The Great Moon Mining Operation Migration of 2017

The devs released a blog detailing more information about the upcoming Refinery structures and the changes to moon mining:

For anyone looking for a TL;DR here’s your convenient summary:
 Refineries coming this winter
 New Moon Mining Paradigm
Must extract ore from moon to space, mine and reprocess it to get the moon materials
Refineries use exclusive moon drill service module to extract ore from moon to space
Only one Refinery can mine each moon at a time
New Ores
20 New moon ores that are mined from moon extraction
Reprocessed into 1 main moon material and other minerals (moon or regular)
Only available in asteroids created from moon drill process
Moon Composition and Distribution
Moon composition to be a percentage of different ores
Mix of moon ores and existing ores
Full reset of moon distribution on Expansion Release
Moon Survey Improvements coming in August
Friendlier looking UI for results of Moon Composition
“Copy to clipboard” function
Indication of probe missing target
Timer for results from each probe

We can look at the provided information and make some predictions.

1) The current profit centre of buying raw moon material and refining it in a POS to resell on the market for a profit will cease to exist for all intents and purposes due to the ease and security of setting up a Refinery. No more dealing with POS  mechanics like setting them up, fueling them, and silo micro management. When ease of production comes into play, profit margins decrease.

2) The redistribution of moon ores will cause some upheaval in null and low sec space, not only because the location of valuable moons will have changed, but moon mining operations requires actually miners to extract the wealth for refining, thus alliances will need to be close enough to guard the structures and pilots using them.

3) Small groups (alliances/corps) making money from moons will be more difficult as the number of trusted people needed to run a moon mining operation increases. I.e. operational security is easy when its two people running it, but loose lips/spies will make it harder to extract the wealth without more cost.

4) It will be easy for smaller groups to get into low end moon mining as mid range value moons will actually be profitable. Right now a moon is either valuable or not, but the new model where many ores of different types and amounts will make more moons feasible for mining.

I plan to exploit this moon land rush by building as many of the refineries as I possibly can this winter.

Customers!

When I set up my Raitaru in high sec I decided to open it to public for offices and manufacturing for a small fee. Since its rigged for producing structures I didn't expect to gather much or any attention at my facility and pretty much forgot about that side of the business.

However, yesterday when I was looking at my wallet comparing facility tax costs between NPC station and a low sec Azbel I noticed some unexpected green transactions:

Names redacted.

Its not a huge amount of ISK and its only two or three pilots, but I'm insanely pleased nonetheless. Back when I heard about POS and setting prices for lab slots I wanted to run a public laboratory but when I subsequently heard that the mechanics for that purpose were incomplete I was disappointed. Now I can partially live out that old dream.

Build on, my customers!

Industry Changes - Followup

Its been a year since I looked at the (then) upcoming industry changes and wrote this:

But an even bigger loser in this shell game of production benefits and nerfs is the low sec producer: as much risk as null sec (if not more) but only a portion of the benefit. Low sec capital producers may really see the crunch as the volume there is less massive and can be more easily fulfilled by a number of producers operating out of shallow null sec. I can see low sec eventually becoming an importer of capital ships instead of an exporter for the markets as null sec producers would want to move their product to neutral markets to reach the widest audience. However, the crystal ball is cloudy on this issue and more time needs to pass before anything for certain can be said.

I operate in Placid and what I`ve noticed over the past 6 months is that the number of Archon and Thanatos capitals for sale on the market in this low sec system has increasingly gone upwards. As supply increases in relation to the demand, the price will drop as competition occurs. So far, what I`ve seen in my little corner of the cluster, this is holding true. Whether this is a result of increased production or decreased demand (or both) is unclear. I suspect its a case of decreased demand as the jump changes of Phoebe and the upcoming FozzieSov changes create a one-two punch of less need for capitals right now.

The upshot of this personally is a slower pace of capital production while I evaluate the market and give some time for less efficient producers to close up show to reduce demand. I am still operating at a profit, just a smaller one than previously enjoyed.

