Planetary Industry Templates

CCP has just launched a test of Planetary Industry Templates.

Quoting from the CCP page: "Templates, allowing you to set up a planetary colony and save it to a PI browser. You can then share your layouts with your fellow capsuleers and corporation members, or use them to set up a new colony much faster than before."

This could seriously speed up Planetary Industry and save players from dying of sheer numbness when setting it up.  Of course, that will also mean a lot more players will do Planetary Industry and therefore prices of the outputs will come down.

A very quick 45 second video from CCP is below.

It is in test and bugs are being ironed out and ideas from the player base implemented.  The Forum posts are here.

The Next Steps: Planetary Interaction and Reactions

In my 3 Omega accounts, each has an alt at Jita.  Their primary purpose is to Buy from Jita Sell Orders and have the items couriered to their Trading alts in Dodixie / Amarr, Rens/Hek and Sobaseki / Tash-Murkon Prime.

My Trading ventures, including the alpha accounts, is currently generating profits of 1bn ISK per day after all costs including Plex.

I want to continue to expand my Trading venture across more of High Sec and into Low / Null Sec.

But there is much more to Eve which i want to explore.

To that end: The Jita alts' secondary role is to take up another ISK producing venture.

one Jita alt is now trained up in Production, Research and Reactions.

another Jita alt is trained up in Planetary Interaction.

(the other Jita alt is waiting for the Trading alts to be fully trained in Sobaseki and Tash-Murkon which will take another month).

I had started trying my hand in Manufacturing and that is still on the cards.  Same for Research.  For both i need to rethink my strategy.

In an ideal world i want repeatability with low touch.  Both Manufacturing and Research can give me that, i just need to find the niches were others don't play.  Clearly more work for me to do!

Planetary Interaction and Reactions

In all ventures, the aim is to at least make sure it covers the Plex for the Account with minimal work.

So, for now, i plan on investigating Planetary Interaction and Reactions.

Both will require me to venture into Low Sec and so i am skilling up the Planetary Interaction alt in a Epithal.

Lets see how this goes.

I know Planetary Interaction is going through a tough time . . . . . . . but i just want to give it a good shot.

Update on my Business Activities in Eve

The focus of my business activities in Eve is starting to shift.  Below is a summary of what i am doing.

Worth recalling that the aim of my business activities is to spend no more than 45 minutes a weekday on Eve + each activity must be able to generate at least enough ISK to purchase a Plex a month.



Manufacturing

This is working well.  I make up to 15bn ISK per month for what is half an hours work each evening.

I am slowly expanding the set of items i manufacture to sell.  I make good margins here though they are slow moving (just how i like it).

Currently, i sell in the 4 trade Hubs + 4 other regions, though i may scale back in Jita given it is quite competitive.



Trading

This was where i started but i am now winding it down.  The big constraint i now face is that real life (i.e. work) is taking up more and more of my free time whether it be working at home or business travel.

Part of trading is to constantly review what I am selling and filter out the low margin items and find new high margin items to sell - that needs a degree of focus and travelling on business does detract from that!

Hence, for now i will focus on a few highly valued items (i.e. prices over 500m ISK).



Planetary Interaction

In all i made 1.7bn ISK profit from Planetary Interaction.  Mainly hauling P2 materials to my factory planets and selling the resulting P3 materials produced.  Occasionally I would haul P3 items and sell the resulting P4 items.

I am able to make enough a month to finance a Plex whilst spending very little time on it - which is my aim.

This could be a real ISK maker.  So, once i review the set up i suspect i will keep this going.

The margins are about 20% - so pretty healthy.



Plex Trading

I made about 26m ISK through buying and selling 21 Plex until real life caused me to move on.

At this stage i will leave it on the back burner and see if i can get it to work more efficiently at a later stage.

It is a useful business to park surplus ISK into though the margins are very low (1-3% after all costs).


Mining

It has crossed my mind that i do spend about 3 hours a day working from home in the evening and many hours working at home in the weekend.

Therefore, i have decided to start mining and see if i can get this to operate in the background whilst i work.

