Manufacturing next steps

So I've not abandoned manufacturing, but there hasn't been too much to report.

I've done 2 runs of the citadel rigs, and put them up for sale in Hek and Rens. These are selling slowly, but I should end up with about 2Bn profit from it if they all sell. Pretty good really! I've not done proper accounting, just ballpark figures for input mats purchased and the sell prices I put them up for.

More importantly, I've bought a set of structure component blueprints, specifically the 9 components required to build a Raitaru, and put them in to research ME:

I had been hoping to get the BPOs to ME 10, but to do that with these would take about 500 days! Obviously not practical. The most I can put them in for from fresh is ME6, which takes about 15 days. I'll probably aim for a final ME of 7 or 8, and go from there. It'll take a while to get going, but it's nice to have something to work towards, and building up a BPO library is always going to be useful.

Skill Point Farming

So, I have an account containing my Jita station traders, my Amarr station trader, and my Tash-Murkon region trader. All of these characters have all of their trade skills at V, so I consider them "finished" from a skills point of view.

As such, any skill points I train are wasted from a trading point of view. CCP decided to allow skill point trading a while ago though, so I'm going to take advantage of it on my Jita station trader for a little supplementary income. Some people optimise this so that accounts pay for their own PLEX plus turn a profit, but I pay for this account in cash, so the money will simply go towards the Trillion.

On my Jita trader, I have the following skill mapping:

This is the default that every character starts with. I also have a set of +3 training implants plugged in. Currently my skill queue looks like this:

Advanced mass production has 6 days 19 hours left to train to 5. It has a primary attribute of Memory, and a secondary attribute of Intelligence. I'm going to remap to focus on those two, and buy +5 implants for those 2 attributes:

Down to 5 days 9 hours. A huge increase in training speed. I'm going to keep extracting skill points from this skill and advanced industry, and sell the injectors on the market as a supplementary income. I should be able to sell 3 or 4 injectors a month for around 440mil profit each at current prices. Decent bit of income for next to no work.

November Update

A very sow start to the month, but picked up towards the end. Still not quite at the velocity I saw in June/July, but getting bacon track. My current position:

I have 507.8Bn ISK, an increase of 16.9Bn. This is, all things considered, a pretty poor month, I suspect partly cause by upheaval in my life (moved house) and partly by the tail end of the "Chaos Era" changes that saw a dip in nullsec activity. My life should start looking a bit more settled now for the foreseeable future, s I'm hoping to start getting a bit more playtime in going forwards.

I've been keeping to 1sh trade run a week, and even managed the odd evening to update orders. I was very pleased when I logged in yesterday to find over 50Bn ISK across my main characters to buy more stuff. In the end I carried ~34Bn of items out of Jita for sale elsewhere. I have an issue with one of the numbers on my spreadsheet, and that is "ISK in wallet: 36.9Bn". That is way too much ISK lying around doing nothing for me. I have plans for that though, I'm going to buy some structure blueprints and put some money into manufacturing, and I'm going to plow the rest into my trading/investments.

I have 4 accounts, with 10 characters dedicated to trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has little training, and mostly buys from sell orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders. This character also manages my long term investments, though that doesn't take much work. I am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 74.7Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~155.8 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 86.9 Billion in sell orders. No news with this character.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has  108.4 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane. There's a jump in sell orders here, as he's listed 5 structure rigs build by my manufacturing characters, and some skill injectors bought in Jita.

Hek Seller

Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. Currently on 55.8Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which isn't too difficult.

Amarr station trader

Sits in a player owned Fortizar in Ashab, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a range of 1 Jump to cover Amarr. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 12.3 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, with 0.3% broker fee that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a reach of 1 jump.

Most of my items are bought and sold in the Jita 4-4 station. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 10 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 57 Billion. I spent the time to get faction and corp standing up with this character, and this is my attempt to take station trading seriously.

I'm also going to start SP farming/extracting on this character, as the characters on this account are "finished" from a trading point of view. This could cover the cost of PLEXing account 4 potentially. More on this in another post.

Horde Seller

In a very similar way to the other selling characters, he takes items bought by the Jita Buyer, then contracts the items to "Valhalla Deliveries" (a delivery service for Pandemic Horde) to transport the items to the Horde Keepstar in R10-GN. He then sells them there for a profit. He trades primarily T2 modules, drones and scan probes. I set him up with 1Bn and he's currently at 3.4 Bn in sell orders.

I've done very little with this character this month again.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

A different strategy altogether. This character sits in a player owned Fortizar in Tash-Murkon prime, and set up regional buy orders for modules, implants and drones. When a lot of orders have been filled I fly around and collect it all to sell in Tash-Murkon Prime. I set this character up with 100mil to buy his own skills and get started, after skills he had 70mil to buy items. Currently at 5Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably.

Manufacturing Character

My latest character, pretty new. Currently has 11 building slot and 10 lab slots. Finished research on 5 structure rig blueprints and has done 1 run on each of them, with the produce up for sale in Rens. I haven't accounted for this very well, but I bought materials for the run for about 2.1Bn and put them up for sale in the region of 3.4Bn. Pretty good return if they sell. New plan is to buy structure component blueprints to research, and do more runs on the BPs I have. The plan will be to sell the items produced by this character in the 5 trade hubs I sell in. I'm planning to put more time and work into this character this month to work out a process.