I`m hoping that once the dust settles from FozzieSov this summer I can increase production again.

Team Building

The sixth and final Industry dev blog was released today at the start of Fanfest and covers a completely new feature of manufacturing and research: Teams.

The Elevator Pitch
Let’s start with a quick elevator pitch of what "teams" are. We’ll then dig into the details in later sections.
All jobs now require a workforce. All jobs automatically have regular workforce attached, so no special action will be required to start jobs We're not exactly sure how you capsuleers were able to build things without one before!
A "team" is an expert NPC labor force, that players can choose to hire instead of using the regular, provided workforce. A team consists of specialists that give bonuses to certain jobs.
These specialized teams are not available everywhere at any time. They are hired into a system through an auction. Once in a system, the team is available for anyone doing a job in that system for month, at which time the team retires and goes on a much needed space "vacation".
There is a vast variety of specialized teams. Each specialized team affects a particular job activity (like manufacturing or copying) and a limited sub-section of items. For example, a team could affect manufacturing of frigates, but have no effect on manufacturing of cruisers.

More details on what a team is:

- Each specialized team is linked to a specific activity (manufacturing, copying, material research, etc.).
- Each specialized team has a type, indicating what kind of stuff it can affect. There are six types: structure, components, consumables, ship, mobile and equipment. For example, a team that could affect the manufacturing of Rifters, would have the “manufacture” activity and the “ship” type.

So with four activities (for instance) and six types there are 24 combinations of activity/type a team can be.

- Each team has four members, and each member has a specialty. The specialty can be broad, but with less bonus (for example Ship – Small Class) or narrow and bigger bonus (like Ship – Frigate). Team members cannot have the same specialty.

I *think* this means that once the team activity/type is determined, each team member has a specialty within that category. So someone would only have a specialty of "Frigate" only in a team with a type of "Ship". Is there a list of all the specialties somewhere?

 - Each team member affects either material efficiency (ME) or time efficiency (TE). Members of a team can affect either and don’t all have to affect the same.

- Each team member also has an efficiency level, which dictates how big of a bonus he or she gives. There are five level of efficiency, with each level above 1 being a multiple of the level 1 bonus. The bonus given by level 1 is determined by whether the team member has a broad or narrow focus and whether it affects material efficiency or time efficiency.

 And the exact bonuses in a readable chart:

Broad is for team members that have a broad specialty (like Ship – Small Class), narrow is for team members that have a narrow specialty (like Ship – Frigate).
How much extra cost a specialized team demands depends on the overall efficiency of the team. The extra salary is a percentage that comes on top of the normal salary cost. The percentage can range from +2% to +18%.
In addition to its stats, each team also has a unique name that gives an indication of what it can do and where it originated.

Did you follow all that? To reiterate, a team will be good for an activity like manufacturing, research, etc. They will only be good for one type like Ships or modules or structures, etc. Within that team of four members, each member affect either Material Efficiency (i.e. less materials) or Time Efficiency (i.e less time in factory) and will either have a broad specialty (for example, Ships - Small Class) with a smaller bonus to the efficiency or a narrow specialty (for example, Ships - Frigates) with the larger bonus to the efficiency (see chart). And each team member is different.

Let’s look at the life cycle of a team now.
Teams are seeded into the game over time and become available for auction. The stats, name, home and activities are all randomized, meaning there is a wide variety between teams.
All auctions last seven days. Bids are placed on a team on behalf of a solar system. This means bids made by multiple players on the same system are pooled together.
When placing a bid, the default location is the same system you’re in, but you can edit this to bid on a system remotely. A bid can be entered for any system, including wormhole systems. Bidding on behalf of a system that is far away requires a minimum initial bid. Teams have a home location when they are created and the minimum is higher the further away the team’s home is. This represents a relocation cost and gives a small amount of geographical differentiation without it being too stifling.
Note that while a team is up for auction, it cannot be hired on any other jobs.

 Teams are randomly created, auctioned for a week, and work in the winning system for four weeks. I can't tell if a team is available for all relevant jobs in the system for the four weeks, or if players need to book them and share them.

