Getting hold of cheaper materials

 So one thing you will hear industrialists talk about a lot is that you can increase your profits if you get hold of cheaper input materials. This makes perfect sense, provided you're not doing something silly like buying cheaper materials in order to make building something profitable. In that case you'd be better off selling the input materials.

Up to now I've been keeping half an eye on this, though I've struggled with the capital to really pull this off. One of the issues I have is that I don't always build the same thing. I mostly build rigs, so cheap salvage is good but what exact salvage I often don't know in advance, which makes sourcing it cheaper from buy orders difficult. 

One thing I do regularly churn out though is Mobile Depots. These take 4 PI materials and 3 mineral inputs. The spread on materials is tiny and therefore not necessarily the best place to go first for cheaper inputs but the spreads on PI mats can be 10% plus. I've decided to put up buy orders on a couple of my input PI materials and see if they get filled. I'm only trying to buy enough to contribute to about a days worth of production, so I'm very much dipping my toe here. If it works though i should be able to start squeezing an extra 5% or so profit out of every depot I build, which is really nice especially considering how fast they sell. We shall see.

Also, seems Croda over at marketsforisk.blogspot.com/ is starting to take industry more seriously. I'm intrigued how he gets on with it as it appears he's taking a slightly different approach to me, and I also just like reading more about how people go about this stuff.

Declarations of War

 Quick one this, I was invited onto Declarations of War, EVEs longest running podcast!

https://declarationsofwar.com/

It was an awesome experience, where I got to chat with CCP Okami (Game Designer) and CCP Kestrel (QA) about the recent mega-patch and CCPs wider goals on the economy. It's quite long but we were able to really get into the aims and expectations of what they're doing, which is great transparency from the devs.

It's a great podcast where they like to go in depth on all things EVE, and I'm fascinated to see what they'll do for episode 300! That's a huge milestone and an enormous amount of work to get there, so huge congratulations to the guys there!

March Update - Industry

 In contrast to my Trading, my industry has had a much better month. Here is my net worth:

And here is the graph:

My current net worth is 8.4Bn ISK. That's an increase of 3.4Bn ISK or 132Mil/day.

That is a very good month. This is the first time I've broken 100mil/day and represents a 68% increase on my net worth since the end of Feb. I had revenues of 28.8Bn ISK this month, an extra 10Bn on last month which means my profit margin has been 11.8%, higher than last months 7.1% and a very healthy rate. Honestly I'm thrilled with this.

I've changed a few things this month to contribute towards that increase. I've continued to be quite aggressive with my sell orders to drive revenue which is clearly paying off. I've got better with reactions, buying extra formulae and adding reaction slots on my alt so now at any given time I'm running 8 reaction slots. I want to increase this to 20 and also balance out the outputs, as I'm building up a surplus of certain things at the moment. I react the inputs for Reinforced Carbon Fibre and then the RCF itself, selling that on the market. I've found that even though this final step doesn't add a huge amount of value in and of itself it sells really well.

I've also added an extra high sec character, who is still training but currently has 5 build slots. Once I get my extra reaction slots trained I'm going to add another null alt as well. I also want to buy a couple of mining barges and give that a go during off times, but I haven't got that far yet.

I feel like I'm getting better at keeping my slots busy which is very satisfying and keeps things moving at a brisk pace. I think the next major step will be getting on top of batching and buying materials in advance for better deals, real optimisation type stuff. We'll see how I get on. One thing I can say is 6 months in I'm just as enthusiastic about this as when I started, which is the most important thing!

Also I was on the Declarations of War podcast this week which was really cool. It hasn't been released yet but I'll make another post when they put it out.

March Update - Trading

An early update this one as I'm going on holiday with the family this Friday so I'll be away from the game for a week or so. I was ready to come in here and talk about a better trading month, until I updated my "investment" worth....

Anyway, my current position:

And a full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.073Tn ISK.

That works out to an increase of 9Bn ISK, or 346Mil/day. Pretty poor, but when you factor in that HyperCores have dropped by another 10,700ISK each to below the 2 for 1 offer value, costing me 7Bn (Ouch) then my operating profit for the month would actually be 16Bn ISK. Still not great but considering I've been updating my orders once a week I'd consider that an OK return on effort. 