Whoa, we're half way there!

WHOOOAAA, HALF A TRILLIONAIRE!

Bonus Bon Jovi To listen to whilst reading this blog entry.

So, It's taken longer than I'd hoped, but when I updated my spreadsheet today the total ticked over to a little over 500Bn ISK!!

I started out on 17/11/2015, so just under 4 years to go from 3Bn to 500. An average of 10.57Bn a month, obviously increasing as we go.

I started out buying items in Jita, and selling in Amarr. I then expanded to Dodixie and then Rens. Along the way I've added new characters and trading techniques, including station trading, hauling to null, and buying and running around a region without a "big 5" trade hub. The bread and butter however has remained the same, buy high price, low volume items (implants, faction/deadspace mods, rigs) from sell orders in Jita, transport them to another hub and then sell.

This will likely continue as I head towards the big T, though I'm going to further supplement my earnings with manufacturing (in the works, not far off starting), and a little SP farming. More on that in another post, but I basically have 1 account where all 3 characters are considered "finished", so I might as well cash in on their skill point accumulation as I can't use it for trading.

So, how long is it going to take me to get to 1 Trillion ISK? I'm going to make some assumptions and try and work it out.

On 01/01/2016 I had 11Bn
On 04/02/2017 I had 29Bn (The earliest I have for that year, I took a bit of a break from the game)
On 04/01/2018 I had 100Bn
On 01/01/2019 I had 270Bn

I predicted at the start of the year that I would double my wealth this year, leading to a wealth on 01/01/20 of 540Bn. That's looking like being about right with slightly over 2 months to go. Here is where I take some assumptions going forwards. Let's start with the pessimistic prediction:

100/29 is a 3.44x increase year on year
270/100 is a 2.7x increase year on year
540/270 is a 2x increase year on year

Assuming my yearly increases continue to decrease as a percentage, the next few increases should be:

2.7/3.44 = 0.78
2-2.7 = 0.74

So to extrapolate, I'm going to use 0.7 for the next few years:

2*0.7=1.4
1.4*0.7=0.98 (I doubt I'll lose money year on year).

so, 540*1.4= 756Bn by 01/01/2021.

Now let's look at it a different way:

in 2017 I increased my wealth by 71Bn
in 2018 I increased by 170Bn
in 2019 I increased by 270Bn

So for 202 I should increase by ~370Bn, which would put me on 910Bn on 01/01/2021, then an increase of 470Bn would result in 1380Bn on 01/01/2022.

The reality would probably be somewhere between the two, so let's say I'll aim for 825Bn on 01/01/2021, hitting the T some time in the middle of the year.

Either way, I'm hoping for more going forwards. I really like having a definitive target to aim for, I feel having somethign to drive for really drives engagement in the game, whether that's a certain wealth, a certain number of pvp kills, or building your own orca. All playstyles are valid, you just have to find the one that's right for you.

October Update

Well this was inextricably a poor month. Let's get right to it.

My current position:

I have 490.9Bn ISK. That is a measly increase of 7.6Bn. Not 27.6, 7.6. My worst month for probably 2 years. What I struggled to work out is why?

I've managed to keep to 1 proper trade run (as described in a previous blog) a week, which isn't unusually low. I've barely updated orders in between then, which will definitely have contributed to less profit, but doesn't explain such a small increase. Even more strangely, this last week has been decent, almost all of my profits coming this last week. The preceding 3 weeks, despite some turnover, I wasn't making any money at all.

I looked and looked to see if I had made an accounting error somewhere (wouldn't be the first time) and couldn't find one. The price of PLEX tanked which I reckon accounted for a 2-3Bn lowering of value, I spent ~1.85Bn on PLEX for my 4th account, same as last month and I had to put up some orders which had expired again, which accounted for about 1Bn in broker fees. All that still comes to a pessimistic 6Bn ISK in costs, which would still be quite a low increase of 13Bn. I know it's summer, and the Chaos era may have hit activity, but I'm still surprised that this month my worth isn't starting with a 5. I guess I'll just have to keep trying and see if next month improves.

On the plus side, it looks like there's money to be made manufacturing, which I'm keen to get started with.

I have 4 accounts, with 10 characters dedicated to trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has little training, and mostly buys from sell orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders. This character also manages my long term investments, though that doesn't take much work. I am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 76Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~154 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 84 Billion in sell orders. No news with this character.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has  89.5 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Hek Seller

Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. Currently on 53.9Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which isn't too difficult.

Amarr station trader

Sits in a player owned Fortizar in Ashab, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a range of 1 Jump to cover Amarr. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 12.2 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, with 0.3% broker fee that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a reach of 1 jump.

Most of my items are bought and sold in the Jita 4-4 station. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 10 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 54.8 Billion. I spent the time to get faction and corp standing up with this character, and this is my attempt to take station trading seriously.

