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.

How to set up a High sec T2 industry corp

 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...

March Update - Industry

 A real slump this one, which I'll get into below. My current values:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 58.9Bn ISK, that's a decrease of 1.8Bn ISK.

So, what's up here?

Firstly, as you can see from the graph and explained in my trading post, I didn't play much, especially second half of the month.

Secondly, and more importantly, prices have been falling across the board. The death of Horde has lead to a sustained peace across Null, and the alliances are making ISK and mining in a big way again. This combined with less destruction has a negative effect on the game economy. Basically everything I build has more competition, less demand and is worth less. So I am constantly having to drop prices to get revenue to keep slots busy. Essentially I am sprinting to stand still.

As a result of this, I've decided to have a bit of a reset. I've dropped a lot of prices of my sell orders, so my worth has dropped but is more representative of the true value of my wares. This gets me some cash to invest in the next phase of my project, which is moving some operations to lowsec.

I have moved 1 character there already, and he's been training in building Sabres, which he can now do. Also reactions. I've also started another 2 characters down this road, as I look to scale back on medium rigs in high sec and look towards bigger ticket items with a better margin. My priority over the next few days will be setting this up and getting my first batch of blueprints/materials down there so I can test the whole flow end to end and see how I feel about it.

Ultimately I think I'd like to get to a place where I'm building Black Ops battleships and Jump Frieghters, but for now a few Sabres will have to do. I'll update as I put this together with my learnings, but hoping this can be the shot in the arm my industry needs!

March Update - Trading

 Another less than spectacular month this one. The summary:

And the full values:

My total net worth is 1.172Tn ISK. That's an increase of 11Bn, or 354Mil/day.

That's ever so slightly better than last month, but still terrible. So what's up with that? 

Basically, I've hardly played. As you'll see from the industry portion of events I've only logged in maybe once in the last 2 weeks, and even before that I wasn't reliably doing trade runs. Part of that has been that revenue is low. We saw in the last MER that velocity of ISK is down and prices are falling, both of which are bad for my business. 

I tend not to run through any character that has less than 8-10Bn in their wallet as the hauling contract tends not to be worth it for people, so less revenue means less updates, less updates mean less revenue. You see the problem.

that's in addition to me having stuff on in  real life, work being insanely busy, parents being down, I've had to sort out new blinds, had some building work done in our kitchen and various other bits. Yes I'm just as middle aged as it sounds!

I haven't actually set up seeding the PleniMart yet, but I'm going to make that my main trading priority this month. Hopefully opening up a new revenue stream can help with my motivation and cash flow. It should also help with the quarter of a trillion I have lying around in wallets doing nothing for me.

On that note, I have noticed that PLEX has been trending up, slowly but consistently for over a month now. I'm not sure why it has though, as there hasn't been any particular sales from CCP or anything. Maybe we're reaching a natural turning point where players view it as being cheap enough to PLEX their accounts and we're seeing increased demand? Not sure. One I'll be keeping an eye on though if it continues on this upward trend. I could easily throw 100Bn at it as a sort of hedge.

A new Industry Creator

 I've recently started watching a new EVE industry content creator on youtube, EVE Compass 

He has done an industry podcast with a couple of guests, the most recent one being Ardel Corvalon, CEO of ARDCO, who I've loaned 5Bn to support his industry buyback program. 

The new podcast takes more of a conversational tone, going into why the guest got into what they're doing, challenges they've faced and how they overcame them, as well as things like burnout. A really good listen.

He's also started his own progression series, From Rocks to Riches, where he started with an alpha character and is making a go of industry. Only 1 episode so far but I'll be keeping track with interest.

It's nice to see some recent additions to the industry content creation game. I've said this before but I think we're in a really good place for this sort of content and there's a lot more than there used to be a few years ago, which is great. Gives me stuff to watch on the train into London!

Deflation and reduced economic activity

 So, at the moment we're in a period of arguable deflation within EVE. Oz has done an analysis in greater detail that I could here: Feb MER analysis

But essentially, ISK velocity is down, mining is up, destruction is down, prices continue to fall.