I plan to get my two alts in Jita (on different accounts) set up for mining and see what i can make with them both out on the job.

At this stage, i am viewing it as playing Eve in the background and making ISK whilst i do.

Back of the envelope calculations suggest that this should achieve the goal of making a Plex a month.  We will see.

(i have to admit, when i watch the video clips of miners, it does look incredibly relaxing!  Could be tricky to weave into trying to work at home in the evening though).



The results

More of this in another post, but in summary my monthly profits vary from 16bn ISK to literally nil.  16bn if i am not on business travel, nil if i am away at lot!

The chart below shows the monthly profit i make since i started back in May 2013.

It can be seen from the above chart that i was on business travel in last August (2014), November and February (renewed my gold cards at BA and Emirates, so can't complain!).  Otherwise i tend to make about 10bn ISK a month.

It is fair to say that my real life work has somewhat dented my progression.  Given my planned business travel in April it is unlikely that i will make 100bn in the 12 months to the end of May - as the chart below shows.

The chart below shows how my wealth has progressed since i started back in May 2013.  The red line shows the average profit per day i make (i.e. the monthly profit divided by the days in the month).

My ultimate goal is to make enough ISK to buy a Plex a day whilst constraining myself to the 45 minutes per week night.

I suspect this is achievable.

Of course, an underlying goal is to enjoy my time in Eve - which is being met.  So good news there.

Started Planetary Interaction

My newest market i am entering is Planetary Interaction.

In its simplest, Planetary Interaction is is the extraction of resources from a planet and then the repeated combination of these resources, with processors on the planet, to make further products for eventual sale on the market.

The final products are mostly the POS / Sov Structures and POS Fuel.

The beauty with Planetary Interaction (known as PI) is that each of the items extracted (Resources) and all the products processed (P1, P2, P3, P4 where, you guessed it, P1 products combine to make P2 products etc) are available to be bought or sold on the market.

Therefore, it is possible to buy P3 products on the market, haul them to a planet and then process them into P4 products to be hauled back to a station and sold on the market.

Or it is possible to buy P2 products on the market, haul them to a planet and then process them into P3 products to be hauled back to a station and sold on the market.

In other words, you can make ISK from PI without actually extracting Resources from any Planet.  Think of PI as Mining and Manufacturing but on a Planet.

Many claim that PI is "passive income" - mainly because you can set up facilities on a planet to automatically extract resources + combine them to make P1 products + combine them to make P2 products all on the same planet and all this occurs when you are offline, much like manufacturing.  This can be set up to happen over a week and all the player needs to do is adjust the extractors once a week (need not even undock to do that) and turn up to the planet once a month to take the finished products to the market for sale.  Sort of like mining AFK.

Therefore, the way i look at Planetary Interation is in two parts.

Firstly, there is the extraction of Resources to be combined to make the P1 products.  This is best done outside of Highsec given Highsec planets don't tend to have a high concentration of some of the desired Resources.  This is like mining, afk.

Secondly, there is the combination of Products to make higher level products.  This can be done in Highsec and indeed this is there i am focusing with my "Factory Planets".  This is like Manufacturing.

My entire aim with Planetary Interaction is to combine P2 products i bought on the market into P3 products to be sold or to combine P3 products i bought on the market into P4 products to be sold.

In my first month at trying this (having skilled up) i made 681m ISK and in January to date i have made 555m ISK with just one alt operating 5 planets.  I greatly suspect this will achieve my golden rules of being low time usage + earn at least a Plex a month + high margin.

I will be going more into what i am doing in later posts but i note that the likes of Foo who blogs at foo-eve.blogspot makes part of his living with Planetary Interaction in Wormhole space.

The most useful videos i have found are:

The 8 minute CCP Planetary Interaction guide is a good place to start.

Two 40 minute videos by Gorthour Decievers on Planetary Interactions.  The first video deals with setting up an extraction Planet.  The second video deals with setting up a factory planet.  Excellent starting videos for Planetary Interaction.

They are included on my useful video page.