Horde Seller

In a very similar way to the other selling characters, he takes items bought by the Jita Buyer, then contracts the items to "Valhalla Deliveries" (a delivery service for Pandemic Horde) to transport the items to the Horde Keepstar in R10-GN. He then sells them there for a profit. He trades primarily T2 modules, drones and scan probes. I set him up with 1Bn and he's currently at 3.4 Bn in sell orders.

I've done very little with this character this month again.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

A different strategy altogether. This character sits in a player owned Fortizar in Tash-Murkon prime, and set up regional buy orders for modules, implants and drones. When a lot of orders have been filled I fly around and collect it all to sell in Tash-Murkon Prime. I set this character up with 100mil to buy his own skills and get started, after skills he had 70mil to buy items. Currently at 4.6Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably.

Manufacturing Character

My latest character, pretty new. Not doing a huge amount at the moment other than training skills. Currently has 1 building slot and 5 lab slots. Research ME on 5 structure rig blueprints ready to start building from them in 27 days.

Gearing up for manufacturing

So, today after doing my trade run, I finally found some time to do some initial set up for my manufacturing.

I created my new character for this on the 22nd, a week ago, and since then he has been doing nothing but training skills. He currently has Industry IV, training V, Laboratory Operation IV, Science IV, and a bunch of other general skills like warp drive operation.

All in all at the moment he has access to 5 lab slots and 1 manufacturing slot. Not exactly inspiring, but this will improve quite quickly. I'm not skilling in perhaps the optimal way, but I'll get there in the end.

Meanwhile I've done some browsing for what to manufacture. How I did it is pretty ad-hoc. I went to Fuzzwork's blueprint calculator and scrolled through some options.

I've decided that I'm pretty keen on building citadels and related modules, but building citadels requires the "Outpost construction" skill, which I do not yet have. As part of my trading however I've noticed that citadel rigs can be transported from Jita and sold at a good profit. I therefore had a look at those, and found that most can actually be produced and sold in Jita for a profit, at ME 0. This is pretty unexpected, but welcome. At ME 10 most of them pay for the blueprint with a single run! The blueprints are 100mil each, so not too expensive either. A Raitaru for comparison is 4Bn!

I've therefore bought 5 rig blueprints for medium citadels (the most common ones in highsec) and set them to research:

It'll take about a month each for them to hit ME10, so I might find something else to build in the meantime, but these seem like they'll be nice little earners until I get the skills to build outposts, and am willing to front the pretty high startup capital to build them. The good news is most citadels, despite the high start up cost, are profitable to produce even buying the components off the market. If you build your own they're very profitable! I definitely think this is the way to go for me, as I can't really guarantee a log on every day, or even more than once or twice a week!

In terms of accounting for these, I'm recording the NPC price of the BPOs on my spreadsheet. I know a researched blueprint can sell for more, but market conditions can change that, and I can always guarantee NPC sell price for them, so that's how I'm valuing them.

I've never found a blog of anyone building citadels, so I'll try and record my thoughts and processes as I go along, for posterity if nothing else. A new chapter for my money making!

A New Manufacturing Character

Skill training completed:

I wish Aura still said that, such a satisfying sound.

Anyway, yesterday my Hek seller finished Tycoon V, and I consider him now "finished" from a sellers point of view. He has Accounting/Broker Relations V, and all skills that give more orders to V, giving him the maximum of 305 orders to play with (he's only using 80 atm).

This leaves me with the question of what to do with the other 2 character slots on that account. I had thought to create more region traders in the same vein as the Tash-Murkon trader, and if I was purely thinking from a profit point of view that would be the way forwards. However, for along time I've liked the idea of getting back into manufacturing seriously.

My Rens seller has a lot of manufacturing skills, and there was a period of time years ago when that was how I made money with that character. The problem is if he's flying around doing manufacturing related things, he's not in a position to update orders, or fly around collecting items on a trade run. 

Now however, with a free character slot, I can dedicate a character to just manufacturing. I haven't quite decided whether to go T1 or T2, or mix up both. I quite like the idea of building citadels, or other structures. This seems to be a bit of an underserved market outside Jita, and I have the money to take this seriously.

I also haven't decided where to base my efforts. I'm pretty much free to be where I want, so this is a tricky question. I can pretty much rule out Jita as a place to sell my wares, as the competition is too fierce, and profit margins are likely razor thin, if not negative.

Amarr appeals, being a bit less competitive, and I do transport some structure rigs there for sale, which means there is a margin to be made and I can likely still get all my materials at a reasonable price.

What I feel like I'm leaning towards at the moment though is Minmatar space. I know, it has the smallest trade hubs of the 4 races high sec regions, but that's kind of the beauty of it - trade hubS, plural. Rens is 6 jumps from Hek, and where I already have a character with good industry skills. If I pick a system somewhere between the two, I can serve both hub easily, and if I need more lines going I can easily bring my Rens seller across to build some stuff.

I'm probably several days away from getting started seriously, as I need to train a bunch of skills, industry, mass production, laboratory operation etc etc, so i can spend some time scouting out where to set up. I will probably operate out of NPC stations initially whilst I get a feel for things, then plop down my own citadel(s). 

I'm excited to try something new, though it's going to take a lot of prep and thought to do properly - stay tuned!