As to why, I think we're really feeling the effects of Pandemic Horde's collapse. Both them and Goons were gearing up for a big war, which would have meant large amounts of destruction, requiring replacement ships/modules/deadspace kit and pushing up the ISK velocity. 

Instead what we have is a place where the 3 big blocs, Goons, INIT and Frat, are all in full "stockpile" mode, where they are mining/building like crazy and not destroying much. This pushes prices down due to a flood of minerals and salvage, and demand down due to not needing to replace anything at scale.

What this means for me, personally, is it's becoming harder and harder to make money. My core regional trade business is suffering as the demand for deadspace/faction items is dropping so my overall income is down. In my industry side things are worse as I'm having to drop prices to keep pace with where things are and get some liquidity, which I'm using to keep slots busy for smaller margins. And since I'm essentially just adding to the flood of the market I either push my prices down to get liquidity, or I keep them where they are and just build up sell orders that are never going to go anywhere. It feels like I'm running just to stand still.

These phases happen in EVE, and if it continues too much CCP will step in or eventually a significant conflict will kick off, but right now it's hitting my motivation as it just feels like I'm not achieving much right now.

I'm still waiting for skills to train to get some alts into producing T2 hulls so I can switch to higher margin items as well, which is again frustrating but at least gives me something to look towards.

February Update - Industry

 An even worse month than trading this one. My current position:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 61.7Bn ISK. That's an increase of 500mil, or 18mil/ISK/day.

Truly dreadful, so why?

Well, likewise I only played half the month as you can clearly see on the graph. I have also been fighting to try and improve my main issue, which is revenue. 

Without revenue, I don't have the money for materials to build things, so I need to improve that. Currently I struggle to keep my slots all busy. Therefore I've been much more aggressive than usual in updating sell orders for my wares. The problem is, salvage is falling in value due to peace time well and truly setting in, so rigs are also falling. 

I'll keep fighting like this until things stabilise, but I also need to branch out. I've been saying for a long time that I want to give low sec industry a go, and I've finally started moving in that direction.

I have 1 character who was building t2 haulers while the margins were good, but that has completely evaporated in high sec now, and has been like that for a while. However, looking at EVEGuru the margins if you do your own reactions and build t2 components in lowsec are very good. As a result I've moved this character to Aunur, to the lowsec foundry run by EVEGuru, and I'm training skills for this new venture. These include things like Mass Reactions and the Advanced form, but also Advanced small ship construction (I'm thinking or starting out doing Sabres) and other skills needed for the t2 components that go into ships. Step 2 will be to buy the blueprints I need, ship them down and start researching them, then ship in materials and do a couple of exploratory runs.

I'm excited for where this goes. I'm also working on a "building rigs in high sec" guide as well, which I hope to publish this month so that people can tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to improve my process. Interesting times ahead!

February Update - Trading

 Not an amazing month this one, I hardly played for the first 2 weeks and it showed. Still, here are the numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.161Tn ISK. That's an increase of 8Bn, or 285mil/ISK/day.

So that's pretty poor, why so bad?

Well, as explained, I basically didn't play for the first 2 weeks, but additionally, when I was updating my "investments" towards the end of the month I realised I had 100 extra master-at-arms cerebral accelerators listed on my sheet than I actually had in my inventory. This wasn't a new mistake and was listed on my last sheet, so I could go back and adjust my accounting there, but that could get messy so I'm just updating it here. So operating profit wise I'm probably about 6Bn better than that.

Additionally, I've not really been doing anything new with my money. What I am starting to prep for is seeding a market to branch out. I've chosen the "PleniMart" in Kihtalid for this experiment. It ranks in the top 40 markets galaxy wide and is being operated by Thanak of the Building my Industrial empire series. Well worth a watch. What started out as one man trying to get into industry has turned into an alliance encompassing high sec and null sec, and has pulled in the likes of ARDCO into its ranks. 