When the auction ends, the solar system with the highest pooled bid wins. The team becomes immediately available for hire in the winning system. The team will be active in the system for 28 days (four weeks), at which time it retires (or is institutionalized; Inferno does not treat its users well). Any jobs the team was hired for are completed normally even if the team retires while the job is still ongoing. If no bids were made on the team, the team retires immediately at the conclusion of the auction.

Again, no word on how they are shared in the system. At this point, I'm assuming its available for all jobs or else it would put a damper on the cooperation aspect for bringing a team to a system during auction.

There's more in the dev blog so go give it a read.

Overall, I'm disappointed. When I saw teams were coming into things from the second dev blog I had more of an image from World of Tanks where you get inexperienced tank teams and train them up over time to become proficient experts in various abilities. Instead we get temporary random components to fight over in auctions.

And again, I feel this feature will aid the large scale rich heavy industrialists over the small scale and casual industrialists. Those with the wherewithal to hire the best teams to their hubs can amortize the hiring cost over their jobs and produce more cheaply even in busier systems than those who work with generic default teams or the poorer quality teams. I'm also willing to bet that capital ship production teams will be in highest demand even if poor quality because the large capital jobs makes savings more significant.

On the other hand, the devil is in the details. What's the spread of randomization of the teams? How many teams will be created? Will null sec powerhouses achieve any benefit from outbidding everyone to bring teams to null sec? How much will freeloading affect benefits (which ties back to my question of whether or not teams are tied up in jobs once they are working)?

Together with all the other changes coming this summer means I don't even know how this is going to shake out. Time will tell.

Winners and Losers

The latest dev blog pretty much confirms that the summer's expansion is going to have a heavy focus on basic heavy industry. Called Building Better Worlds it outlines some pretty massive changes to industry and science that, when coupled with the mineral changes announced previously (in Reprocess All The Things), upset the apple carts in very fundamental ways.

Let's hit the major points and try to determine the winners and losers of each one.

Changing Market Groups - This one is neutral. While some of the re-grouping will make more sense, people used to the old way will get turned around until they learn the new categorizations.

Icons on Market Groups -
Winners: Everyone. More icons to break the wall o' text.
Losers: No one.

No More Damage to Parts In Builds -
Winners: Everyone. This makes sense and will relieve some unnecessary complications.
Losers: No one.

Removal of Extra Materials -
Winners: People getting into manufacturing or people setting up spreadsheets and trying to figure out how Material Efficiency.
Losers: People with existing spreadsheets, and coupled with the reprocessing changes, anyone planning on reprocessing stuff for minerals.

Removing Industry and Science Slots -
Winners: Alright, now we get into the big one. What we are basically doing is trading a time bottleneck for a cost bottleneck, and the big outstanding question is how much the cost scaling will impact the bottom line. At first the big winners will be small time producers who will no longer be dissuaded from the insane wait times in high sec stations for almost any activity slot and who don't mind spending a bit more ISK for their efforts. At first. But as bigger producers decide to reduce risk with the changes to blueprint usage I expect the stations in high sec to actually become more busy and thus drive costs up all over as they can more easily absorb the extra costs than small producers can.
Losers: Short term, no one. Long term, small scale producers will find themselves squeezed out by shrinking margins and forced to look into low sec or null sec.

Starbases Anchored (almost) Anywhere In High Sec And Without Standings Reqs
Winners: You think high sec is polluted with starbases now, wait until this change goes through! This is going to encourage more small groups and individuals to anchor POSes and allow more use of their unique mineral compression and research capabilities. No word on if the fuel requirement for charters is going away though, so assuming it isn't, big winners are people that produce those charters and small groups/individuals that want their own POS. As well as high sec war deccers that will have something to force the targets to fight or give up.
Losers: Small groups / individuals that don't understand the Byzantine controls and roles of starbases, nor how to protect for high sec war decs. High standing corporation creators (a niche but profitable occupation).

