This is something I've been wanting to put together for a while. A guide in setting up a corp in high sec to do manufacturing, aimed at multi character production. I use this setup to produce T2 rigs, deployables and similar in high sec with 9 characters.
Who is this for?
The idea behind this is a setup for people who want to do industry on multiple of their own characters and accounts, without help from a wider corp. A "one man corp" or solo industry setup, depending on how you want to define those terms.
Note, this only really works if you are producing small or medium rigs, deployable or modules, or some large depending on market conditions. Once you are into Large, Capital or Upwell structure sized items the rig bonuses from low or nullsec structures start to win out and you will struggle to compete in a high sec setup.
Corp setup
I'm assuming here that you are in full control and you do not want to worry about having other people in your corp, or if you do that you trust them implicitly (I would maybe do this setup with my sister but very few other people, and I'm not sure how much I could trust her to be honest).
What you will need is your own corporation. Give it a name, a ticker and a logo, and off you go.
Next, you want to make sure that all of your characters and in the corp, and that they have the Director role. This ensures that not only do they have full access to all wallets and corp hangars, but also that third party tools such as EVEGuru can see you corp assets as well. Your corp "Role Management" tab should look like this:
And that should be it from a corp setup point of view.
Where to base yourself
Now this is a personal decision obviously, but I have a few strong suggestions.
First, it should be an NPC station. A lot of people (including myself) fall into the trap of using a public Raitaru, or worse, putting one up themselves. This is on the logic that the rig speed bonus will allow them to turn over product faster and thus make more money. Solid logic in principle, but it falls down in reality for a couple of reasons.
1. Most public Raitarus are scams, and will be put low power and scooped hoping to scoop your blueprints and materials. You have to be on the ball to avoid this fate
2. All Raitarus in high-sec are war deccable. There are corps dedicated to hunting areas arounds trade hubs, particularly Jita, and declaring war on any corp they find to destroy Raitarus and get easy ganks.
For these reasons, I cannot state strongly enough, USE AN NPC STATION, DO NOT PUT DOWN A RAITARU.
So, what station do you want to use? If you open the Industry window there is a Facilities tab. You can set the range to "within skill range" and search for "station" to filter our player structures.
From here you want a station that has the following:
- Manufacturing
- Material efficiency research
- Time efficiency research
- Copying
- Invention
So it should look something like this:
You ideally want the system cost index to be fairly low, ideally 5% or lower for most activities, although your presence will likely push these values up.
You also want to select one that is close to your chosen trade hub. I use Jita and Akonoinen is 4 jumps away, so it works for me.
Setting up your office
Once you've chosen a location, you want to fly there, dock and rent an office. There is a tab on the right for doing this:
You will get billed monthly for this, by default from the master wallet. I pay about 35mil to use this station. Busier stations you pay more, quieter ones you pay less.
Once you have an office, you'll notice you have access to corporation hangars. I would take a bit of time to setup names for these as they'll be important for keeping organised later. There are as many ways of doing this as there are people doing it, but here is my setup, feel free to copy. You'll find this window in the "My Corporation" sub-menu in the corporation menu. Divisions button in the bottom right.
Now from a corp setup point of view you're all done. But we haven't got onto building anything yet.
How to build
Now, I'm not going to go into too much detail of how to decide what to build at any given time. You can use a tool like EVEGuru or EVE ISK Per Hour, or you can start how I did by trawling through contracts until you find something profitable with good demand. Either way, you buy blueprints, you buy materials, and you haul them to your corp office. But where do you put them? Here's where the corp hangars come in.
I put all my BPOs and T1 BPCs in my "Blueprints" hangar, imaginative I know. Input materials for manufacturing and invention go in "Materials". Creativity is my specialty.
The setup for different processed varies slightly. For ME and TE research I do the following:
I have my output location set to "Blueprints", this means when the job is finished it will be dropped back into that hangar so I always keep them in the same place. Next to the Total Job Cost there is a drop down, you should select it and select "Corporation wallet - Master wallet". What this means is that the cost of running the job will come from the corp wallet, not the characters personal one. This really just saves several clicks moving money around anytime you want to do anything. This will be the same for all job types.
For invention it looks like this:
I get the input materials from materials, the output goes to "T2 BPCs", guess what that hangar is full of? The reason to have a different hangar just for this is that hangars have a space limit. I'm not sure exactly what it is but I have hit it several times in terms of BPCs. It's somewhere north of 1200 items. BPCs do not stack so you can fill up a hangar quite fast.
For manufacturing it looks like this:
Materials come from materials, out goes in "Build output". I have a hangar just for outputs for the logistics side of things.
How to do a run
So, I have 1 primary hauler character, who runs to Jita to put up sell orders, buys new materials and hauls them back and sets things up for my other characters. This character has decent trade skills as well as being able to fly T2 Haulers. And by fly I mean can actually fly with a decent fit, not just sit in them. I'll get into this shortly.
What I do when I log in is on this character go to the Industry window, jobs tab, and click "deliver all jobs". This will deliver all jobs for all my characters, leading to a pile of finished products in the "build output" hangar. From there depending on size I will put it all in either my Blockade Runner or Deep Space Transport and fly to Jita and put all the items up for sale.
Then I decide what to build next. For me that's usually 10 runs of 10 Mobile Depots (I keep a stock of the input materials that I get from buy orders as these are so reliable that I have 1 character just building them 24/7) and then I check if my best sellers are decently profitable. For me that is Medium CCC II, Large EM Shield Reinforcer II and a few others. Keeping this list small means I can keep a stock of materials from buy orders, improving my margins, and allows me to carry a stock of BPCs at all times. It also reduces the mental load of choosing items. I usually restrict my "ad-hoc" production to about 1 character or 10 slots, which I pick using EVEGuru, and keep the rest to these items.
Once I have my materials I fly back to Akonoinen, dump them in the "materials" hangar and then it's a simple task of cycling through my characters and clicking "start" on dozens of jobs.
Important point: You should setup and use insta-dock and undock bookmarks at the trade hub you are using, and use them every time. You should also use your tank every time as you will be targetted at some point. One trick on docking in a trade hub, you can set you destination there, manually click warp to your insta-dock bookmark, then once you are in warp you can turn the auto-pilot on and you will dock on the tick you land.
Here's the fit I use for my DST:
Damage Control II 1
Power Diagnostic System II 2
Multispectrum Shield Hardener II 1
50MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive 1
Large F-S9 Regolith Compact Shield Extender 1
Medium Core Defense Field Extender II 2
Explosive Shield Hardener II 1
Bustard 1
EM Shield Hardener II 2
This gives me the following stats:
Overheated this will survive 2 tornadoes (and has). Always keep your wits about you when hauling yourself. Or pay someone else to do it. That works.
Wrap up
So, what do you think? What do you do differently? What have I missed? What have I got ludicrously wrong? Hope this will be useful to some at the very least, giving an insight to how I approach things.
Now, how to do this in low sec...