This planned seeding will be using different items to my normal regional trading, likely more common items to get greater turnover. I will also be competing with Croda, who has recently started seeding this station. We'll see how this goes. I suspect my item choices might be slightly different from his, but greater supply can only help further cement PleniMart as a real secondary trade hub.

This should also help me hit one of my other goals I've had for a while to hit 1Tn in sell orders, which I'm also there at right now.

A rare gank attempt

 So the other night someone attempted to gank me.

I was on my way back to Akonoinen, in a DST with about 3Bn in materials for a run, then when I jumped into Vellaine I loaded grid with 7 ships, mainly Oracles. I knew what was up and aligned to warp and turned my tank on along with my MWD. I was promptly locked up and...brought to about half shield. I remembered I hadn't overheated so did that and the second volley hit...knocking off about another quarter of my shield. 

By that point CONCORD had flooded the grid and all 7 assailants died in an expensive fireball, leaving me with 7 kill rights to use, which is nice. 

I was never going to use them myself, but fortunately I don't have to, so I made them available for all to use for 10 or 15 million each. Over the next 2 days I got these mails:

And just like that I was about 90mil richer. Just goes to show that it's worth having your haulers fully tanked, and remember to train Thermodynamics so you can overheat. 

If he had calculated properly it would have cost me about 3.3Bn, as he failed it cost him somewhere around 700mil and I gained 90mil. Quite the swing based on results.

January update - Industry

 Similar to my trading update here in that I didn't play that much, and there were headwinds that affected my overall profit quite heavily. My current position:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 61.2Bn ISK. That's an increase of 1.4Bn or 45mil/day.

That's really poor. 

The primary reason here is a lack of proper play and investment, so my slots were not kept busy very much this month. Additionally, logic circuits and medium rigs were fluctuating and frequently unprofitable, negatively affecting my worth even when I was producing.

Really, what I need to do is diversify my characters skills and blueprints, so that I can pivot more easily in these situations going forwards. Also, I should buy a freighter, so that I can shift minerals more easily. Rig margins vary quite heavily and can move quickly, but something I produce a bit of every now and again that maintains a healthy margin is Siege modules. And I don't specifically mean Siege Module I or II, but the category of modules that fall under that. In my case I sometimes produce Medium or Large Industrial Cores. Both the T1 and T2 versions are always profitable, though a job run can take a week to do. I suspect this plays into the margins. They are however quite space intensive, usually requiring several DST runs to shift the materials or the modules one way. I can fix that with a freighter, which I think my CEO character can now fly.

The other thing I'd like to do is look into longer running jobs. For a least some characters. Rigs are great for a quick turnaround but I can't always log in enough to take advantage of that, so some longer running things would be great to weave in. Maybe take a look at building t2 hulls in Auner. We'll see.

January update - Trading

 A bit of a delayed update this one, for a couple of reasons. Real life has thrown up a fair amount over the last month or so, with work being pretty hellish. We had a number of time critical bits combined with major incidents and our product owner is leaving us, so I've picked up some of his responsibilities in his absence. So I've had very little time for coding and little time and energy for gaming. I've also been ill this last week or so, well enough to work but ill enough to not want to sit staring at a screen gaming. The worst kind of illness. 

Anyway, my numbers from the end of Jan:

And the full breakdown:

I have a net worth of 1.153Tn ISK. That's an increase of 31Bn ISK, or 1Bn/day.

All things considered I'm pretty pleased with that. I haven't done as many trade runs as usual, but I'm back to making a healthy profit again which is great. I've also gone in and done 1 or 2 updates from some expired orders in sobaseki (far right of the sheet) in addition to my normal sale locations of Amarr, Rens, Hek and Dodixie. It's not a big earner but I want to liquidate that before deciding if I want to pick it up as a proper sale location again.

Some investment increases have helped as well, Large Skill Injectors have taken a bit of a jump, as well as hypercores taking another step towards PLEX parity. I've begun liquidating these, hoping to be completely free of HyperCores by the end of March realistically.

