Raitaru.05

My spreadsheet tells me I have gathered all the resources I need to build the Raitaru. It is more of a “thank goodness” than “fist pump“ moment.

I’m fearful I’ve made a mistake in my calculations – but we will cross that bridge if we have too.

My Raitaru project container has 94,954 m3 of stuff ready to manufacture. The client suggests it is worth around 441M ISK. The Blueprint Copies would add around 20M ISK. Probably not something you want to move around lots.

That figure of 461M ISK is interesting. So far, I’ve paid out approximately 130M ISK in PI fees and taxes to gather the PI goods. (It would be cheaper the next time round if I reuse the infrastructure.) If I sold everything now, I would come out with about 331M ISK for my efforts, minus the cost of sales.

A manufactured Raitaru is currently selling for 527M ISK. That leaves an extra 66M return, minus the cost of manufacturing, and of course minus the cost of sales. I’m not doing this for profit, but it is the sort of thing you need to pay attention to if you are serious about your manufacturing.

It has been a long time since I built anything of note, and I wasn’t sure how the costs were calculated now. I went back to the Eve University Wiki:

https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Manufacturing

Simplistically, you are charged a production fee based on how much manufacturing is being done in your system over the last 28 days, compared to the rest of the EVE universe. The busier the system is, the more expensive it is to manufacture.  This is CCP’s way of trying to spread out manufacturing.

The wiki article also outlines the various skills you should train. I ignore these. I will visit later if I decide to put more effort into my building.

There are not that many decisions you have to make at this point.

There is only one station in system which supports manufacturing, and I had already planned ahead and stored all the ingredients there. I right clicked on the first blueprint copy and selected “Use Blueprint”. This opened the industry panel and I was able to look at how much the build of the first of 9 components would cost me.

The system cost index is 5.42%. I’m not sure if that is high or low. It is applied against the estimated value of the item being manufactured – in this case, 20.6M.

So, 20.6M ISK x 5.42% = A Job Cost of 1.1M ISK.

But wait – there’s more. The Job cost is then multiplied by an additional Facility Tax. In this case it is 10% – paid to the NPC Station Owners.

1.1M x 110% = 1.2M ISK

I open the structure browser and filter on manufacturing services with a range of the current constellation. There are several player structures available with Facility taxes of between 5 and 8%. There is one at 2.8%, but I am weary to use it (even to buy something from there) as it is run by a Pirate organisation.

I roughly calculate that using one of the local player structures would save me around 1M ISK in fees across building all the 9 components. That isn’t worth the hassle or risk of moving the manufacturing. I stick to the using the NPC station.

I submit the blueprint copies one after another until – thump, I quickly came to a screaming halt.

My Industry Alt can only run 5 Manufacturing jobs.

I go back to the EVEUni Wiki to check over the skills after all.

Each rank in Industry reduces the manufacturing time by 4%. I’m sitting on 20% with Rank 5.

Advanced Industry reduces manufacturing time and Research time by 3% each rank. I’m sitting on an extra 6% off my manufacturing time. I can improve that, so I adjust my training queue.

Mass Production allows 1 extra job per rank. I have rank 4 – giving me a total of 5 jobs. I need more than that. I adjust my training queue again to get this skill to rank 5.

Advanced Mass Production allows 1 extra manufacturing job per rank. It requires Mass Production 5, which I have queued up.  I add this skill to the training queue, aiming to have a total of 9 jobs.

My plans to be flying a freighter are stretch out a bit further.

Currently I am looking at about a week to finish it, assuming I haven’t messed up.

Just an aside – I have two characters training on my Alt account – using Dual Training certificates I got with some special deal a while ago. The first certificate had expired so the training on the lower SP character (my Industry Alt) was paused. There was however no warning or notification that I noticed – it just happened quietly in the background. Looking around, I am not sure there is any way to identify how long you have left on the certificates. Annoying. I use another certificate to restart the Industry Alt’s training. I remember how the character already had all these skills in her past life. Sigh.

Raitaru.04

So now I had a plan and the required skills to perform it. The next step was to setup a glorious chain of Planetary Infrastructure to extract all the PI goods I needed for the Raitaru. This stretched my brain a little more than usual.

