets (Barren, Temperate, Storm, Lava…) every planet has a different kind of materials that can be extracted from them.

To know what you can do with the planets in your system, head over to http://eveplanets.com/ this site allows you to click on a planet, and it’ll tell you what can be extracted/created here.

Resources are split up into 4 groups (T1, T2, T3 and T4) T1 are the basic materials, the ones you extract directly from the planet. T2 and higher are created from the other materials. T2 uses T1 materials, T3 uses T2 materials and T4 uses T3. Easy right? Right.

In this example I will be using a Barren planet. And on it I will be creating Mechanical parts. These sell in Jita for about 10 000 ISK each at the time of writing. My planets can create 240 parts a day. Meaning that at the end of the month I have 288mill (4 planets * 240 parts * 30 days * 10 000 ISK). Not bad for only a bit of work right? Right.

Please not, that if you want to set up a planet, you need a command centre in your inventory, in my example it will be the Barren Command Centre.

In order to create Mechanical Parts, you need to extract Base and Noble metals from a planet. Go to the planetary overview and press scan. Press the base metal options and you’ll see a bunch of green and red, maybe white on the planet. These are the concentrations of the metals. Now, press Noble metals. You’ll see the same thing. What you need to do, is to find a spot, with Base and Noble metals concentrated near each other. Or at least near enough. Seeing as you will need to put an extractor on each. Place your command centre around here somewhere, I’ve been told that your command centre doesn’t need to be too close by but, just put it there, better safe than sorry.

Scanning a barren planet for Noble metals

Scanning a barren planet for Noble metals

Once this is done we can start with the extractors, click on extractor control unit, and set one at the edge of each concentration. Once you click on it, you can assign Head Units. Click on the metal of which the concentration you picked, and place four of them on it (check my below example if you wonder what I mean with this.) Once this is done, check the extraction size. I put mine on 3 days of extracting. Make sure that the areas don’t touch, you get a slight penalty when they do. Once this is done, do the same for noble metals.

You’ve just started extracting. The next problem to tackle is sending the good around your planet.

What I do is make a storage facility, send everything there, and from there on out send things to the different facilities. That way you have one local point on your planet that gets used for storage.

Set your storage facility, press control, click it and then click your extractor. You’ve just made your first link. These are used to send goods from one facility to the next. You can send your products by clicking your extractor, and the second icon (products). You’ll see that your metals aren’t routed yet, so click create route, press your facility and create route again. Now every single cycle it will get send to your storage facility.

Next, place a basic industry facility near your storage unit and link it with the unit. These are needed to create the reactive/precious metals. Click on it, press schematic and scroll down for the correct one (reactive or precious). Make sure to link up your facility once more. And make a route for the product created.

You also need to send the T1 product to this facility, so go to your storage facility, click on routes (4th icon) and make a route with your noble/base metals to your factories. There we go, you have just started your creation of T2 material.

One more and we’re almost good to go.

The last one works the same as the Basic facility. Put down an advanced facility, link it up, press the schematic and make sure they’re linked to your storage facility, set up routes and you’re now making mechanical parts (once the first few cycles have completed from your basic facilities).

In order to get your products off planet, you will need a space port. This is the last link in your chain. Put down a space port, link it with your last factories or storage facility, and set up a route for your mechanical parts to the space port.

PI extraction barren planet

Once a month, you will be going to the customs office of the planet, and transfer everything in your space port to it. Which you can then drag into your cargo bay.

Not, that you can transfer your materials from planet to POCO without being near the customs office, you just have to be in the same system. So make sure that you’re safe until you go grab it. Don’t blame me for dying 😉

As a little added extra, you can also make a factory planet. This usually means that you import the T1 or T2 materials to the POCO and from there on make it into T2/T3/T4. This is what high-sec planets are usually used for. Buy your T1/T2 in your local hub, and process it for a nice little profit!

Factories!

Factories!

I hope this was somewhat enlightening for you my dear reader. And may you make a nice little profit from whichever planet you decide on.

If you still have no idea, or want to learn more, there are some pretty good videos about PI on YouTube that can help you out too.

Stay tuned o7

post

I’m getting there

Last week I finally joined a new corporation, and the past few days I’ve gotten more action than I did in the past few months.

I’ve gone on roams, I made a jita shopping list, even tried out ships I had never flown before.

I’ve been on two roams now in a Svipul and I enjoy the ship. I love the fact that it changes it’s look if you go in a different mode and it’s quite fun. Not only that, I haven’t lost one yet! Hooray

Svipul Roam

I did lose a claw a few days ago but that was my own fault. Silly me trying to be hero tackle. That obviously failed because I also failed to land on any other kill mail at the time.

The one thing I still need to get used to is that unlike when I was in High Sec, I can’t just open the market browser and buy whatever I need. I can’t, because the current market is non-existent. The corporation I joined does have a service from Jita to their home so that’s nice. Means I just need to make more shopping lists and figure out what I need and when I’ll be needing it.

Although it did got me thinking of maybe, just maybe setting up shop over there too. I’ll be looking into that once I’m used to it some more.

Unfortunately my ISK making ways have dried out a bit. My production lines are currently not doing anything because the profit I was making per day wasn’t enough anymore. 20million a day vs 100+ half a year ago. It’s a shame, it was easy ISK, and now I have no idea what to do to make more of it.

I’m trying my hand at station trading in Jita and Amarr a bit and I’m making ISK with it, but also only a few million per time, my production used to net me more. So I’ll have to figure out something new. Maybe in Null, maybe somewhere else.

I’m still thinking of w-space, and I’m looking around, I still have another combat character that I’m training to get into a wormhole, so maybe I can have her join a wormhole crew. If they’ll have me.

We’ll see

Stay tuned o7

“Do you wanne build a moon base”

I’m sorry if you now have a certain ‘Frozen’ song in your head… Ok no, I’m not, I like the songs, most people do.

Anyhow, these past few months I haven’t done much industry wise, but a friend of mine asked me if I was interested in his latest little scheme. I told him I had to think about it after his explanation and the more I started thinking about it, the better it seemed to sound.

Basically, I was asked if I wanted to join him in null sec with my indy character and start moon harvesting with him, and slowly but surely, start on our own little super/titan building process.

I’ve always wanted to build titans but not on my own, so if this thing actually happens, I’ll be a few steps closer to my goal. Along with the fact that I’ll be a bit more active again. So win/win situation! Unless we lose a few freighters, that’d make us go back to square one, but I’m being positive here, I can do this!

Stay tuned o7

Too many copies

A few months ago I decided that once I was through all my T1 copies I’d try something new in my manufacturing. Turns out I first should have checked my copies before stating this. 
With the new way industry works these days copies don’t get destroyed when you try to invent them into their T2 equivalent.

Which means that if you have copies with 300 runs, you can actually try to invent from them 300 times. 
I did not know this since I don’t pay much attention when doing my clicking of the day, but I noticed this a few days ago when I tried to figure out why my amount of T1 copies wasn’t going down.

As it stands now I have about 200 copies with all around the 300 runs still on them. So maybe I should just put them somewhere for the time being and just start something new. Seeing as it will still take me months before I get through my current stock.

This new way of working is good though. It used to annoy me to no end that I had to keep making copies of my BPO’s just to do my invention, turns out that right now I could just work with 30 copies for a few months instead of needing my stock of hundreds.
I’ll keep that in mind for next time.

As for the rest, I’m currently on the lookout for something to do with my combat alt(s), I’m doing a few missions when I log in and browsing the corporation forums, trying to figure out if there’s anything out there I could join. Because as most of you know, EvE is more fun when you play it in a group.

Stay tuned o7