Blueprints must now be present at POS to start research / industry jobs
Winners: Hard to find a winner here. Perhaps some high sec war dec corporations might get the opportunity for some rich BPO drops from a POS bash. Corp thieves in corps that mess up security in the POS hangers.
Losers: Large organized POS farmers who kept their blueprints safe and locked down in station hangers and are now faced with the added risks of putting the BPO in the POS, or the added cost and effort of making BPCs. More on this subject from my corpmate Lockefox at his blog.

Copy Time Reduction
Winners: Hard to say. There is going to be a lot more copying going on in order to use copies in POSes instead of originals, but some copy pack manufactures might benefit from faster turnaround. On the other hand, those high end copy pack producers used POSes to make the copies so it might be a wash and loss for them.
Losers: Anyone who depended on the long copy time to reduce availability / supply of a particular item. Another perspective at EVE-fail blog.

Project Vulcan Full Speed Ahead

I've entered a local maximum on my progress of capital construction.I have a deal with another budding capital constructor who has agreed to build Orcas with me and I'm building on a weekly basis the Capital Cargo Bay parts we both need while he builds the rest of the parts. Then we swap and both build an Orca. This allows me to put off buying the rest of the BPOs I need while I build up capital AND avoid having to use BPCs in the meantime which cut into profit.

The hope is to get to a state where I am constantly building an Orca which is possible once I sell the current Orca that is due out of the oven tomorrow morning.

The next goal is to get another of the capital part BPOs which might take a while since each one, researched, costs around a billion ISK. Sigh. But at constant Orca production rates I hope to make enough profit to get the blueprints I need at a rate of one every two months.

Meanwhile, I have scaled back my importing business into low sec. The big problem is I used a lot of my liquid ISK to get the blueprints so I couldn't put as much on market as I have in the past. I did consider shutting it down entirely but instead I'm simply going to cut it back as it is still a source of income. I bought another load of ships to import last night and will get them to market later today.

All in all, things are going well.

Project Foo Update

So its been half a month since I started working in Wormhole Foo on my new Planetary Interaction project so I figure its time for an update.

I started with five planets and about a week and a half ago added a sixth. I have four extraction/basic processing planets, two producing the Toxic and Precious metals for Enriched Uranium and two producing the Water and Electrolytes to create Coolant. A fifth planet is the advanced manufacturing hub that takes the inputs and creates the uranium and coolant. My late-added sixth planet is simply producing Coolant from start to finish on its own.

Setting up these planets including a couple extractor re-positions (and a one time purchase of Electrolytes because I forgot to hit submit one day) cost me approximately 64 million ISK. I've made approximately 256 million ISK since Dec 13th as of last night for a profit of around 191 million ISK.

Not bad for about 15 minutes of work every night (not including setup and extractor movements) and will definitely ensure my PvP habit remains funded.

Now its not all bells and roses. Depletion is starting to play a major factor into two of my extraction planets and may require a reconfigure of who produces what over some lunch hour to maintain acceptable production rates.

But in terms of effort and risk to ISK generation, this ranks easier than anything else I've bothered with in game. A lot of that is due to the setup I have with Foo Holdings in that I don't need to worry about POS fueling and material transport out of the wormhole. He buys my materials at 90% Jita prices and I can just focus on PI production and not worry about the extraneous stuff while he gets a 10% cut to help offset business costs. Win-win if there ever was one.

I plan to expand a little bit with a second alt once training is complete, running a couple more planets on a long schedule to supplement production input resources.

OTEC and Null Sec

I watched the development of the OTEC cartel (Organization of Technetium Exporting Corporations) with a little concern for my wallet and a lot of interest for Eve politics. The apparent goal of OTEC is to price fix at a high profit this fundamental component of tech II production while providing mutual support to ensure each member's source of Technetium is protected from outside influence.

So far since its announcement in late April they have succeeded in doing just that.

Can you see where OTEC started?