Honestly I wish I'd never bought HyperCores. How they have hit an all time low versus PLEX 6 months after the sale I don't know. Well I know the recent drop was people cashing out to put money in skill extractors/injectors, but still. I have thought seriously about liquidating them and using the money for something else, but given that most of my effort is going into my Industry challenge I think now isn't the time for me to look into reinvesting 200Bn ISK. Maybe once things settle after my holiday I can revisit this.

Another thing of note is that it's almost a year since I returned to the game! How time has flown. The downside of this is that my trade accounts (all 4 of them) are running out of Omega time, and I'll be PLEXing them all in the middle of the month. I spent 86.4Bn ISK on PLEX about 6 weeks ago in preparation for this, but it means I need to find another 14Bn ISK in April or I won't be a Trillionaire anymore! Should be fine provided HyperCores don't drop to 100k or anything, and I'm only half joking.

I'm aware I sound quite sulky here, but I am feeling positive none the less, here's to a second year back in the game!

Another High Sec move

 So I've moved my high sec manufacturing for a second time.

When I first started off I was building and researching out of a public Raitaru in Ikuchi. I was fairly shortly locked out of the structure as it went low power and I lost the materials of what I was building, thankfully not much in that case. 

I then moved to a NPC station in Ikuchi for building, and a public Raitaru in Hirtamon for research. This is a bit risky as there is a chance I can get locked out of the Raitaru, but at least I won't lose my production materials. However when I logged in today I noticed that the build costs seemed a little high. Upon closer inspection the system cost index had jumped up to 8.69%. This is still a lot lower than Jita or Perimeter but is a significant hit to margins, especially when combined with the increase in Sales tax.

So I've moved again, to an NPC station in Hirtamon, where the system cost index is currently 4.94%. I could build out of the same Raitaru I research/invent in, but I don't like that risk right now. Also they are charging 10% tax on manufacturing. I need to do some working out of the cost of putting up my own Raitaru at some point to take advantage of the bonuses and lower tax, but for now the NPC station will do. 

I am still building the same sort of thing, primarily rigs both tech 1 and 2, some modules and in null I've even built a few Raptors. 

I've also started scaling up Reactions a bit. Initially when doing reactions I tried to do one step and sell the output. In that instance it was Carbon Fibre, which had a on paper margin of 30% and seemed like a good call. However, selling it involved shipping it to Jita, and micro managing the sell order and it still took 2 weeks to shift. Not ideal. Going one more step to Reinforced Carbon Fibre though, while only adding another ~7% in terms of margin had a much greater demand. So I've been able to sell the output in MJ- for a similar price to Jita! I'm now skilling up to get beyond 6 reaction slots to expand this.

I've also added another character in High Sec. I was running out of immediately useful skills to train on my main character that does my hauling and I am increasingly finding I have excess cash that I could use for more slots, so I've started a third character on that account, remapped Int/Mem and am skilling up initially for 10 build/science slots and then towards tech 2. 

All this has contributed to me really kicking on in net worth this month. This is already my best month so far with 10 days to go already being 2.5Bn up on the start of March! 

Eve terminal shutdown

 Possibly one not many people have heard of, but a site I found useful is shutting down. 

https://eveterminal.io

It's a neat little website that lets you view the in game market from out of game, created by someone called Eurreka. I tended to use it to keep an eye on how much money I'm losing in HyperCores or the movement of PLEX from my phone when I'm away from my PC. 

It's always sad when things like this close, and I hope whatever has happened in their personal circumstances can be resolved.

February Update - Industry

 The picture for industry looks a lot healthier than with trading. Here are the values:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 4.97Bn ISK. That's an increase of 1.3Bn ISK, or 46Mil/day.

