Greedy Goblin

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Producing crap

Do you know what material research is?
How high is your research skill?
Do you have advanced mass production 5?
Production efficiency 5?
Do you know where to get datacores to T2 BP research?

No? Then keep away from production n00b!

Or not. Even with low skills and even less knowledge you can efficiently and profitably produce items. Of course not titan rigs, but items that serious players consider worthless crap. My item is trauma rocket. Yes, that newbie rocket:
As you can see the materials cost is 3.4 ISK/rocket and they sell for 7-7.5, netting me 3.5-4 ISK profit on every rocket. I can run 4 concurrent jobs and a 1500 batch takes about 5 days to complete, so I'm printing 3.7*1500*100*4/5 = 440K/day.

Low isn't it? But the keyword is "printing". I have no opportunity cost on the manufacture as I can't produce anything worthy. My alternative is leaving my crafting slots empty. It's passive income, why leave it there? I have little to none competition due to no serious player would bother crafting this item.

So let's start the basics of manufacture: You need materials, a blueprint and a station with slots. The NPC stations have lot of slots. Some of them are empty, the rest are used. Of course you won't find empty on Jita, but a few jumps travel won't kill you. The simple items created from blueprints are sold by NPCs for low cost. They are original blueprints, meaning they are usable forever. Copies on the other hand has licensed production numbers. The crafting interface will tell you the material requirements, you get them and off you go. Don't let these slots go waste!

Some tips:
  • The skill "production efficiency" decreases material cost
  • The skill "industry" decreases crafting time
  • The skill "mass production" gives more manufacture slots
  • You can also research production time decrease, the "research" skill helps that.
  • There are "beancounter" implants  that decrease research time. They go to different slots as the +attribute implants.
This Covetor seems to be selling below material price, because "perfect" is not perfect, it just refers to you having perfect skills. The NPC sold blueprint has 10% waste, removing this would decrease material cost to 10/11 of the current: 23M.
You can decrease material costs by doing material research on the blueprint. The "metallurgy" skill makes it faster. Only a few stations provide that service, you can find them by starting the research and on the "pick installation" window switch to "region", showing all installations in the region. Now all you need is one with less than 20 days waiting queue. Good luck! The skill "laboratory operations" increases the number of available researches.

Business report: buy+sell+cash = 1.68B (0.49B gift)

8 comments:

Gevlon said...

The text fixed with the Beancounter implants (thanks Steel) and the material research clarification (thanks Parasoja, Anonymous).

The comments referring to them deleted as now redundant.

IO said...

Actually training Adv. mass production 5 is retarded, better to train basic skills in another char on same account :p

And Titan uses same rigs as Battleship.

Noriane said...

"This Covetor seems to be selling below material price, because "perfect" is not perfect, it just refers to you having perfect skills. The NPC sold blueprint has 10% waste, removing this would decrease material cost to 10/11 of the current: 23M."

Actually this is still misleading. "Perfect" means "perfect material research" (0% waste), "you" means the current material that is need for the current material efficient of the blue print, and I believe both of those numbers doesn't take into account your skill yet.
So in the picture, the material for the covetor would have been worth 26.8M.
Also, note that most of the time it's not worth researching ME to perfect, there are another "optimal" threshold - after which it may not be beneficial to research more. You can either look up the optimal ME or calculate it.

Bobbins said...

You can get material researched BPO through contracts for an inflated price. Calculate the savings versus the cost it may be better than waiting a month for the research to start.

PS It probably goes without saying but know what you are buying. Blueprints come in two forms BPO/BPC are they can be researched to differing degrees. Also when researching BPOs diminished returns sets in a ME100 can provide no better return than a ME4 so don't over research(depends on items).

Ket said...

Lowsec stations usually have research slots with 0-2 days queue. Open the starmap, set it to filter for station services - science. Find some lowsec stations with such a service, and set destination. Fly to the 1st system in that region of space, most likely a highsec system. Open up your science window, to go the installations tab, and click through all the ME research stations in the region until you find the one with lowest queues.

Blueprints take no space, so depending on the BPO cost you can risk going there in a shuttle. Most lowsec dwellers will ignore your shuttle, assuming they could even lock you up in time. Obviously, a cloaky ship is much safer. Don't be the moron in the shuttle killmail with a 400m ISK BPO in cargo.

Anti said...

nice site to calculate BPO material and production efficency.

http://zofu.no-ip.de/bpo

lets you put in any item and at a glance see how much time it will take to do the ME / PE research and how large an improvement that research will make.

Anonymous said...

Your opportunity cost = the time spent to haul the minerals to the crafting station, the time to haul the rockets to the selling point and 6 times per month the time flying to the crafting station to do the clicking for the next production.

For about 13 mio per month while you are gaining > 100 mio per day already.

Gevlon said...

@Anonymous: I craft on a newbie station using reprocessed Badgers and I go there anyway to pick up newbie books.