I see this development as a natural step of Null Sec's political evolution. Alliance leaders, like any business quickly become addicted to easy sources of income and this leads them to realize that cooperation is often more profitable than competition with other entities in their market. There is a reason that governments have laws to prevent monopolies and oligarchies in markets in their nations: competition is good for the consumer, not the producer (in the short term anyways). The main issue is that prices are kept higher to maximize profit at the cost of the consumer, but a secondary problem "in the real world" is that companies with cartels like this are less likely to invest in innovation for competitive advantage and are more likely to collude to maintain the status quo.

However, in Eve there is no chance at technological innovation. We can have process innovation (e.g. 3rd party tools to monitor POS towers and keep track of silo levels) and organizational innovation (e.g. better social structures to mine the moons more efficiently and protect them) but we can't have technology innovation (e.g. a new source of technetium or a new material to replace it) without CCP changing the game, much like they did to make Technetium the One Ring of moon materials a couple years ago (replacing Promethium and Dysprosium as the top dogs).

There has been a lot of talk out of Reykjavik about how having certain areas of the cluster more rich than others is a conflict driver for promoting wars. Like King of the Hill, the kids at the bottom work hard to push the guys at the top off in a never ending cycle, right? The problem is with Technetium is that the current kings of the hill stopped fighting each other and are getting fat and strong off the top of the hill, leaving the kids at the bottom to be forced to throw occasional snowballs instead of an ineffectual climb up to simply get a snow face wash.

Technetium will be nerfed, its only a matter of time. Its been longer than I expected for sure; I predicted it being addressed in Crucible and was sorely mistaken. But the fact is that while it may have been a great conflict driver and possibly responsible for the fall of the Northern Coalition, it is no longer doing so and is in fact doing the exact opposite as evidenced by OTEC.

How will CCP address this? Ring mining to introduce a non-alliance active source for moon materials has been discussed and something I'm very in favour for. Rebalancing moon materials so that the other R64s are as valuable as Technetium has been mentioned. Overhauling moon mining completely has been suggested. But right now, we don't know which of these options CCP is most likely to do.

Time will tell. In the meantime, expect your ship prices to continue to look like this:

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to compare with the Technetium chart above.

Managing The Minions

Life in the wormhole for my Planetary Overlord alt is a lot slower than usual due to less free time then ever, but when I can the Robotics and Coolant production has continued.

Ever since I moved my lava and plasma colonies to spots closer to the high concentrations of resources, everything has gone perfect on those lines and the processed materials have been moved to the manufacturing planet at a constant stream.

However, my coolant production lines hit a bottleneck. My gas giant producing water ran into severe resource depletion and I had to move the master extractor farther and farther to get more water. However, this crimps production because the upgraded link required more and more power and CPU as a result. I considered picking up the moving the whole colony like I did for the lava and plasma planets but the water resources were thin all over. It was like a straw sucking up the last bit of your drink.

So I checked the other planets in the system, looking for larger deposits of sweet sweet H2O. It was dry except for one planet with massive supplies of water. Unfortunately it was my temperate manufacturing planet which I picked for the nice view and scenic coastlines.

So I tore down my advanced factories for the coolant production and one of the launch pads supporting them and put in an extractor for water instead with five extractor heads. Yeah baby, there's the juice. I moved my coolant production to the ex-water extracting gas giant and we'll see how things go over the next couple weeks.

A Man's Perogative

So I changed my mind about training for and saving up for a jump freighter. Just too impatient I guess.

I got Amarr Cruiser V and realized there were a few support skills I really should train up to be a better capital pilot. So Tactical Logistical Reconfiguration went into the queue, to be followed by Jump Drive Calibration V, Fighter Bombers V, and Capital Ships IV. I know, I know, JDC V should have been a higher priority but it wasn't until recently I felt the pain of not having it. Regardless, I'm doing them now.

For Korannon, I have been going back and forth between several options that I finally decided to just up his basic skills which were lacking. Shield skills, energy skills, and navigation skills for more hitpoints, more cap, and more propulsion mods. Then I have to figure out what to do next with him. I'm leaning towards planetary interaction skills to make another passive income stream.

