April Update - Industry

 A belated update on industry. And another fairly flat month:

My net worth is 59.5Bn, that's an increase of 600mil, or 20mil ISK/day.

Well, it's not negative, but it's not really positive either. So what gives? Have I just forgotten how to make money with industry?

Not exactly. My usual medium rigs have been continuing their slow downward trend which makes profiting off them very difficult. I've been constantly chasing prices down just to get revenue. But I have been making money with them. The bigger thing has been starting a lowsec industry set up.

I've spent time and money getting a set of blueprints and reaction formulae to Auner in Minmatar lowsec, and working out the logistics and contract mechanisms. That all went fine, but I also found I had to spend hundreds of millions on skills that I was lacking across a couple of characters, which eats into my profits. 

Also, building ships is slow. These first few runs have really been test runs to get the mechanisms setup, make sure my blueprints are in the right place, materials in the right stations, that sort of thing. This aspect has been a success, but actually selling the finished product has been a challenge.

Sabres have fallen in price, when I started my build run they had a 22% profit margin, but they have fallen to a 52 week low price where the margin is just 2%...I spend more than that on shipping alone!

T2 transports haven't been much better either. Though I'm just getting started with those. TBH I'm not thrilled with the outcome so far, but there's a lot to work out. Onwards!

April Update - Trading

 A better month this one, though not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. Here are the numbers:

And here's the full numbers:

My current net worth is 1.227Tn ISK, that's an increase of 55Bn ISK, or 1.83Bn ISK/day.

That's a massive jump, close to a record I think. So why the big increase?

Well, there's one reason, and it's not to do with my regional trading. As pointed out in an earlier post CCP (now Fenris Creations, or FC I guess) made a return to FOMO sales in a big way. The headlines were 3 for 1 HyperCores and 3 for 2 Skill Extractors. Both are huge, but the hypercores are unprecedented.

As such I liquidated everything I could and dumped as much as possible into both of those items, with a heavy emphasis on Skill Extractors as those tend to recover in price faster. The sale has now ended and the price of both commodities jumped a lot more than I was expecting to be honest, currently up 44% and 21% respectively.

The more I think about how to scale wealth into the trillions the more I think this is the best way to do it. The market cap for PLEX adjacent items is massive, far far bigger than any in game items. This will allow me to keep putting more and more money into it and get a similar percentage return regardless as I am unable to ever have enough to meaningfully affect the market price. As such going forwards I'm going to be putting what profits I can from my regional trading towards this kind of speculation, and try and ride the waves of NES sales for profit.

With these current investments I am looking to start selling off hypercores once they hit 300k or we get to 4 months from the sale (late July), whichever comes first. For the Skill Extractors I want to sell off once the price hits 480mil(ish), with again a cutoff of late July to start liquidating. That's because I would expect more big sales in late summer/early autumn to entice people back in after their summer holidays.

Lowsec Industry - early observations and bottlenecks

 So far on my industry journey I've stuck to high sec, and within that primarily rig manufacturing. What this has done is trivialise logistics, as Jita is only ever a few safe jumps away, my stuff is in NPC, and salvage and rigs are low volume, with a single stage of manufacture. It's industry on easy mode (which is why I've been surprised at how far I was able to squeeze the profits with it until relatively recently).

Lowsec ship productions, particularly tech 2, has a whole range of issues though.

Firstly, getting materials to lowsec. There is a corp, Citadel Hauling Solutions, with whom EVEGuru has a deal that makes this step easy, even though it involves a bit of waiting. It does add some cost though.

I say it makes it easy, but that's only partially true. Minerals such as Tritanium are very bulky. Indeed so much so that for my transport ship run I elected not to import the minerals for the Tayras I need. I will need to work out if either bringing in compressed ore works best (probably) or running it myself from Hek. I will need refining skills for this though, which I currently don't have. 

Secondly, with these being multi stage projects having up to 5 stages Fuel Blocks and reactions are real time bottlenecks:

These are just for 1 type of ship! Then once I've done all that I need to do this:

It's clear that reaction slots are going to be a real bottleneck going forwards. Sir SmashALot said the same in his interview with Oz where he was going over his industry setup. I'm really starting to appreciate why that's the case.

