Oh no.

 The day I've been hoping would be a little while has finally arrived:

I had been waiting for hypercores to push towards 490k before cashing out, so as the buy orders disappeared and the price crashed I'm down 30Bn in about an hour. Ouch.

On the flip side skill extractors have spiked slightly, so I'm trying to cash those out to buy more hypercores at a very cheap level.

This might seem like throwing good money after bad but provided I'm more sensible about cashing out it should still be good. And I can use some of the money in more diverse investments as well.

The worst part about all of this is I'm technically no longer a Trillionaire, though that will be corrected soon enough as before this point (and starting my industry character) I was well over 40Bn up for the month so day to day trading is still good.

My first hundred million

So yesterday I passed the first real milestone of this journey, turning 8 million starting ISK into 100mil. According to JEveAssets it was actually 115mil and today I'm up to 146mil. 

That's quite a spike in the last few days, so what's happened?

There's a couple of components to this. First, I achieved a milestone in the opportunities program that awarded 8million ISK and 5 PLEX. I have been accepting these small rewards as they're part of the new player experience these days and they'll soon become inconsequential. I sold the PLEX to fund my Advanced Mass production skillbook, so now I have 9 build slots, rising to 10 in a few days. Once I achieve this I might spin up a new character on this account to get more slots.

The next aspect is I've sold 2 more of my researched BPOs, for 7.5 and 10mil respectively. JEveAssets counts BPOs at NPC value until the contract is accepted, so I only see the profit when I actually sell it. This is quite neat from an accounting point of view. 

Another major part of it, and a large contributor to me logging in with 84mil in the wallet this morning was cap booster 400s. Jita has been almost cleaned out of these over the last few days so I was able to build and sell some for over 100% profit margin! I've got more in build to try and take advantage of this.

One thing that's surprised me is how easy it has been to make money by skimming the first couple of pages of BPC contracts and building from them. I don't know how things will look when moving into null but for high sec industry I think the only reason I would buy BPOs is to research and sell them. Making money with BPCs is just too flexible and easy.

Making money from BPOs

 So as part of my switch to using BPCs to manufacture rather than BPOs, I've been looking to divest my current small BPO collection. As I've put ME research time into (almost) all of them I can't just sell them on the market. What I can do though is research from TE to make them 10/20 and sell them via contracts, which is exactly what I've started doing:

Not pictured is a Microwave S blueprint, which I bought for 20k, spent about another 20k researching, and then sold for 300k.

One thing to note with the contract UI though is there is no way to see at a glance what your total sell contracts are up for. This makes accounting for them quite annoying.

JEveAssets does total them for you, but it calculates the cost of the BPOs at NPC sell price, not at the price you put the contract up for:

That tiny yellow dot on the bottom right is 1.01million of BPOs up for sale, even though I've actually put them up for 31.5million. 

This leads on to a wider question of how I do my accounting for this challenge going forwards. Updating my spreadsheet manually as I have done throughout my trading will likely become too unwieldy with contracts and builds to consider (also not covered well my the UI). JEveAssets does cover items in build as well.

I am going to explore if the Excel addin can get this information, if it can't then I will almost certainly se JEveAssets for the accounting of this going forwards. So long as it's standardised and covers all my activities (which this does) it should be fine. 

Also, I'm finding that since transitioning away from the tiny BPOs to BPCs, I'm more limited by ISK than by manufacturing slots. This is kind of good as it means I can keep expending a little without imminently having to start up second characters/accounts or invest 26mil in advanced mass production. Though I want to do all of those things soon.

BPOs versus BPCs and an early mistake

 A while ago I did a post on an experiment manufacturing by sitting in Jita, buying BPCs on contract, building them in place and selling for profit. This demonstrated the profitability of doing things in the most cost inefficient way, and was something I intended to implement. It also showcased the other advantage of BPCs, that being flexibility. I could easily switch what I was manufacturing to what I found profitable, and wasn't limited to any blueprint library I happened to have.  

I then started this challenge and immediately forgot about all of that and bought a bunch of BPOs. Low value ones, and profitable even without research, but still. This has 2 problems. One; as mentioned, the limitations of flexibility, and two; All that money in BPOs is sat there doing nothing when those BPOs aren't being used. As the library grows I would effectively have a ever growing pile of assets sitting there doing nothing to grow my net worth. Also you have a break even point with BPOs, which isn't so bad for small ammo blueprints worth a few hundred thousand, but for bigger blueprints the BPO break even point could be several thousand runs, which I'm unlikely to ever do from a single blueprint.

I've started to correct that, and bought a couple of BPCs to use in the Raitaru in Ikuchi to build from. In doing so, I found a nice looking rig blueprint that looks nicely profitable, and would use up my last free slot and most of my available capital. Perfect.

You can't see the popup on hover over but it says "Activity requirement not met". Essentially I don't have the skills to use the blueprint. Damn. Injecting those skills cost me almost half a million and will take about 9 hours to learn. An annoying mistake but a relatively low cost learning point. Something to keep an eye on in the future!

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!