Loans

You may have noticed an extra line in my summary, "loans". This is just one loan actually, but I've left it as a plural in case I end up giving more out. Ardel Corvallon, COE of ARDCO and creator of the series Zero to fuel tycoon has begun expanding into wanting to run a buyback to support his miners and get some materials for his corps fuel block production. I've spoken to him on and off over the last few months, he seems like a good guy who's passionately trying to carve out his own niche in EVE, and a number of people seem drawn to his enterprise. I've been keen to support him, even though creating fuels blocks doesn't really fit with my style of industry, so I offered him investment if he needs it. 

I was initially turned down, as he was keen to learn from a smaller base and build up, which is probably the best way and I respect that. However to get some seed money for his buy back he came to me and one other anonymous benefactor asking for 5Bn at a 4% interest rate, with an unspecified return rate.

Now on the face of it this isn't great for me, 4% return for an indeterminate amount of time isn't great. However, this is really about me supporting another content creator in the game, and helping to make the EVE cluster feel more alive, so I'm more than happy to provide this, even if, through burnout, personal circumstance or simply a scam I never get the 5.2Bn. It's hardly a major loss for me (I've lost more to erroneous broker fees than that!).

I'm keen to see where his journey takes him, and how he can make this scale and work in the future.

End of Year 2025

 This year has been eventful. A year when I've thrown myself fully into the game, and upped both my activity and variety of what I do. Where I lost my Null sec "home" of the last 10 years, and where I find myself in a very different situation tot he start of 2025. So let's recap.

Trading

So, there's a bit to talk about here, but first here's the numbers:

And the whole sheet:

I have a net worth of 1.122Tn ISK. That's an increase of -67Bn ISK!!

So, that seems bad. And it is, no question, but there's more to it than that. Well, the main one is this month I had to buy Omega for another year for my 3rd Industry account, I bought PLEX for 4.45 million each, and spent 16Bn ISK on that. The next day, CCP dropped a 25% NES sale on Omega time for 1 year. Now, my trade accounts (all 4 of them) have Omega until April, so i could have held off on this for 4 months, but 25% off is just too good a deal not to jump on. So I bought PLEX for about 4.815 mil each and paid 2700 (rather than 3600) per account to Omega them for an extra year through to April 2027. What this worked out at is:

4,185,000 * 2700 = 13,000,500,000 per account

13,000,500,000 * 4 = 52,002,000,000 overall

That plus the industry account means 68,022,000,000 ISK spent on Omega this month. 

That wasn't my only expense either, as I spent 2.5Bn getting some assets out of asset safety and shipping them to Dodixie.

Additionally, you will notice that there are significantly fewer HyperCores listed than previously. As the price of PLEX tumbled HyperCores were approaching PLEX parity, and appear stuck at ~383,000 a unit so I decided to start liquidating my stockpiles and use that ISK elsewhere, dumping some into PLEX, some into Large Skill Injectors and some into other investments. Those other investments I'm not convinced about, and tbh I could definitely use the money for my regional trading, so a bit of a mistake there. Not the end of the world though, diversification is a good thing after all. 

I've not been able to work out exactly how much I paid in broker fees and sales tax for my HyperCores, but roughly:

150,000 sold this month * 383,000 (average price) * 0.0458 (~1.21 broker and 3.37 sales) = 2,631,210,000 ISK spent liquidating hypercores.

So, factoring all that in, that's ~73Bn costs versus 67Bn losses for an operating profit of just 6Bn ISK this month. Really poor all things considered, though I'm sure there are other costs I'm missing here. Having said that I wasn't playing much for the latter half of the month.

All that equivocating to say I start the year with just over 1.12Tn ISK, but only 2 Omega subs to worry about later on in the year rather than the usual 7. Only 80Bn made this year, but I have paid for 11 yearly Omega subs in that time. 

Industry

The Industry half of my business has been my main focus this year, and is really where most of the money making has been. Here is the values for December:

And here's the graph:

My net worth is 59.8Bn ISK. That's an increase of 10.2Bn ISK or 329mil/day.