Fuel blocks present their own relatively minor logistical issue. The inputs for fuel blocks are simple and the manufacturing is fast, but the end product is bulky and I need to move them from the Forge to the Foundry to run reactions. These 2 structures are aligned to you insta-warp from 1 to the other, which is nice. But today I had to move 250,000m3 of fuel blocks, in a Badger. I was able to fit it with all the expanded cargoholds and rigs I wanted as it's very safe. but it was a lot of back and forth trips. I think ultimately I'll want a freighter in system for this purpose alone.

So, how do I resolve these bottlenecks?

- Mineral capacity I need to train for refining and work out which compressed ores to import for what minerals. I'm sure there are tools for this. I'll find one and use it. I might even be able to do it in EVEGuru.

- Reaction slots, again this will involve training characters and bringing them down. I think I'm going to move a few characters down to support this and leave a smaller setup in high sec.

- internal logistics I think I will bring down my former null sec character with his deep space transport and use that for hauling between the structures. It can carry over 60,000m3, which is a lot better than the badgers 16,000m3

I'm enjoying this new challenge of working all this out! To be honest pumping out the same rigs in the same station in high sec had become dull, so it's nice to have a whole new set of challenges to work out.

Setting up the next run - Deep Space Transports!

 So while I work through the stages on my Sabre run:

I was thinking about next steps. I remembered that I had some T2 hauler BPCs that I hadn't utilised, due to the profit margin being in the single digits or negative most of the time. But I decided to run it through the industry calculator for Auner and see what it comes out with:

Well that's slightly better than 2%!

I decided to commit and ran all my hauler blueprints down to Auner, and buy the materials for 10 Bustards as a first run, remembering to include the blueprints this time. This cost me a grand total of about 2.5Bn, along with 145mil hauling fees. Noted for later.

EVEGuru makes this really easy, as you can create a project in the production ledger, and then selecting the project it gives you a shopping list. From there you can right click and copy for multibuy, imports from clipboard in EVE and there you have it, all input materials bought!

I will say, having not previously used the production ledger much, being able to check off the stages of a multi stage project is really nice. I can see this being the way I keep track of these projects going forwards. Just have to try and keep them up to date, cross checking with amounts when I have several stages going at once. 

I feel like there's a lot of process to optimise here, but I am liking this so far. Doing t2 ships also has the advantage of stages running for multiple days, so I don't have to be as ever present as I do for medium rigs. Once I find a flow here I can see this being something I need to check on every few days to keep on top of it and make a healthy margin, which will be really nice.

Starting production and a few mistakes

 So, I created a project to build 10 sabres in EVEGuru, which then allowed me to take the shopping list provided as a multibuy order. I manually removed the blueprints from the multibuy as I'd bought them all already.  Foreshadowing is a narrative device where authors drop subtle hints, warnings, or clues early in a story to suggest future plot developments, creating suspense and preparing the audience for upcoming events. Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a writer gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story.

After a couple of days my contract had been delivered, 1.5Bn collateral moved for 60mil. Not too bad. I set a bunch of blueprints researching as I'd bought duplicates so I can research some while using the rest to build. I then consulted the production ledger where I saw that step 1 was to do some reactions. It was here I encountered my first mistake.

In Auner EVEGuru provides 2 facilities, one for research and manufacturing and another for reactions:

I had everything delivered to the Guru Forge, but I needed to move the moon goo to the Guru Foundry. However, I only brought an Ibis with me.

Ah.

That would take a few hundred trips back and forth to move the mats. Not ideal. However, Auner is just 3 jumps from Hek, so I bought a Badger, and flew it back in, then moved the mats. Problem solved. Ok so reactions rely on earlier reactions, where did I put those formulae...?

Oh, I forgot to buy the three basic reaction formulae needed. Bugger. Fortunately they had some at NPC orders in Bei, 5 jumps away. So a quick 10 jumps there and back. OK, so these reactions need fuel blocks, 3 different types. Where is the third one?

Dammit! So, I needed to buy Hydrogen fuel block blueprints. Fortunately there's an NPC seller in system, so that was easily solved. Right, ready to go now? Well...

