Getting going with my first character

 So I've not had as much chance to play EVE as I'd have liked the last few days, but I have made a bit of progress on my industry journey. First off I have been training skills to get some industry slots, get my market fees down etc. I also applied my free 1,000,000 SP from refer a friend. My recent skills trained looks like this:

I also have Broker Relations V and Mass Production V. I haven't learned Advanced Mass Production as the skillbook costs 26mil to inject, and I don't have that!

I have done a few runs of manufacturing, will my sell orders currently looking like this:

Not pictured is some other ammo that has already sold.

I have also utilised my 5 research job runs to research ME 10 on some other blueprints, mainly rockets and light missiles. These have now finished so I've switched those to producing (they're mostly higher profit anyway) and put my ones I was building with into research to up the profit margins.

These are all OK, giving me anywhere from 10-50% profit each, though the absolute profit is obviously quite low. 

I've also mined about 100,000m3 of veldspar, which is very little.

I'm coming up against 2 barriers at the moment. The obvious one is ISK, I do not have enough ISK to even inject advanced mass production, which is leading to the other bottleneck of job runs. I am utilising them all profitably but I feel there's more I could be doing. I'm sure one will unlock the other, and once I have made enough with mining and manufacturing to get and utilise my max build and research slots then I will start additional characters on this account and another account, but I'm holding off just a little bit on that for now.

Starting out in Industry

 So I took the first step. I created a new account using a refer-a-friend link from myself for the free 1,000,000 skillpoints, created a new character and undertook the new tutorial.

I must say, the new tutorial is much better than previous. Your actions are extremely trimmed down, giving you a lot of focus. The HUD is hidden so as not to overwhelm new players. And the whole thing plays out like a playable set piece, with full voice acting and taking advantage of EVE's fantastic visuals in quite a neat little storyline to introduce you to the AIR corporation and to being a capsuleer. 

After that you're pointed in the direction of career agents (which haven't changed in years) and are given a bit of a nudge through them by Aura, before being left to it. 

I used this time to buy a years worth of PLEX from my trading accounts for ~19.1Bn ISK, contracted to my new account and applied it. I thought about recording this as a "loan" to be paid back, both to keep me still a Trillionaire and as a promise that I would to keep me motivated with my industry. In the end I opted against this, though I made a note in my spreadsheet and will for future accounts where I do this. This took my trading wealth down to 983Bn, though it is already back to almost 992Bn. 

Then I got really ill for 4 days and did essentially nothing. I wasted my weekend, barely ate for 3 days ( a bit of excess weight off is great, but not like this), had 2 days off work, and didn't log into EVE.

Today I was feeling better though and managed to get a trade run in and crucially did the career agent missions in Akiainavas. This had 2 uses: 1, get me some starting capital (I have 10mil atm) and 2, get me a slight broker fee improvement in Jita.

See, this character is planned to be based primarily in Jita, no matter where I end up taking my industry. I want at least 1 character there as it is the only place where you will find the full range of blueprints, original and copies, on contract. If I want to get some new prints out to null I don't want to fly a Horde character from Perrigan Falls to do it.

The fee improvement is minimal but my Jita boker fee sits at 1.47% now having trained broker relations V, which is not bad. What is bad is my sales tax. I've just bought and started training the accounting skill, but that set me back 5.2mil, leaving me with just 9.9 to start my industry. I've identified several BPOs that should be profitable though, so I'm going to give those a go.

Industry Challenge

 So, having made 1 Trillion ISK primarily through trading, I want to try something different. For some time now I've wanted to get into Industry more seriously, but half heartedly doing the odd production run on a single character simply doesn't compare to the ISK I was making with my trade characters. 

However, I am intrigued as to the ISK that can be made if I really commit to it and look to scale it, as well as expanding to other areas beyond t1 manufacturing. To that end I am going to start a whole new challenge. New characters, new accounts, no financial help from my trading accounts. The one exception to this is I will buy PLEX on my trading accounts to PLEX my Industry accounts, at least initially. I fear going 0 to PLEX using industry would be extremely limiting and time consuming, so I want to replicate what I initially did with my trading which was paying my subs with real money.