* * * * *

So what to do with the money I've got saved up if not for the Rhea? I opted to invest in a researched Chimera blueprint original so that I can assist with the corp efforts to start a capital ship building program.


* * * * *

In planetary interaction news, my two robotic resource planets were running afoul of depleted resources for base metals and chiral structures, so I took an opportunity a couple nights back to reconfigure the two colonies from scratch in new locations on the planet. So far only one oops when I forgot to route reactive metals back to the launchpad but I caught that the first day. Looks like volume is up for now and should keep my factories busy.

"No More Vespene Gas"

Something I missed in my pre-incursions testing on Sisi of the Planetary Interaction changes was that the depletion mechanics had been put into operation. What this means is that the more you extract from a resource at a location the faster that hot spot turns into a cold spot.

For my two robotics extraction planets, the effect has not been too bad except for base metals on the plasma planet which is pretty remote from other hot spots and may require moving master extractors to increase its operation range. However, my two coolant planets, which are doing a single resource each, has been a lot more difficult as the hot spot depletes in less than three days.

On the upside, my extraction rates have been outstripping my production rates and I might go from 23 hour cycle to 47 hour cycle which has the benefit of being less depleting on the resource nodes.

On the manufacturing planet, in order to deal with the influx of more raw materials I added a fourth launch pad for storage. (Does anyone else think they got launch pad and storage facility stats mixed up?) I had to do an in-place command centre upgrade which is so easy; I love that change.

So overall a lot less double-clicking but a lot more thinking and planning has been required. I think once I find an equilibrium it will work out better in the long run.

Rebuilding

So I thought I had all my colonies configured properly but when I logged in last night to take some screenshots for today's post I saw that my Lava and Plasma colony had nothing in their launch warehouse despite extracting all day. Turns out the new program had more than the link could handle and the products were not routed. A little visual cue would be nice on that one CCP. I mean besides the animation on the link which is very very subtle.

Anyways, got it working with upgraded links and it seems happier now.

Lava Planet

Plasma Planet

Gas Giant 1

Gas Giant 2

Industrial World

As I've talked about before, the four extraction planets get the raw materials and produce the P1 products that I transport to the manufacturing planet every second day. There I take the four raw materials for robotics and the two raw materials for coolant and produce them. I also have a could basic factories for producing water from excess Aqueous Liquids overflow.

Obligatory New Avatar Post

Click for 512x512 goodness!

Since its all the rage...

I tried to keep the same feel of the new Kirith Kodachi, an angry man who is slightly broken and haunted by his past. I also found some time to do Korannon and Korneilia but don't have the images here, probably post all the rest of the crew once complete.

I find it amusing how much people are enjoying making characters and the variety of avatars even with the horribly limited number of clothing options and extra options not available yet. I miss Kirith's big scar for example, or the metal face implants Korannon has.

Oh well.

Also, got two of Korneilia's four extraction planets reconfigured, hopefully do the rest tonight. I upgraded the command centres to hopefully increase extraction rates. MOAR ISK!

Incursions: Planetary Interaction Changes

So I used the handy dany SISI launcher tool CCP has created and quickly set myself up with a test environment to get on Singularity and try out the new character creator and the new Planetary Interaction over the Christmas break. Today I'm going to cover the PI changes and tomorrow I'll have a post on the new character creator.

The first thing I noticed upon investigating my colonies is that the old extractors were there but were now called "Obsolete Extractors" with only one available operation: Decommission. Well that's obvious.So I deleted them and their links and set about putting a new Master Extractor in play.

There are a few things to note. When you are placing the master extractor, you see a very large shaded area around it. This represents the space in which the extractor heads can be deployed within. Its very large and as far as I can tell the distance of the extractor head from the master extractor has no cost, so feel free to keep the master extractor closer to the launch pad to save on the link costs between the two.

Secondly, once its placed you can survey and pick a resource from the left side of the Surveying Program window that comes up and the density scan comes up on the planet surface to help you place the extractor heads. Each master extractor can support up to ten heads within the limits of your available power grid and CPU of the command centre. To activate a head, click on one of the free blue buttons on the right side of the survery program and it appears randomly on the map. Now move it.