For the fuel blocks yes, but then I went to build my R.A.M. Starship Tech...

Turns out when creating the project in EVEGuru I'd set the ME/TE of desired blueprints to 10/10, when that's not what I have in reality, leaving me slightly short on materials...So I need to wait for this stage. 

Oh, what's that, it'll take another 12 days to finish??? Well, sod that. Fortunately there's someone selling noxcium in station. So I bought 12 and that's me off to the races, on those steps anyway. 

This is much more complex than rigs!!

Setting up for Sabre production in Lowsec

 So I've had one of my industry characters sat in the EVEGuru low sec Sotiyo just training skills for a little while now, but I decided today is the day actually take some blueprints down and start prepping for doing my first build run.

First thing I did was load up EVEGuru and see what blueprints I'd need. As this is lowsec I'm going to be doing some reactions and component production myself. Previously I'd just bought the components and built Cranes, but this limits your ROI  as some of that profit is baked into the intermediate components and reactions.

Anyway, I saw that I was missing a bunch of skills for the intermediate components, so I updated my skill queue...

Just a bit more training time then...

In reality this equates to about 5 days before I can do everything I want to. So not too bad. 

I then bought all the blueprints I need for the intermediate components, reactions, and the ships themselves, and flew them down in my blockade runner.

Next was renting corp offices. Being owned by a player entity they can set a fixed price for corp offices rather than it being demand driven pricing like in NPC stations. For the 2 EVEGuru strictures it's 50mil/month, so 100mil all in. Not dirt cheap but hoping it'll be worth it in the long run.

After that it's time to start researching some blueprints. This is where the rig bonuses and being in low sec really start to compound, as blueprint research is much faster than it would be in highsec. So on my one character there my industry jobs currently look like this:

I have at least 2 of all these blueprints, except starship tech I'm realising. Need to sort that one out. This allows me to have 1 in research while I use the other to build. Also 1 day to get to ME10 for the components is really really fast.

That's where I'm at. Next step is to work out a list of materials to feed all of this to build, say, 10 Sabres, and have it shipped down here. I'm going to try and use EVEGuru for this, but will make my own spreadsheet if I have to.

The return of FOMO

 About a year ago now, CCP released a dev blog in which they declared "the end of FOMO", i.e. big sales that you make you feel like you have to take advantage of otherwise you're losing out on some serious opportunity cost. Whether that be the cost of PLEXing an account, or buying skill extractors or whatever.

In part they said this was to combat the behaviour of PLEX hoarding as an investment vehicle that gets unloaded during these massive NES sales. Pretty much since then the price of PLEX has steadily fallen, with small bumps here and there for minor sales. Until today.

We have never seen anything like this before. The scale of it is madness. And some of the deals are ridiculous. 3 for 1 hypercores??? I swore I would never again, but, well...

The main issue I have with this is that it totally shatters the idea that PLEX is not an investment vehicle. We now have clear, undeniable proof that t is and always will be. So any spare ISK you have, putting it in PLEX is a good idea.

It also throws so much ISK into the "game adjacent" economy. By that I mean items that are not available in game but affect your character in some way. MCTs, skill extractors and the like. So much money that could be used for in game activities is instead used on opportunities like this because they are more lucrative. And that's just sad really.

That being said, I will be taking part. I have around 180Bn ISK that I am not currently utilising, and I think the majority of it will be used in this sale in some way.

Now, what am I going to do?

I have 181Bn ISK sat in my wallet right now, and I want to invest the majority of it.

PLEX is currently sitting at 4,820,000 buy, 4,970,000 sell

That puts HyperCore break even at 160,666 ISK

and Skill Extractor 359,893 ISK

I can buy about 37,000 PLEX, which is what I put a buy order up for (the biggest of all time for me).

I'm going to buy about 500,000 Hypercores and then put the rest in Skill Extractors. 

I'll never get parity on these, but will probably look to start offloading in about 6 months for whatever profit I can get.

It's wild, I don't really like it, but knowing about it I'd be stupid not to take part.

Also, once the sale ends I'm going to slowly start stocking up on PLEX. As something like this is clearly going to happen again.