Using the production ledger to manage alts

 So I have had a problem with manufacturing where I'll sift through my blueprints, decide on what I'm going to build, transport the materials to where it's being built and then I'll forget half of what I was going to build. This leads to wasted materials from building the wrong things and general inefficiencies. This is compounded with alts where I have to trade things around.

EVEGuru has a solution for that though, and I have changed my process a bit. Once I have all the blueprints I need I can go to the options and untick "not owned" so it will only look at the profitability of my actually owned blueprints, then as I decide what to build I can update the quantities and tick that item. 

When I have enough for all my slots (or all my money) I can add these to the production ledger and call it something like "14/01 high sec". This tells me which characters it relates to and when I started it. I then buy the stuff (I still use the buy all window in the in game industry so I don't get wasted mats) and when I get to the other end I can use the production ledger as a reference to kick off my jobs!

Once I have all of the runs going I can mark the run as complete, it's served its purpose by that point. For multi step production (e.g. tech 2) I can keep the stages up to date correctly to help me manage. I've already found this leading to a greater utilisation of slots, which is huge for me.

New year, new PC

 I've just taken delivery of a new PC. My old one is nearly 8 years old and I was starting to get freezes and graphics issues that suggested the graphics card was not entirely healthy, so getting out ahead I decided an upgrade is due.

One thing I always find baffling with new desktops is they never come with more than 1 HDMI slot. My last one had an old AV slot (not even sure what type) that I used an adapter, this one has 3 HDRs, so until a HDR adapter arrives I'm down to one monitor. Annoying but I can make do. 

It does however mean setting everything up again, including EVE and all my tools. I exported my market quickbars to a spreadsheet and I'm in the process of transferring them to my accounts on my new PC. I've managed to transfer my jEVEassets history across, by copying my .jeveassets folder over to my new PC and it works a treat. 

I've installed EVEGuru and added my character but it hasn't picked up my subscription. I'm only a few days out from needing to renew it anyway so I'll just add subscription time and start from there. I've seen others experience the same issue on their discord and they've been able to sole it, but for the sake of a few days it just doesn't seem worth the hassle for me.

On the game front someone spiked the price on Mobile Depots, and during the rush I was able to make out with about 400mil profit over a few days. The price is now settling towards normal and I'll look elsewhere but it was a pleasant surprise to come back to

End of Year 2024 - Industry

 First end of year here! It's only been going a few months, and December has been challenging as I'll go into before. I also have had quite a period of barely playing, which my jEveAssets graph shows. My current position:

And here is my jEveAssets graph:

I currently have 3.78Bn ISK. An increase on last month of 741Mil or 23.9mil ISK/day.

That's very disappointing. I have spent 200mil on a EVEGuru subscription, so I've made operating profits of 941mil but that is still heavily down on last month. I seem to have struggled a lot for throughput this month, especially on the selling front. I think I need to really strongly focus on making sure my items sell so I have more money each day in order to keep my slots busy. I have a lot of slots empty at any given time which is a killer in industry.

So a bit of a bumpy start to my Industry challenge in 2024, but I'm really enjoying it and learning a lot about a game I've been playing on and off since 2009!

My main target for 2025 on top of my overall goals for this challenge is to hit 100Bn by this time next year. Seems a stretch but I think I should be able to do it. Got to have goals to push myself! 

Onwards to a near year, let's hope it's a good one!

End of Year 2024 - Trading

 This year has been eventful from a trading point of view. Most notably I came back to the game in a big way. Starting out with 778Bn ISK and 4 accounts, PLEXing for a year and completing my challenge to becoming a Trillionaire, then engaging in another challenge immediately after. And I talked about wanting to avoid burnout this time!

One other thing I have done is to cut down on the amount of traders I update. I basically only update sells in the big 4 (Amarr, Rens, Dodixie, Hek), my investments in Jita and my "station trader" (mostly trades in PLEX tbh) in null. The other characters have essentially been mothballed, and in January I intend to properly mothball them and transfer all assets to another trader to be sold so I can put more money into my main operations.

Here is my current net worth:

And broken down further:

My current net worth is 1.043Tn ISK.

That means month on month I've made -16Bn ISK, or -0.51Bn ISK/day. As always, I have mitigating factors here. I've not traded since the 20th, and only logged in to make this update tonight really. A good christmas break will do me good personally, professionally and in game I think. I've been spending a lot of time with family and friends which has been great, though not great for my ISK balance! I've also spent 19.2Bn ISK starting up another industry account, and Hypercores are down 24,800ISK month on month, which as cost me another 19.1Bn ISK. Taking those into account my "BAU" trading made me 22.3Bn profit, which is far from great but considering the time I put into it I'm not too upset. Hypercores have honestly not been a great investment for me.

Overall this year (well since I came back this april) I've made 265Bn ISK. Which averages out at 29.4Bn ISK/month. Not bad but I'd like it to be at least 50Bn ISK/month. I've spent 123.5Bn ISK PLEXing 7 accounts for a year, which is the first time I've done that at this scale. If I'd used real money to fund my accounts like I used to my yearly profits would be 388.5Bn or 43.1Bn/month. That is a lot more respectable and shows that my underlying strategy is solid, even though I have been very inconsistent in applying it.

