Another Seeding Market destroyed, 65 billion cost

Over the last 11 months i have made sales of 208 billion isk in the two stations i seeded and so profits of around 34 billion.  But all the costs associated with those stations being destroyed came to 93 billion meaning i have made a loss of 59 billion in my Market Seeding ventures.  Damn.

I plan to relist all the items in two more stations.  Both in High Sec, stay tuned.

Market Seeding

For several months i was seeding a market in Khanid and also Drone Lands.

I started in September 2025, and discussed it back then in my first market seeding post and again in February in an update on market seeding.

In total i was seeding two stations, the one in Khanid and one out in Drone Lands run by the team from DeclarationsforWar podcast.

In total i made sales of 208 billion isk and if i assume my normal margin structure (big ask) then i would have made around 34 billion isk from 4 characters.  That was quite respectable.

The First Destruction cost me 30 billion

I had 105 billion of assets up for sale.  Which all went into Asset Safety outside of High Sec.

The first station went down back in April, cost me 30 billion, and i wrote about it The Fall of UAJ5-K = 105 billion Sell Orders into Asset Safety = 30 billion cost to me.

The 30 billion cost is made up from:

1) the cost of releasing the assets from Asset Safety = 10 billion.

2) the mark to market costs = 18 billion (prices had fallen in Jita since i had listed the items for sale and so now worth less)

3) courier costs of those items to the next place to put them up for sale 2 billion

This destruction cost me 65 billion

I had 342 billion of items up for sale which all went into High Sec Asset Safety.

Against this 342 billion i had a 68 billion provision (i always have a 20% provision against my Sell Orders to cover Transaction Taxes and price movements).

So that's 273 billion.

Marking those items to market (i.e. marking to the prices in Jita) cost me 48 billion.  In other words, prices in the market over the last 11 months or so had fallen a long way for the items i had for sale).

Asset Safety only cost me 1 billion (this is High Sec).

Courier Provision cost me 11 billion (nothing quite like a disaster to soak up as much negative costs as i can think of).

And then a relisting provision costs me 5 billion.

so 48 + 1 + 11 + 5 = 65 billion.

The bottom line

Profits over 11 months = 34 billion

Costs of Asset Safety, mark to market, couriering etc 93 billion (30+63).

Net loss 59 billion.

Data warning

I will be the first to admit that i am not confident that my spreadsheets properly pick up all my assets or value them correctly.  It is quite possible that the value of my assets is understated.

SquadB Gaming taking a character from Alpha to Omega

SquadB Gaming, the youtube channel that focuses on games like Eve Online amongst others.  He also has a website https://squadb.com/

Alpha to Omega Venture

The creator has launched a project to take an Account from Alpha to Omega.

The first episode is on youtube, called EVE Online Hardmode:– Episode 1: 0 ISK, No Help, One Character

Starting by creating a new Account and going from there.  No help, no loans.  So starting from scratch.  Seems he will explore a number of routes to get there - so will be interesting which he uses the most to gather the isk.  My bet is on trading but lets see.

The creator is doing this as a break from his normal game style and wants to document the journey.

Episode 1 sets the tone for the entire series as with creating the new account, the starter missions, the first income sources, and the mindset needed to grow from nothing in New Eden.

The Youtube channel / Eve Online

There is a lot of useful videos there covering Eve Online including Industry, Trading and other isk making ventures.  Full use of Excel.

Almost 14k subscribers.  First video 18 years ago.

It is best viewed in his playlists to get a sense of what is available.

Examples are:

Master EVE Online Multiboxing

How to Run Abyssal Deadspace Sites

How to Setup Excel for EVE Online

How to make ISK in EVE Online

The Website

As far as i can tell this is a collection of his videos.  https://squadb.com/

Player Created Music for Eve Online

Sticking to Spotify (apologies to other platforms, this is the one i have on my iphone) i was looking for any music created by Eve Online Players.

Surprisingly hard to find Eve player made music on Spotify.  Some prior music has gone.

I have created a page at the top of the blog to keep updated.

I can see three, i suspect there are many more on Spotify - so please let me know.

CrodaUK

This is my music, about being a Trader in Eve Online.

Currently i have an Album of 9 songs totalling 34 minutes.

Obviously i think it is good enough for me! . . . . . and the other 6 monthly listeners.