Here's where things get tricky and is not obvious from the interface. The size of the extractor head correlates directly with the running time of the program. What this means is that if you want a 23 hour program time, you need to adjust the size of the extractor head using the painfully shitty slider bar on the bottom left of the Surveying Program. Do this before selecting and placing many heads because when the extraction area of a head overlaps the amount each one returns diminishes! Get the first head sized to the program length you want, and then place other heads with minimum overlap.

As you are placing the heads, you can see the Surveying Program showing the expected return of resources over the time of the program. As well, each head has a value beside it which goes up or down depending on the amount of resources it extracts. Try to maximize the values without overlapping. Note: make sure your master extractor is off the resource you are extracting to avoid getting it in the way! I made that mistake once.

Here is a second colony with the master extractor off the resource hot spot:

I found that I could replace 5-6 old Extractors with three extractor heads, but I needed to upgrade the link from the master extractor to the launch pad in the process. My initial 23 hour results in comparison can be seen in this chart:



My initial efforts are almost always less than before, but I would like some more chances to optimize and see if I can squeeze another extractor head in.

Now some more details:
- The program running time can be customized to any 15 minute increment from 15 minutes to over 4 days, perhaps longer. I used 23 hours in my chart above as comparison, but it could have been 23 hours and 15 minutes, or 22 hours and 45 minutes, etc. Since you get diminishing returns over time of the program, you get more resources by shorter run times and resetting.

- The reset of the operation after a program is done is simply done by having the master extractor resurvey and then clicking "Install program". No need to reconfigure extractor heads as far as I can tell. This is a potential huge time saver.

- Upgrading Command Centres in place is really nice.

More Money

Near the beginning of December I talked about how I was going to setup more colonies.

To this end I've scheduled Korannon to train up basic planetary management skills when Industry V completes in the next couple days and I'll have his set up a factory planet where I will import some purchased raw materials and produce higher level items for reselling. It seems like a nice compromise between taking effort and making money. Unlike the extraction where I feel if I miss a cycle every day I'm losing the game, this will feel more hands off I hope.

Well, due to real life pressures it took longer than I hoped to get set up and running but last week I finally managed to do it and set out to produce some commodities for profit. I picked Robotics to start because I was familiar with the production lines and I knew they were in high demand.

I'm pleased to report I made about 10% profit on a 166 million ISK investment as of last night when the last of the produced robotics sold. Excellent. I'm still ironing out the kinks but hope to run another batch over the next couple days and see if the turnaround time can be streamlined any more, and consider if I want to expand to a second production colony.

Expanding the Empire

Since moving my oxygen production lines over to double the coolant production, I've found my extraction colonies easier to manage. Oxygen as an end product sucked because it took so much space in the Orca, but now I've been going a couple weeks since my last high sec delivery and the Orca is only just over a quarter full.

This frees up a little planetary overlord time so I've been considering how to best make use of it. I don't want to double extraction and production efforts but a side project with a second character might be perfect. To this end I've scheduled Korannon to train up basic planetary management skills when Industry V completes in the next couple days and I'll have his set up a factory planet where I will import some purchased raw materials and produce higher level items for reselling. It seems like a nice compromise between taking effort and making money. Unlike the extraction where I feel if I miss a cycle every day I'm losing the game, this will feel more hands off I hope.

Once I get things going I'll report back.

See Anything You Like?

My days as a manufacturing industrialist are long past and I have no interest in going down that rabbit hole again. Unfortunately, that has left me with a slew of blueprints to dispose of.

These are all blueprint originals, most of them researched up in ME and PE to decent levels. I'm selling them at NPC price. If interested, comment here, or email me to kkodachi@gmail.com. Or twitter. Package saving deals possible.

EDIT: All of the ship BPOs have been spoken for.

EDIT 2: Here's what's left:

Please Tell Me The Rules

Last night I was on Kid Duty while the wife had her free night and with all the kids asleep and the house work done I was able to slip in front of the computer with the baby monitor on. "I'll just take care of some minor stuff," I said.