While that sounds pretty unimpressive, it's not the complete picture. I started the month coming off a hiatus in half of January, and a lot of what I had up for sale was overpriced and wasn't shifting. This can be seen by the small gape between sell orders (light blue) and total worth (red). In order to pull this round and increase my revenue I started fairly aggressively reducing my sell orders to try and recoup the money faster, rather than maximising per transaction profit. This lead to ~10 days of fairly static net worth but allowed me to increase my amount manufactured at any given time. From there I was able to really ramp up production, regularly having over 1Bn in build at any given time allowing me to keep slots busier and turn over products for cash faster. That lead to a second half of the month where I was making almost 100mil/day on average and you can see the amount of manufacturing and cash I have at any point in time has jumped up while sell orders have stayed around the 2.5Bn mark. This is a much better state of affairs and should allow me to continue to utilise more concurrent slots and scale harder.

With this increased revenue I intend to skill up my 2 alts that don't currently do tech2 building to be able to do it, and it opens up options. I should be able to start additional characters soon as well.

I have had revenue of 18.3Bn ISK this month, which means my profit margin is currently 7.1% after all costs. Not amazing but Worth keeping track of as I go forwards.

One thing I have noticed is that there have been several "phases" to my journey already, which I have highlighted below to a very high production quality:

Phase 1 - Getting started, learning initial skills, getting starting capital and beginning my journey

Phase 2 - Establishing a manufacturing chain with a few reliable blueprints, steady expansion.

Phase 3 - I get EVEGuru, my net worth explodes, though most of the items I build are actually overvalued due to short term spikes.

Phase 4 - Correction and slowdown. I start to pull my items back towards more sensible sale values, though my capital and revenue is limited. Relatively stagnant here and items in build rarely beats 500mil. Christmas and then a very stressful time at work meant I didn't play much over this period either.

Phase 5 - Steady growth. Sale values have been pulled into a more realistic place. I have started to get a feel for what items sell well with relatively little micromanagement and I can tailor my slots to pumping out those. I have slowed down on buying new blueprints and skills in order to get in a better place in terms of cash and revenue.

This has been a really interesting journey so far. I am fascinated as to what problems I will have to solve at further stages going forwards. The scaling in terms of profits is definitely trickier than trading but there is more variety in industry and it keeps me very engaged, which is great!

Next month my plan is to continue to scale in terms of revenue, skill up my characters a bit and maybe start another character or 2. All about scaling for now.

February Update - Trading

 A very lacklustre month this one. I've been updating my orders monday and friday as I normally do but the revenue just hasn't been there. Maybe I need to be more aggressive in how I go about things but anyway. Here's my current position:

Broken down further:

My current net worth is 1.064Tn ISK.

That means I've made 10Bn ISK or 0.35Bn ISK/day. This is another very poor month. Partly I've not updated my orders as much as I probably should, as I've been enjoying my industry. Partly there is the continuous decline in price of HyperCores AND Skill injectors/extractors (seriously, don't take investment advice from me!). There also just feels like I'm getting less revenue from a weekend of orders. This is less tangible and possibly a bit of an excuse but I'll see if I can improve some of this in March.

One thing I have done this month is buy a years worth of PLEX for 4 accounts (14400). I missed the big PLEX + MCT sale as I was away from the game but when PLEX prices dropped back I snapped them up to use, as my main trade accounts all run out in mid-April. This cost me 87Bn ISK to do and I haven't updated my sheet with the current value as I will be redeeming them in early April. So I have another month to make 23Bn to remain a trillionaire! Should be easy but then I've not done it in a little while. Will be a good motivator though.

Burned logic circuits and general null supply

 On my Null sec industry characters I build a lot of rigs. Well I do in high as well, but in Null I frequently face a problem. Not with profitability or revenue (these things are typically easier than in Jita) but with supply of raw materials. Specifically MJ- never has enough Burned Logic Circuits. These are a material that comes from Relic sites I believe, so should be something null has in abundance, but I find myself frequently limited in options because of lack of supply. 

Up to this point I had resisted doing much about it. Bringing in more is something my industry chars don't necessarily have the money for (at least to be tied up for potentially several days as it is brought in by alliance courier services). I do, however, have a trade character in MJ-. And bringing the circuits in is profitable in and of itself. So I bought 50,000 Burned logic circuits on my Jita Trade char, contracted to my Null trader and had them shipped in. Putting them on the market for a small profit. 