Main target next year is to earn 500Bn ISK. I want to do this without expanding my time played much, so basically throwing more money at the same characters and hoping I can scale my profits. I might have to be smarter with my investments too but I want to throw more at regional trading before I expand my investments further as they haven't worked out how I'd like so far.

20% off Omega means another account!

 So right now there's a 20% off Omega time in the NES until 24th December. I was planning on creating another industry account so I can get more slots in null anyway, though I was going to wait until after Christmas. Guess it's time to take advantage!

The Sale means 1 year of Omega is currently 2880 PLEX instead of 3600, which is a pretty good deal. I bought 2880 for up to 6,659,000, which cost me a total of 19,160,602,000 ISK. 

This takes my total for PLEXing my industry accounts up to 58,461,120,000 ISK.

I gave my new character 100mil from my industry profits to buy skills and applied for Pandemic Horde, bought some production skills and added them to jEveAssets and EVEGuru. I should be able to get this guy to doing t2 rig/module production fairly quickly and then fill up the other 2 slots. My main null character is busy training spaceship command skills (I want a Blockade Runner and eventually a Jump Freighter) and trade skills so I can't really free up his skill queue for other characters on that account.

Issues in Ikuchi

 So today I've learned of the perils of doing industry out of public upwell structures. Pretty much since the beginning of my industry journey I've been operating out of a Raitaru in Ikuchi, one jump from Jita. This has the advantages of Raitaru bonuses, so 1% ME on everything essentially, as well as taking advantage of the lower cost index of the system (~6%) and a generous 0% tax from the owner.

This afternoon I logged in and all was well. I set off a few jobs, did a quick run to and from Jita, then logged off.

This evening though when I logged in and checked the industry window it looked like this:

Thinking this was a weird graphical glitch or something I logged out and in, but presented with the same thing. Odd. I noticed my EVE Mail blinking and found I had one telling me my corp jobs were paused. I thought maybe the structure is being reinforced, so I tried to undock and check, and was presented with this:

I promptly cancelled out of this as I don't want to be separated from my assets. I thought it was pretty unlikely that the owner of a public structure has taken against me personally, so I checked the corp for the CEO to ping him a message, maybe he was taking the structures down? being extorted out of business?

After a bit of digging I noticed that the founder of the owning corp left 44 days ago, and transferred ownership to another character (interestingly, a former Horde member). I sent him an EVE Mail asking about the status of the structure though I'm not expecting a response. I wonder if this is a malicious takedown? not entirely sure but it looks suspicious.

I also logged in my Jita trade alt and *gasp* undocked! to go see what was up. I had to D-scan the structure to warp to it as it's stopped showing up on overview, but when I did warp to it I was presented with this:

Now it could just be that the new owned has forgotten to refuel it, but I doubt it. I suspect my days operating out of this structure are over. This presents 2 major questions. The first being what happens to all my stuff? From my research it seems I can stop my jobs, in which case I lose my materials and ISK but keep the BP (ouch) though I only have 4 production runs going currently so this could be worse. If the structure gets taken down everything ends up in asset safety and I have to pay money to get it back.

The second is where do I go next? I could operate out of Jita itself. I'd have to deal with the monstrous ~20% system cost index. 

I could move to the other public raitaru in Ikuchi, but I run the risk of this happening again. 

I could move to a different NPC station - Ikuchi has one with manufacturing but no research or copying. Veisto has one with everything, and a system cost index of ~6% for production and ~7% for research. Could be a real winner that one.

Or I could put up my own private structure. I don't really have the funds for that at the moment but it's an option.

TBH I don't know yet. Being as it's quite late at night I'll probably defer this decision as it has fairly far reaching consequences. Either way I've lost ISK but my blueprints should be safe. This is a very annoying setback.

Throughput struggles with Tech 2

 On my Null character I'm pretty well invested into tech 2 production. What I've been doing is taking the list of seeded rigs/modules from the alliance and bought blueprints for them, some of them anyway. Then I've got a bit of a production line going where I invent/produce Tech 2 items from them. 

These have the advantage of moving selling faster than tech 1 stuff, as people burn through them doing normal PVP/PVE activities, but I've run into a throughput problem.

Small/medium rigs and drones have a production time of a couple of hours at most:

The issue with this is that I can't log on every 2 hours to start up new jobs. For the medium rigs like this I can add a decryptor that tanks the success chance but ups each to 10 runs which helps keep my slots busy, but it's something I'm trying to work a balance out for it. I think I'll probably settle on a system where I do short runs when I know I'll be around again in a few hours and larger items/longer runs at other times.

I also think I need more slots in null, but my existing character is doing a lot of training to do with selling/flying better hauling ships etc. so I think I'll probably start up another account this month to get myself additional slots.

Also I subscribed to EVEGuru, costing me 200mil. This means I can utilise all my characters in there and get more accurate estimates for my null character, as his skills are different to my highsec guy who can't yet do tech2. I'm hoping they come through with the roadmap item to get sell prices from player owned structures, as that will make it infinitely more useful for planning out my null operations.