Stress, illness, real life and EVE

 When I returned after my holiday I was full of confidence that this was going to be a real "knuckle down and get on" kind of month, where I would play near daily and really push how far I could take my industry. Then real life got in the way.

We are in the process of trying to sell our house, and after a few months of very little happening we received an offer while we were away which we accepted. This kickstarted a whole bunch of admin, selecting and instructing solicitors, filling in forms, trying to find things worth viewing and squeezing in said viewings. My evenings were suddenly full of admin, exciting as the prospect of a move is.

At the same time, I am dealing with a HR situation at work, one that I thought I would wrap up my first day back. Stressful but over and done with was the idea. Then HR caught up with Legal and it became a whole big drawn our process. There has been a lot of uncertainty, and even though it is clarified for me now it means I'm staring down the barrel of several more months of dealing with this. Not ideal.

On top of that I was ill most of last week. In classic fashion the kids had it for about a day and bounced back but it hit me and my wife for about a week. I struggled through work but it really took its toll. Also I'm 80% sure I broke my big toe playing football as well.

How this affects EVE

Why the big real life dump? I hear you ask. Well partly it's cathartic for me to put down what I've been dealing with, manageable though it all is, and partly it's to explain that I've actually played very little EVE since getting back. Indeed when I have had time and the inclination to play games I've mostly been playing a retro football manager save. Less cerebral than trying to work out how to expand my EVE business and come up with better processes.

Tonight though I have a clear run, so I've filled up my slots and taken stock of where I'm at. The high sec business continues to chug along, the process is easy and the profits are good. Null is a bit more complex though. Though I realised through Ansiblex gates I was actually only a few jumps from my old operating ground the Sotiyo I operated out of has been taken down. I have seen on the discord that there is a plan to add more industry structures near E8- but for the moment I think I need to be content to operate out of raitarus. Not a dream situation but one I'll put up with for now.

Also, those characters have kind of trained everything I need them too for now, and they're sort of aimlessly training skills further and getting mining skills up. So I've decided to utilise those accounts better and create new characters to put in my high sec venture. I will initially train them for slots and then beeline for rigs, though initially they'll probably be mobile depot factories. I would like to add more characters for Null but I don't feel like I have a good handle on material acquisition or even a semi permanent operating base, so they'll be better utilised in high for now.

Trading, or how to make the most of the login bonuses

The Solar Fest event is going on right now, so you get rewards on login. Mostly this is SKINR detritus but there are also crates containing quafe zero classic and green apple. These are boosters that give minor bonuses and are reasonably cheap most of the time. This is especially true at the moment:

As you can see the volume is up and the price is at a 52 week low. Green apple usually goes for 15-20mil and is currently sat around 13mil in Jita, and classic usually goes for 40-50mil and is currently 30.

CCP can and will reintroduce these, and the volume isn't enough to sink hundreds of billions into but I'm putting a few billion in buy orders up to snap some up in all 5 high sec trade hubs. If I hold onto these for a month or 2 I should make 30-40%, which would be nice.

Other big industry news is the SCC charge for researching blueprints has been halved. I haven't researched any high level blueprints but I gather the charges are excessive, and bringing these down should only be a good thing for newer industrialists (like me!)

Getting set up, and frustrated

 So. After a bit of chat in the alliance discord and studying maps of the area, I realised that the industry park that was 11 jumps away actually 2 jumps and an ansiblex away from new staging. Given that I used to jump 4 jumps each way this is actually pretty good, though from a risk point of view ansiblex's are more likely to be camped than gates are. The only downside really is that the park contains a bunch of raitarus not a sotiyo, so I need to spread my operation out a bit to make it work.

So I dutifully set up EVEGuru to factor in the new settings, moved my blueprints over, did a run of materials to build a few things, then as I docked in the manufacturing Raitaru I noticed something...

The ansiblex in that system takes me to Z-ENUD, which I used to pass through on my way to the sotiyo I did everything out of. New staging is actually about 5 jumps including ansiblex from where I used to be based! 

Leadership has made it clear that industry parks won't be moving for the time being, though there is the added risk that Goons are more likely to hit 7MC than where I have set up now. I'm enormously frustrated that I could have left my setup literally as it was. I guess this is the issue with not really knowing the space very well as I only undock to do short shuttle runs. I'm going to let my jobs run as they are, but tomorrow I may well move my setup back to the old sotiyo. It should just be blueprints and decryptors, so a single run which is at least easy. I feel a bit stupid for not having realised this tbh, but there we are.