This keeps my 2 ventures still sort of pure, this is a trade transaction that will be profitable whoever buys it. It also creates a supply of a material I need for industry at a price that is profitable for me to make rigs with. Win-win really.

There are a world of efficiencies like this I could take advantage of, which is why when I finish up my targets I intend to combine both ventures into a "money making" goliath and see where I can leverage things like this. For now though I think there are probably more places I can do things like this to help myself, but I'll take them as they come.

Player Owned structures update for EVEGuru

 So, EVEGuru have updated the tool with my biggest wish for the tool which skyrockets its usefulness long term - pulling sales data from player owned structures. So long as you have a character with access you can get all the normal sales data, demand, sell price, buy price, the works - even in Null. And it works with the industrial calculator:

With this I see no reason to have a spreadsheet for day to day null industry, at least on the scale that I'm doing it. As I scale up i might find use cases where I would like more adding but this really does make building modules in null for sale in null vastly quicker and easier.

On an unrelated note, I have managed to bring my sell orders into a more realistic position that has resulted in me having over 1Bn in build at once for the first time:

The pink is the manufacturing line and the turquoise is sell orders. I'm trying to stop buying so many skills for my characters for a little bit and just focus on throughput for a while. I've sunk a lot into skillbooks (even bought some t2 ship invention skills which are ~20mil each) and various other bits recently which opens up my options horizontally but hasn't been directly increasing my throughput. For throughput I really need to focus on getting some more cash on hand so I'll try ands let this run for a bit and focus on training up the skills I already have.

January Update - Industry

 The picture here is similar (if slightly worse) than with my trading. I've not played much this month due to real life concerns and that is visible clearly in the numbers:

And the graph:

I currently have 3.67Bn ISK. That's an increase of -90mil or -3mil/day.

Clearly this is not what I was hoping for. One thing I have done this month is aggressively chase sell orders down, so a lot of what I was building was overpriced and as I chased the sell prices down my net worth dropped. The dangers of jEveAssets taking sell orders as gospel.

Secondly, in addition to spending 200mil on a EVEGuru subscription I also spent quite a lot of money on t2 skills for some of my characters. These are around 20mil each and you need quite a few to be able to build a range of items, primarily the "<insert name here> physics" skillbooks. This should allow me to produce a greater range of items. 

The EVEGuru subscription might be about to really come into its own, as they just released the player-markets pricing feature, allowing you get prices and base your industry calculation on any structures you have access to, including null! I am very excited about this feature and will likely post more on it when I have had time to play with it. 

For now, my plan for the month remains similar to my trading, play more, invest some of the money I have lying around and check out the null market module. I think I might try playing around with building small ships in null too, as t1 modules don't keep my slots busy enough as the runs only take an hour or 2. TBD here.

January Update - Trading

January has been a very stressful month for me one way or another. I've just had a weekend off from working 12 days straight, often into the evenings, along with my family being generally ill and big decisions pending around various things in our life. All that is to say I have had very little time or motivation for games, and that is reflected in the numbers. My current position:

Broken down further:

My current net worth is 1.054Tn ISK.

That means I've made 11Bn ISK, or 0.35Bn ISK/day. That's really really poor and reflective of how little I've played in the latter half of the month, but is at least a positive number. There are a few reasons to be positive though. 

Firstly, I moved all of my goods from Tash-Murkon prime to Amarr and put them up for sale. The difference in sell prices amounted to a 15Bn ISK write down, but a lot of it has sold as is visible from me having over 200Bn ISK just sitting in wallets.

Secondly, I've started cashing out on some of my HyperCores. The price took another slight dip, people have cashed them out to cash in on the Omega + MCT deal, which unfortunately coincided with my hiatus so I missed that opportunity. Not the end of the world but would have been nice to make my Omega pay for itself for a year.

Aim for this month is to play a bit more, and plunge as much of that 200Bn into new items to trade as possible. I think I'll take a look at some blueprints in addition to the usual stuff on my list.

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.