That's pretty good, though not quite as good as last month. Early in the month Logic Circuits spiked hard, up to 2.4mil at times, and everything else came up with it. This resulted in an enormous revenue spike in the early part of the month, as you can see from the dark blue line in the graph. 

With revenue of 68Bn in the last month I quickly found myself with a lot of money to invest. I did achieve this by stocking up on plenty of supply of all of the materials I use in my day to day. I bought tens of thousands of datacores, decryptors, salvage materials, PI. I bought materials for dozens of Cranes which ended up not really working out tbh. When I put Cranes in the oven across 10 slots they were costing ~123mil to build and were selling for 147mil. By the time they came our the sell price had dropped to build cost, leaving me with a potential loss after fees. I've decided to hold onto these for now and wait for the price to rise as it's currently at a yearly low.

I've mostly been churning out Rigs as fast as humanly possible. I don't know how many medium CCC II rigs I've sold, but it's a lot. The price has been all over the place but settled back to a build price of ~12.5mil and a sell price of 15mil. I'm pretty happy if it stays like this as the revenue is reliable and I can use them to build up my cash buffer while I wait for other things to sell.

Early on in the year I pushed my 3 accounts to 9 characters, moved them all to the same place and brought them online, with a system that I can work through in 15-20 mins if all I'm doing is setting off rig builds and doing a quick run to Jita. This is great as I often don't have more than this during a given day but I would like to expand if possible. 

Plans for 2026

I have 7 accounts, 4 dedicated to trading and 3 to industry. However, I only have 5 characters dedicated to trading at the moment, a Jita buyer, and sellers in Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek. I have my "main" who is currently homeless and my former null seller/cyno character, who is sitting on a mountain of asset safety gear to get out. That leaves 5 characters that have been idle for some time. All of these characters have trade skills, and very little else. They've done a mix of selling in other hubs, station trading, and one did some building of Raitarus in the dim and distant past. That character is the whole reason I've got that blueprint section on the trade sheet.

First thing I need to do is to get all of my assets out of asset safety and up for sale in Dodixie. That will likely cost me close to 10Bn, but it need to happen to extract that value and clean things up. 

Next, I need to work out what to do with these idle characters. The easy thing to do would be to incorporate them into my industry. Add them to corp, move them to Akonoinen and get them churning things out the same as my other characters. For my Raitaru builder in particular this makes a lot of sense. I could "buy" the blueprints from my traders for NPC value to make the move clean and start from there. This is something I will likely look at doing this month.

The main issue that can arise from this is transport, I have 1 character who flies a Blockade Runner (BR) or a Deep Space Transport (DST) and another one with a DST. For what I do currently this is fine, though for things like ships or industry cores it can be painful as they take several trips. What I need really is a freighter. I have been quietly training one of my characters to fly a Charon, and I will likely buy one soon. I will keep to sensible limits when hauling, preferring multiple trips over stuffing too much value in to make a profit. 

I would like to start making a move towards building freighters this year. I think it'll be profitable to do where I am, though the start up costs are large. I will likely have to build up a month or twos spare capital to pull this off, but if I continue to make 10Bn a month this shouldn't take too long.

The final thing I need to do this year relates to my main. I like having Null access. It gives access to a different style of gameplay, to fly capitals, to rat as a serious form of income, to fly in big PvP fleets etc. I would jump in one of the remaining blocks but TBC Anniversary comes out soon (I know, WoW, BOO). It was always my favourite expansion and I do kind of have the itch, even though I definitely can't commit to strict raid times this go round. I will likely take a view on how into it (or not) I get, and if I ditch WoW this go round I'll jump into one of the null blocs and get some serious in space flying done on a ship with guns for a change.

I'd also like to thank everyone for reading the blog this year. I started this to keep myself motivated and on track, not thinking anyone would be remotely interested but it has lead to me being invited onto a podcast to speak to the devs, added to the think tank for ARDCO as someone who "knows what they're doing" and others. All that's to say it has really enhanced my experience being able to interact with others in this wonderful game we've all being playing more than half our lives, at least that's true for me.

Happy New Year!