I want to focus on industry, so making money using:

• Manufacturing (t1 and t2)
• Blueprint research
• Blueprint copying
• Invention
• Mining (to a limited extent)
• Reactions
• Career missions to get a starting fund an some basic station standings

And that's about it. What I will not be doing is trying to replicate my trading. I also want to have certain milestones to hit to keep me on track and mark some progression. These are:

• Invent a t2 item
• sell a blueprint copy
• sell a researched blueprint original
• Build my own Upwell structure
• Complete some reactions
• Build a capital
• Build a Super
• Build a Titan
• Earn 1 Trillion

These are lofty goals, and primarily must be completed outside of highsec. Building Supers/Titans will also require being in a gated corp in Horde, as they don't let just anyone build supers (understandably). I've gone back and forth a lot on where to base myself, high or null. I think I'm going to settle on both. I'm going to have at least 1 character in high to take advantage of Jita and the blueprint market there, and most of my characters out in null to take advantage of the access to reactions, null bonuses and ores.

Also, I will be tagging all posts relating to this challenge with "Industry Challenge" and all my end of month trade updates with "Trading Challenge" so if you only want to see one or the other you can select the label on the right hand side of the blog.

With that said, off to create a new account!

1 Trillion

 I've finally done it! 1 Trillion ISK. 1,000,000,000,000. In assets anyway, not in liquid ISK. To say this has taken a while would be an understatement.

Here is my current position:

And a more condensed version:

And here is a bonus JEveAssets graph of worth since my return from hiatus in April:

As you can see, JEveAssets says I have 1.103Tn, but this is because I take a provision of 20% against sell orders to allow for reducing the price to sell. Since I aim for about a 20% profit margin this works well. JEveAssets doesn't account for this though and treats my sell orders as though they are all going to sell for that price, which would be great if it was true.

One thing that's clear from this graph is I could really do with upping the amount I sell in other hubs. It's been hovering at about 600Bn since April, and I've earned more than 200Bn in that time so I could do to look at this and see if I can up my revenue even further.

It's taken a almost 9 years to get here, with some big gaps along the way!

There's this post: Distribution of player wealth (reddit) of a screenshot from a talk at fanfest 2023 talking about the wealth distribution amongst players. According to this if you have 495Bn across your accounts (in terms of assets) you're in the top 1% of players. To get into the top 0.1% you'd need 1.9Tn. I'm somewhere in the middle there, so top 0.7% or so probably, which is quite cool! Based on analysis of that on reddit and elsewhere people estimate that there are 20-30 players with more than 10Tn, which is just insane.

How it started

My first EVE character was born in April 2009, not long before my final exams at university (perhaps not the best decision I've made). I didn't really commit to this character and forgot the login, creating a new account in August after I'd graduated. That first character was Stranathor, the alias I use mostly online, who would later become my "nullsec main" and thus is actually not included in the characters for this challenge. 

The second character though is included. I started a highsec mining corporation with my siblings and a few friends, and we would chat and make great plans together. I would also buy the minerals at a set price and build things with them to sell. We even collectively joined a group of nullsec renters briefly, eyeing up the nullsec ores and expecting to make our fortune. This didn't work, so back to highsec and our corp we went.

After a while doing this, Brave took off and offered anyone an entry into null (before this you needed vouches/a certain amount of skill points to be accepted into any null sec corp basically) and I signed up to experience that side of the game. From low to null and even a month in their wormhole corp, I had a great time, but they got ground down and kicked out of Catch by Pandemic Legion, the high SP big boys of the time. They then started their own newbie corp, Pandemic Horde. After a while of being on the "losing" side with Brave I decided to switch and join Horde, where I have a couple of characters to this day.

Through all of this I never made much ISK in the grand scheme of things, and I had begun reading a lot of ISK making blogs such as Gevlon Goblin, Eve-fail, and most influencially for me, MarketsForIsk.

In particular, Croda's method of buying in Jita, shipping to Amarr/Rens/Dodixie etc. seemed straightforward enough to follow, and I thought I could replicate that. So that's exactly what I did.