Trying to work out new null logistics

 So today I've restarted my highsec industry properly, utilising all of my slots. I've had to take some write downs on sell orders to follow the market, particularly in Null.

Speaking of null...

I've been trying to work out where best to restart tings in Null after the move of staging to E8-432. I was hoping some industry park would have been put up by now but it seems not to be the case. An Azbel has been put up in the staging system but it only has facilities for manufacturing, so it's of limited use. 

There is an industry park with full rigged sotiyos 2 systems over, but the structures are not held by Horde but a blue corp (renters I think). I've been told in no uncertain terms not to use these structures, or any that are not owned by Horde themselves. This is fine in theory, but the nearest Horde industry park where I can do the full range of activities is 11 jumps away! The politics of this situation are not fun.

I don't particularly fancy moving 11 jumps any time I want to do anything. I'm not even sure that's doable in a single jump freighter jump. Honestly I'm a bit deflated about this altogether. I'm sorely tempted to add new characters to high sec and park Null activity until I can work out the logistics here. Maybe a move to lowsec is the way to avoid the politics of it all? 

In a separate note, the global PLEX market is now live. Instead of having PLEX located in a certain region all orders go into the "global region" so you can buy and sell from everywhere. This is a good change to the game, though it has taken away one of my income streams. 

My null station trade character had transitioned to exclusively trading in PLEX, as in Horde staging you could often flip it profitably, even with higher broker fees than perimeter (there were occasional arbitrage opportunities as well, though more infrequent). When the PLEX market went live they cancelled all existing orders so I'm sat on 9325 PLEX on that character, and at 6,300,000 I can't quite sell them profitably (picked them up for up to 6.1mil), so I'll transfer them to my character that holds my investments and mark them on my sheet accordingly for now.

June Update - Industry

 Similar to my trading, my play here was a little bit patchy. A strong first half of the month though. My current ISK values:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 26Bn ISK. That's an increase of 6.91Bn ISK or 203mil/day.

Another record month. As you can probably see before I went away my net worth was 26.4Bn but I seem to have lost 400mil in net worth without logging in. Maybe this is the price of assets dropping as the moves by the big blocs settle down. Not sure as I haven't actually logged in to my accounts yet.

The month started off very strong, and had I played the whole month I was on track for a 10Bn ISK month but life happens. I have moved one of my high sec characters into making t2 rigs, so now my split is 1 null and 2 high sec chars making t2 rigs, 1 highsec making mobile depots (they're just too reliably profitable) and 1 null sec char who makes random stuff from EVEGuru, and is frankly underutilised. I am training him for t2 rigs as well though.

A big thing is I have 6.2Bn in wallets to reinvest which is great, and I suspect by now a new industry park has been set up near Horde's new staging that I can look at utilising. I'm going to sort out a trade run before that though so I might not get to that today.

I met my target of 6Bn for the month, which I'm thrilled about. With a full month of play ahead of me though I think i can push myself and hit 10Bn profit this month. I might even need to start a couple of new characters to help scale. TBD.

June Update - Trading

 I was away the last week of the month, and had my sister in law over for a lot of this month so I didn't have as much time to play as usual and didn't log in at all on my trade characters for the last 2 weeks. Still a pretty good month though:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.083Tn ISK. That's an increase of 45Bn ISK, or 1.32Bn ISK/day.

That's a big increase on last month, though not quite a record. Considering how little I played I think this is a huge improvement. With 100Bn in wallets I've got a lot I need to rebuy, my sell orders have mostly sat around 800Bn this month which is good as I inch towards 1Tn sell orders. I'm going to try and push to 900Bn in sell orders in July.

There was a small bump in my investments as hypercores inched up in price, which is nice. Still going to be a while before I can cash out but good nonetheless.

I've also bought more PLEX, up to 12,000 now. The idea behind it is to build up a bit of a stockpile that I can use on any Omega + MCT sales to do a bit of skill farming on my trade accounts. The last sale like that happened in June last year while I was on holiday, so I missed it. There hasn't ben one yet this year, and there may not be. Worst case I use the PLEX to add omega time to my industry characters towards the end of the year.

In my drive to increase sell orders I've moved into buying more blueprints. I've tried to stick to blueprints worth more than 1Bn to be worth my time, and these are mostly ship blueprints. I'll probably expand this further, and look into structure and maybe structure rig blueprints as well.