Oz Eve

Has one song about his Trading effort.  379 monthly listeners.  Its a catchy tune.  is the opening the closing music to his Oz Show.

TheOneandonlySidar

Has 4 Albums up (one of which, the most recent, has one song).  60 songs in total.  11 monthly listeners.

The Dance of the Moon Dust album is suitably relaxing and upbeat, as you would expect from someone who does mining, as you can see on his show.

Travelers Amongst Stars similarly relaxing and upbeat.

Darken Times album feels a bit darker.

Eve Excel Addin Formulas: Characters connected to the Addin and Character Location

I would have thought that the formula to find out the location of one of my characters would be very easy.

It can be done, it is not easy, it is in the second section two thirds of the way down in this post.  There has to be an easier way of doing this.

But first lets look at the Characters connected to the Addin given this is a key requirement.

Very simple formula

=EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER()

This will list all Characters that are connected to the Addin.

adding the .id method will give all the character IDs, a useful way of seeing all your character IDs.

=EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER().id

and to get a list of where all these characters are currently located firstly get the location id and then use the EVEONLINE.STATION formula to get the station name.

so

=EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER().location_station_id

gives the list of station_ids where each character is located.

And to therefore get what station each is logged into i need to reference each individual cell in the above column using the EVEONLINE.STATION formula.

and so

=EVEONLINE.STATION(G4) where cell G4 is the location_station_id from above, G5 the next one etc

So, how to get a character location in one formula?

It can be done but it seems very complicated.

Assume the character name is on cell D4 (which can be found using the formula EVEONLINE.CHARACTER(A4) where cell A4 is the character ID), then the formula to find the character location is:

=EVEONLINE.STATION(SUM(IFERROR(EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER().location_station_id,0) * (EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER().name=D4.name)))

Lets break this down - three are 3 parts to all this:

EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER().location_station_id

This is as above, it returns a list of the station IDs where each character connected to the Addin is.

Some of these stations, if player owned, will be an error and so throwing an IFERROR around it will return zero if this happens, hence:

IFERROR(EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER().location_station_id,0)

the second part:

EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER().name=D4.name

this compares the name (in plain text) for every character connected to the addin with the name in plain text for the character you are looking it and returns a list of TRUE and FALSE, where only TRUE is for the character you are looking at. (So, this is a list with only one TRUE in it and the rest of the items are FALSE).

In excel terms, TRUE = 1 and FALSE = 0 and therefore multiplying EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER().location_station_id to EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER().name=D4.name will return a list of zeros and one station ID where your character is.

So throwing a SUM around all that adds up the list of zeros and the one Station ID to give the Station ID.

So the final part is to use the EVEONLINE.STATION formula to get the station your character is logged into.

That was complicated!

Footnote

And it is weird.  the range of methods that can be used on the EVEONLINE.ACTIVE_CHARACTER() formula are different to the range of methods that can be used on the EVEONLINE.CHARACTER() formula.  Thats what makes it all complicated.  The EVEONLINE.CHARACTER() formula does not give the option to find the station location of the character.

Eve Excel Addin Formulas: Character Name, Skill Points.

Two simple but almost always required formulas.

Assume the Character ID is in cell B9.

Character Name

=EVEONLINE.CHARACTER(B9)

Very simple, nothing more to say.

Total Skill Points

=SUM(EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS(B9).skillpoints_in_skill)

lets break this down.

EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS(B9) will list all the skills a character has

adding the method .skillpoints_in_skill will then show the skillpoints in each skill

(for what its worth, i think it shows the skill Advanced Planetology with zero skill points because i once had it but extracted all the skill points in a skill farming routine.)

and the final part is to sum this list:

SUM(EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS(B9).skillpoints_in_skill)

Eve Excel Addin Formulas: Buy and Sell Prices in various Regions

A very useful formula is to look at what the maximum priced Buy Order and Minimum priced Sell Order is in a Regional Market, typically Jita.

In all cases, the Cell B5 is the item name we are looking up.  I.e obelisk.

The Minimum Jita Sell Price

=EVEONLINE.MARKET_ORDERS_STATS(10000002,EVEONLINE.INVENTORYSEARCH(B5,1).id).sell.min

Lets break this down.

EVEONLINE.INVENTORYSEARCH(B5,1) will show the name of the item you are looking up.