Starting the trade journey

On 17/11/2015 I created this blog and started my journey, with 3 characters across 2 accounts, and 3.1Bn ISK: it begins...

It took a little bit of time to ramp up to use all those funds, but once I did I started in earnest. I did however have my first break from the game and from trading in April 2016, returning in August of that year. At that point I had 25Bn ISK and I didn't write another post for almost 2 years, returning to the platform in July 2018 with 171Bn ISK and ending the year on 270Bn End of year 2018. Not a bad ramp up from a break!

2019 was a good year for me, I played and blogged consistently, added more characters, got into manufacturing, and made 296Bn, more than doubling my wealth in a year and breaking well past the half way point: End of year 2019

2020 was a bit more mixed for me (as I'm sure it was for everyone!). Lockdown provided much greater opportunities to play games, so this should have been a bumper year for me. But I was beginning to feel the burnout, and my monthly increases ranged from 2.6Bn to 43Bn depending on how motivated I was feeling and how much of other games I was playing. However I kept up the blogging and ended the year on 782Bn, an increase of 216Bn. Worse than the year before, but still I thought I was on track for the Trillion in 2021.... End of year 2020

I did not become a Trillionaire in 2021, which I'm sure is obvious as this post goes up on the 4th September 2024. Indeed, I did not make another blog post until April of this year, over 3 years without a post! This was for multiple reasons, burnout primarily, but I also got really into WoW Classic TBC and Wrath. I had a great time reliving my youth playing those games and achieved a lot more than I did when I was a teenager, whilst playing with some really cool people along the way. Interestingly the average age of my guilds seemed to be about 40, how times have changed!

Recent changes

Since returning to EVE though I've been feeling motivated and refreshed. I've taken stock of how my trading works and optimised it a little. In particular switching from doing all my own hauling to using public courier contracts. A full run around for my traders used to take me about 2 hours including updating orders, buying new stock and flying it to be sold. It was also kind of an all or nothing deal as I used to do it with my Rens seller character, not a short hop to Jita. This meant if I didn't feel like dedicating 2 hours of play time it wasn't really worth it. 

That's a big commitment on a near daily basis, and the main benefit now is that I don't have to do it like this. I can assess where each character is, updating one set of orders at a time and when they're done I can either log on to the next one or log off completely for a few hours and wait for a delivery.

Another big change I've made was to PLEX all my accounts. Previously I'd been paying for 3 with real money, and funding the other (ish) through selling skillpoints. The idea behind this was to keep RL money and in game money separate, but CCP have put the subscription up and it would be the best part of £50 a month to do it that way, so I made the switch to PLEX. 

The final big change only came about in the last month or so. Whilst I was away I was aware of changes to broker fees to make updating orders more costly. The formula is complex but it mostly works out to about 25% of your initial broker fee to change an order now. I had been leaving my orders to sit rather than pay this, but for August I went hard updating orders to stay on top as much as made sense, and my revenue shot up by 4 or 5 times and lead to record profits, more than double July!

All in all I've got things in a good place now, where I can do my day to day trading without much time commitment, and put any excess into either PLEXing accounts or longer term investments to scale with ISK rather than clicks.

What's next?

Initially, I had planned that when I hit 1Tn I would continue trading, sending half my profits each month to my null sec character and use the money to do whatever my heart desires. I may still do a bit of this, but this isn't my primary plan any more. 

I've also thought about funding smaller corps to do fun stuff, and planned to do this for a guildmate from WoW who was giving EVE a go. Alas, he has since stopped playing so I'm not really looking at this right now.

I actually intend to start a new challenge in the same vein, this time centred around manufacturing. I need to work out how to make a filter or split so that I can have both trading and industry covered by this blog but split if you're only interested in one or the other. It might sounds silly to immediately start a new challenge after finishing one that's taken me the best part of 9 years (on and off) but the great thing about EVE as I see it is having the freedom to make these big goals and go after them. Something very few games can offer. More on this soon. 

If you been reading this up to this point, thanks! I started this blog for me as it's the sort of thing I enjoy reading, and I hope you've got something out of it too. It doesn't end here though!