A Brave new adventure

I've talked for a little while about wanting to get back into the null sec game, back to flying ships in space. Since the collapse of Pandemic Horde I've not had the opportunity, and even before that I didn't really take the opportunity that much. I've also found that often I'll log in, do my trade stuff, do some industry, then sit there not knowing what to do and log off.

Mixing things up should hopefully give me more motivation to try different things, and reasons to stay logged in once I've done my usual routine. There are a few different options when it comes to null blocs, but in the end there was one choice that made the most sense for me:

10 and a half years after I left, I am back in Brave Newbies! No longer such a newbie, even to null. But Brave has a great mix of being welcoming, expecting very little of its pilots other than having fun, and offers a lot of different opportunities. 

They're not as big as say Goonswarm, but being part of the Imperium gives access to a lot of space, and Allies should anyone mount a big invasion. Being an alliance of around 3000 rather than 12000 means people are quite likely to come to their space looking for a fight which is good too.

The experience of joining was quite different from last time though. The first time I joined I simply applied in game and when the hard working recruitment team got to my app I was accepted. This time though, I had to fill in a form explaining why I wanted to join, my experience in the game etc. I had to add all of my characters (all 21 of them) to an external auth service, then wait around 4 days for someone to review my application. I then had to answer some questions about my relation to some characters I had in high personal standings (my sister and IRL friends from our high sec mining corp days of 15 years ago!) and then a few days later I was accepted. After that I had to put in requests for various services, set up mumble, slack etc etc. 

It honestly reminded me of this old meme:

I gather this is how a lot of the big blocs are, guess I was lucky in my previous adventures!

But most importantly, I'm in. Even though I have a few capitals and some subcaps knocking around in low sec somewhere I decided to do a "fresh start" for this adventure. I left all my assets behind, barring the 2.1Bn in my wallet and my alt, and deathcloned to UALX-3 in tenerifis. Just next door to my original home in Catch. Maybe I should go visit GE- for old times sake...

While I waited for all my IT setup to be completed so I could join fleet comms I bought myself a ratting Gila, and jumped out into space to go do some anoms:

Space is scary.

Honestly, I'm quite excited to jump into this and see if a change is as good as a rest. And to try out some null industry again...but I'll fly in space for a bit first, promise.

June Update - Industry

 A slightly less positive outlook for this side of the business:

My current net worth is 67.1Bn ISK, and increase of 3.9Bn ISK or 130mil/day.

A slight improvement on last month, but at a cost of 1.015Bn ISK per month in Omega each for 3 accounts, I'm still barely covering the Omega costs for the industry. A large part of this has come down to demotivation. As you can see the month started strong, really strong, then fell back as salvage prices dropped and then my updates stopped. 

Producing a small basket of items gives me good control of my inputs but it does mean that if the market shifts - and it frequently does - I'm completely at its mercy. I need to have a wholesale rethink about how I handle this part of the business and how I approach things going forwards in a better way. I have been skilling up towards building bigger tech 2 ships, and I have been selling inventory to free up money to pivot as I need to. At time of writing I have over 25Bn in the corp wallets, which is a good starting point for any new direction I take my industry.

I have also partially reclaimed the money spent shipping in fuel block components to Auner by flying my finished T2 haulers myself to Rens and Hek. They sell for a big mark up there and it saves me hauling costs. This is time consuming though and not at all scalable, so I don't want to pivot too hard towards this as manually flying back and forth, even if it's only 3 jumps each way, is the sort of thing that drove me to quit before COVID!

I'm going to spend some time this month exploring a few things though and I'll hopefully have a plan and a direction to bring fully online after our family holiday in August.

June Update - Trading

So, a bit of an unusual on this one. Here are the numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.22Tn ISK. That's a change of -25Bn ISK, or a loss of 833mil/day.

That's a dramatic decrease, but I'm honestly thrilled! 

So, what happened and why am I happy? Well, as outlined in my previous posts this month, I cashed out all of my Skill Extractors and HyperCores, as they reached my profit window and I could smell something coming in the NES. In the event I wasn't quite right in my guess, but I cashed out at the right time! I was able to end up with about 430Bn ISK to plough into PLEX, and then the day after FC dropped a 25% off Omega sale in the NES. I pulled the trigger for all 7 of my accounts, both trading and industrial, meaning most of my accounts are Omega'ed until the end of 2027.

Given I paid 4.5mil per PLEX and a years Omega cost 2700 per account I paid 12.15Bn ISK per account, for a total of 85.05BN ISK.

If you add that back in they I would have a net worth of 1.305Tn, or a monthly operating profit of 49Bn ISK.

A chunk of that is due to the increase in Skill Extractors and HyperCores before I sold them, and also I sold all my PLEX during the sale for a high of 5.1mil per PLEX (or about 12% profit before fees), which is why I'm sat on 445Bn ISK at the end of month. Once the sales all end I expected PLEX to drop in price again and I would pick more up. 

This ended up being exactly what happened and at time of writing I'm sat on 92,000 PLEX bought for (at max) 4.6mil each.

My trade revenues "feel" good though, and a large portion of my profits also came from that. I'm making trade runs regularly and am pretty happy with that part of the business, even though it isn't really growing right now it's just feeding money into my gambling investment pool.