Aim for July is to break the 50Bn ISK profit mark, while upping my sell orders to 900Bn. let's see how I do.

Another move, Null this time

 So, there's been a big announcement, Horde is moving it's staging from MJ-5F9 to E8-432 in Etherium Reach. This includes all war as well as peacetime assets, so i need to move as the market is moving with it. 

I've been able to safely ignore forward stagings for war up to this point as the market has remained where it is, but no longer. This is going to involve a significant logistical effort for me, as I have assets and ships in 7M4-4C and MJ- across 4 characters, including capitals, mining ships, materials, all sorts.

Step 1 is consolidating all my stuff in MJ-, which is what I'm going to try and do with my limited time tonight. Step 2 will be the move to Etherium reach. 

I've made these sort of moves before, and this one is all through "safe" space, so should be pretty easy, but a pain all the same. What's more though is it poses a big question for my industry effort. Do I work out where the closest industry park is to E8- and set up my industry there and hope Goons don't disrupt things too badly, or do I put things on hold/ move to high sec whole sale?

This is complicated by the fact we have my sister in law over on a once in a decade trip from across the world right now, and she is on and off staying in the spare room where my PC is, so EVE access is somewhat erratic. Also, I'm going on holiday for a week next week.

I think the sensible move is to consolidate in MJ-, then jump my assets to E8- and see where things are when I come back from holiday and make a call then. It's a shame as my null revenues were starting to outpace my highsec ones but this whole war is good for the game, and I'm sure worst case I can get set up again once this calms down, provided I don't lose all my blueprints in a fire along the way.

May Update - Industry

 A very strong month this month. I forgot to take screenshots of jEveAssets on the 31st, so I'm missing the values table for this month. However I have the graph, which I'll trim the latest data points off:

My net worth is 19.09Bn ISK, that's an increase of 6.34Bn or 204.5Mil ISK/day.

Nearly a 50% increase in profits on last month, which is a great improvement! Revenues of 53Bn ISK this month mean a profit margin after fees of 11.9%. This seems to be a good sustainable margin as it's been within 1% of that for the last 3 months.

I've been moving this month towards specialisation. As Lord Maldorer puts it in Clarion Call 4 (excellent watch, I'd watch the entire series if you haven't already) "If you build a ship to do 1 specific thing in EVE, it can do that thing very well". This applies to characters and setups as well. I've noticed that most of my profits come from t2 ship rigs, large and medium. Both my null characters can build them as can 1 of my high sec characters. I fell this is an area that ticks a lot of boxes for me:

1. it is "value-dense". Both the input and output materials are low m3 and can be quite expensive, meaning logistics are easy

2. The Margins tend to be consistently pretty good

3. The total market size is pretty large, so I am unlikely to be able to flood the market and thus keep my slots busy.

Therefore I intend to work my setup to be primarily focusing on that. What this means is training up my second and third high sec characters for t2 rig production (the easy part) and getting hold of some extra blueprints to expand my range of products within this basket. I also need to work out the best way of brining in material to null on a regular enough basis as the salvage market in MJ- already struggles to meet my needs with 1 character. The final step with null will be to work out how to balance selling locally vs shipping back to Jita. Alliance Jump Freighter services are cheap but it adds a time delay to everything, which isn't ideal until/if I decide to do my own logistics.

One way around this would be to fly my high sec character to the nearest low/null sec system in a blockade runner and dock in an NPC station, hand off the cargo to my null character who carries it to MJ- in another blockade runner, and the reverse with end product. This has the advantage of me being able to do it on my own time and not wait, but the disadvantage of it taking time and therefore probably not being scaleable. TBD on this.

On the subject of Alliance Logistics, Goons declared war on Horde and invaded a fringe region. This hasn't been disruptive in any way yet but it has given the market a bit of a kick. I came back to ~4Bn in my null wallet as people fit up ships and gear up for the war, which is great for the game and for me! Remains to be seen if goons will actually push into Horde homelands or whether they will get bored before that point (I suspect the latter, despite the reddit spam) but either way a conflict between blocks can only be good for the game as a whole.

On targets for the month I smashed my 5Bn target, though I did not keep my reaction slots busy. The local reactions market has been weird recently but I'm hoping things pick up and I can start utilising this better again. 

I'd be very happy if I can maintain 6Bn profit for next month as I'll be away for the last week of the month, but we'll see how things go.