The Cell B5 has the name we are searching for.

The ",1" in the formula means that the the name and only the name is searched for.  If i had ",0" i would get all items that included the word "obelisk" in it - in this case some 33 items, hence we need to nail it down with the ",1"

using the .id method then brings up the id which is generally what we need to go further.

EVEONLINE.INVENTORYSEARCH(B5,1).id

we can then put that id in the formula to look up market orders:

EVEONLINE.MARKET_ORDERS_STATS(10000002,EVEONLINE.INVENTORYSEARCH(B5,1).id)

10000002 is the Regional Code for Jita.

and we add the .sell method to show the Sell Orders only.

and finally the .min method to show the minimum Sell Order.

The Regional Codes for other Regions:

Dodixie 10000032

Amarr 10000043

Rens 10000030

Hek 10000042

The Maximum Jita Buy Price

=EVEONLINE.MARKET_ORDERS_STATS(10000002,EVEONLINE.INVENTORYSEARCH(B5,1).id).buy.max

Which is a very similar explanation to the Sell Order except using the method .buy to bring up Buy Orders and we are looking for the maximum value,

Eve Excel Addin Formulas: Isk in wallet and in Corporation

Perhaps the most common question any Trader will have is what is the ISK balance for a given character and / or Corporation.

Using the Eve Excel Addin:

In the formulas below, Cell B9 is the character id number

Character ISK Balance

 

This is perhaps one of the most straight forward formulas.

=EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_WALLET_BALANCE(B9)

Nothing more to say.

Corporation ISK Balance

=SUM(EVEONLINE.CORPORATION_WALLETS(B9).balance)

lets break this down:

This is a little more complicated.

Firstly, you will be aware that a Corporation Wallet has a number of Divisions.

Secondly, the data is held at character level.  Hence, you don't use the Corporation ID, you use the CEO id (technically you can use any character that has access to all the wallet slots, but the CEO seems the most obvious to me).

EVEONLINE.CORPORATION_WALLETS(B9) will give a list of the Divisions with the ISK amount in each division.

The first step is to use the .balance method to call up the isk balance in each division.

EVEONLINE.CORPORATION_WALLETS(B9).balance

And then use the excel SUM function to add those isk balances up:

=SUM(EVEONLINE.CORPORATION_WALLETS(B9).balance)

Fenris Creations Opens Carbon Engine to the World - now open source

Fenris Creations (the old CCP) has released its Carbon game engine to open source.

The Carbon Engine code can be found on github.

Seems it was released at the start of July - i missed that.

What is not included

Game‑specific code such as EVE’s economy, gameplay logic, and proprietary licensed components is not part of the open‑source release.

Why release it?

A quote from Ben Hunter of Fenris to gamesindustry.biz:

Seems nothing like third party supporters pitching in to help with the code.

"Members of the community have already been submitting pull requests (PRs) – proposed changes to a codebase – for security fixes, and there's been chatter about someone making a web app to watch Eve Online content."

"Fenris has a long history of building communities and engaging with them. If you look back to the early days of Eve Online, when we exposed our application programming interface (API), that was the start of our effort to engage with the community and let them build something with it."

and then the point that there is nothing really of commercial value in it now:

"We arrived at this point two and a half to three years ago, where we decided there's nothing really special about our sauce in terms of the actual code. We, and the community, would be better served by actually getting it out there, having more eyes on it, so that we can actually learn and grow from that, and people can do crazy things with it, which we're very excited to see."

Really so simple?

Perhaps not so simple:

It is old and complex, with architecture dating back to the early 2000s

Not plug‑and‑play like Unity or Unreal

Missing documentation in places

Built for Fenris / CCP’s specific workflows, meaning newcomers may struggle to adapt it for new projects.

What could this mean?

In part this is "interesting" but take this one step further and we could be heading down the road of allowing third party apps to be created for Eve Online.

Very much like you see on World of Warcraft and other games where those apps make the whole gameplay hugely enjoyable.

Fenris somewhat alludes to that in their press release:

"For Fenris Creations, fully open-sourcing Carbon is the next step in a long history of collaboration with players and developers. EVE Online’s community has built around the game for decades through third-party tools, public APIs, economic analysis, corporation infrastructure, alliance logistics, and player-created services. Opening Carbon brings that philosophy closer to the foundation layer, giving developers, researchers, players, and builders access to technology they can use, contribute to, and build upon."