So I begged a cyno for a carrier jump, moving my Ishtar and a couple other cruisers to the rally base and moving a couple command ships and interceptors for alliance mates.

"Oh, there is a fleet up? Just a couple jumps away? Bashing an I-HUB? OK, be right there." Swap clones, swap ships to the Megathron, get escorted by an alliance mate in a Drake, and spent some time managing cap and drones until the I-HUB was reinforced. Take that foul heathens!

"Oh, we're going to take down an SBU? OK, I've got a few more minutes."

We travel a few jumps deeper into Providence to a CVA controlled system that The Kadeshi had planted some SBUs in. We start shooting and after a few minutes I need to log so I dock up and quit. This morning I look at the killmails and see the SBU there as destroyed but no mention of my contribution, as little as it may have been.

So what are the rules for making it on a kill mail? Last month when we attacked and killed a Titan in the drone lands I had a similar incidence where I shot at a titan that later that fight died but again I got no credit. Now that kill mail was long so I could see getting pushed off by the rest of the horde but the SBU kill mail was less than 40 pilots. Is there a timer involved? A damage dealt threshold? Do you need to be online and in gang? If anyone knows, please tell me!

* * * * *

Anyways, this morning right after downtime I made the quick run through low sec to the high sec pocket with my first load of Planetary Interaction materials and quickly got them to market. So far my PI efforts have netted me 280 million ISK since I started in the wormhole, for 5-10 minutes a day effort. I could probably make a lot more but the effort involved right now is the sweet spot for me every morning.

Tales of a Planetary Overlord

Life in the wormhole continues to be quiet and productive, my five to ten minutes of effort in the morning netting me a good amount of ISK.

The routine is pretty set now. Every morning before downtime I reset the extractors on the Lava, Plasma, Ice,  and Gas Giant planets. Every third morning I then drop by the lava and plasma customs office to pick up the loads of toxic metals, precious metals, chiral structures, and reactive metals and drop them off at the Temperate planet that is my manufacturing base, picking up any robotics, mechanical parts, and enriched uranium there.

Also, once a week I drop by the gas giant and ice planet for the oxygen and coolant. And then every two weeks I look for the high sec exit and drop all the items in the Orca off at a high sec station, contracting to my empire alt for distribution to the hubs.

I'm am thinking of concentrating efforts into simply Robotics however. Since I'm not actually fueling any towers the Oxygen and Coolant production lines are merely distractions and I think a better approach would be to focus on one end product in high demand. Debate continues in my head; I might wait until Incursions before doing any major revamps.

It's Been One Week...

So its been one week of the colonies running in Wormhole Hades and its time to do a review of our progress.

I have five colonies setup using advanced control centres which is the max for my current skills (although I'm training now for elites centres and will train for a sixth colony). I do not plan to make another character doing PI as I don't want this to become a chore. I primarily log in before leaving for work in the morning and reset the extractors on 23 hour cycles, expect the Oxygen producing Gas planet colony which I put on 4 day cycles. This past week I have been checking in on the colonies in the evenings to make sure I don't overproduce or underproduce on the extractors so that I get a nice balance of not building up the P0 resources while not have factories sit idle too much.

Fig 1 - Week One Results

The week one results are above in figure 1. As you can see, one week produced about 37.5 million ISK worth of good at the best Jita buy orders sufficient to move my volume. That translates to roughly 150 million ISK per month. This does not include the the prices of the command centres or colonies themselves, but its safe to say they will be paid off after the first week of operation, while the ongoing cost of moving goods from the surface to the customs office (and vice versa) will be absorbed easily.

The next question is whether or not I should specialize and drop the Enriched Uranium and Mechanical Parts from my production chain as end products (since the Mechanical parts are used in the construction of the Robotics, I would still make them, just use them myself). I'm surprised the Mechanical parts are cheaper than coolant and enriched uranium actually because the latter are not used in tech II production like mechanical parts are.