But, lets see what sort of ideas / products this spawns.

If picked up by interested developers who have the time and capability to get their heads around 20 year hold code then this could really go somewhere.

Eve Excel Addin Formulas: Total Market Order Slots and Number of Market Orders Placed

Taking a look at some Excel Eve Addin formulas that are useful.

A common item on my Excel Spreadsheets shows me how many Market Orders a given character has free, which is the difference between Total Market Orders possible less Orders Placed.

In this case, my character has the maximum possible Market Orders available of 305 and currently has 258 Orders on the Market which leaves 47 free market slots.

In all cases $C$2 is the cell with the character id number.

Total Market Order Slots

The formula to show how many Market Order Slots a character has:

=5 + SUM((EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).name = "Trade")*EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).trained_skill_level)*4 + SUM((EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).name = "Retail")*EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).trained_skill_level)*8 + SUM((EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).name = "Wholesale")*EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).trained_skill_level)*16 + SUM((EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).name = "Tycoon")*EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).trained_skill_level)*32

Lets break this down:

The formula is working out the skill level in each of the relevant Trade Skills of Trade, Retail, Wholesale and Tycoon.  Each skill level of Trade gives 5 Order slots , Retail gives 8 slots, Wholesale 16, and Tycoon 32, and of course a character starts with 5 slots anyway.

looking at the part of the formula that works out the Trade Skill slots:

SUM((EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).name = "Trade")*EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).trained_skill_level)*4

the formula EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2) would list all the skills the character has.

adding the .name method gives the skill name in text form (an important step).

EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).name

Therefore, introducing a logic function EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).name = "Trade" will give the list of FALSE with one TRUE for the Trade Skill.  In excel terms, FALSE = 0 and TRUE = 1.

EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_SKILLS($C$2).trained_skill_level will show the skill level for every skill that the character has trained.

Therefore, multiplying those two parts together will give a list of zeros except for the Trade Skill which will given 1 x Trade Skill.

And so adding that list up gives the Trade Skill achieved.

and multiplying that by 4 gives the Order Slots for the Trade Skill.

Doing the same for Retail, Wholesale and Tycoon to get the total Order Slots a character has.

Number of Market Orders Placed

=COUNTA(EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_ORDERS($C$2))

Lets break this down:

EVEONLINE.CHARACTER_ORDERS($C$2) will give a list of all orders in the form of name, price, amount left, amount original

And so to determine the total number of orders placed we put that into the COUNTA function to count the number of items in the list.

Revenues in 2026, a slow year

I keep loads of charts on how my business is doing but the below really summarise how things are going.

Summary - a slow year so far

The Summary of the below is that my sales are running behind in all my Trade Hubs so far in 2026.

I can't say i am 100% sure why - slower markets for sure, perhaps higher competition also.

Cumulative Sales Charts

What the chart below shows is how Sales progress as the year goes by.

These are simple but informative charts.  For each year they show how the sales built up month by month.  And then we can compare how each year does vs prior years.

So take the green line, the year 2025, it ended the year at 4.5 trillion of sales though it did start behind 2024 and 2023.

2026 is in a sorry state

and then we come to 2026.  This year has started behind 2025 and 2024 and 2023 and is barely doing better than 2022.  A sorry state of affairs.

I have put it down to two things: slower markets and more competition.

Looking at each of the main trading hubs

Lets see how the sales have done across the 6 main trading locations of Dodixie, Amarr, Rens, Hek, Jita, Sobaseki and Tash-Murkon Prime.

It is the same story across all my trade hub locations.

In Dodixie, where i started, i am barely doing better then 2021 in 2026.  More recently i have started to pick up.

Arguably, the slowdown in Dodixie started in 2024.  2023 was clearly the best year, followed by 2024 and 2022 with 2025 coming in fourth.  And 2026 is running behind all of these.

Same story in Amarr though perhaps tracking closer to 2022.

2024 was the best year followed by 2023 with 2025 coming in third.  and 2026 running fifth for now.

Rens also showing 2025 being behind 2024 with 2026 running fifth.

And Hek is even worse with 2026 sales behind all years except 2021!

Sobaseki is running behind 2024 and 2025, running inline with 2023.

Similarly Tash-Murkon.