To begin I went back to my spreadsheet and noted down what sort of planets you could source each of the P0/P1 goods on.

I then repeated that step to identify what P2 goods you could create on just the one planet.

(In future when building P4 goods I don’t think I will bother with exporting P2 goods. I will instead export P1 goods, then do all the P2, P3 and P4 goods on factory planets. This time around however I exported both P1 and P2.)

Next, I looked at what planets I had available to my Alt with low tax rates.

I have four Empire based POCO, anchored under my Main Character’s Corporation. Each has the 10% NPC tax rate, plus an additional Tax based on standings.

Pilots in my Corporation, Alliance or with positive Standings are charged a 0.1% Tax. I’ve left it at the minimum (aside 0%) so that I can see via my Wallet Journal who is using the POCO. Neutrals are charged 2%, those with poor standings 3.5%, and those with bad standings at 5%.

My Alt has Customs Code Expertise at Rank 5 and positive standings with my Main’s Corporation. As a result, the base Tax Rate is 5.1% on those four Planets. There are also another three POCO in the system where the Owner (who I am friendly with) has set the tax at 0%.

That gave me a starting point of 3 Barren, 3 Gas and 1 Lava planet I could use with minimal additional tax.

Now an example of the impact these Taxes have. I want to move 1,000 units of Bacteria off one of the planets I have a 5.1% tax on.

I can move the Bacteria into a Launch Pad and shift it up to the Orbiting Customs Office. The game currently values each unit of Bacteria at 4,000 ISK. So, 4,000 ISK x 1,000 Units x 5.1% tax means it costs my Alt 20,400 ISK in tax to do the transfer. 20,000 ISK goes to some mystical NPC, and 400 ISK goes to my Main’s Corporation.

If I want to avoid giving any ISK to the POCO owner, I can move the Bacteria into a Command Centre, and launch it into space where I can pick it up from a container. There are two limitations for doing this – the first is you can only launch 500m3 at a time with delays between them, and second it costs a flat 15% NPC tax. In this case it would cost me 60,000 ISK, which would all go to the NPCs.

If I need to move Bacteria from space down to the Planet Surface, I only have one choice. I must go through the Customs Office. The tax however is calculated at half the export cost. In my example, importing 1,000 units of Bacteria costs 10,200 ISK – 10,000 to the NPCs, 200 to my Main’s Corporation.

In the 3-jump range I was willing to travel to find planets to work on, most Player Owned Customs Offices charged an additional Tax of between 5 and 10%. (The 10% likely set to equate the cost of exporting via the Command Centre.)

The maximum extra player Tax I was willing to pay was 5% – so I only used other POCO with total taxes of 10% or less. At that rate exporting my 1,000 units of Bacteria would cost me 40,000 ISK, half going to the NPCs, half to the POCO owner.

At these volumes that might not seem like much – but I had to extract 34,880 units of Bacteria for my Raitaru. That meant a cost of:

7.11M ISK at 5.1% Tax
13.95M ISK at 10% Tax
20.92M ISK at 15% Tax

With no skills in Customs Code Expertise, that would have been:

14.09M ISK at 10.1% Tax
20.92M ISK at 15% Tax
27.90M ISK at 20% Tax

Factor that across 400,000 plus units of P1 materials, and add in Import Taxes, and it gets bloody expensive. (It can be a sizeable proportion of the overall build cost and can make it very difficult to complete against players using low tax POCO out of Empire Space.)

This was why I paid close attention to the Tax rate on the POCO I was using and tried to carefully consider and limit the times I exported and imported goods. It was also why I cared so much about the number of units I was extracting. Sure – I appreciate the efficiency and timeliness, but mostly I didn’t want to end up paying taxes for things I didn’t have immediate use for

Just to add to all this – you must remember that the POCO owner could block my access to the Customs Office or set the tax rate up to 100% at any time they wanted!

With an understanding of the taxes and what Planets I needed to extract resources off, the next step was to start scanning. I began with the 7 planets I had cheap access too, looking at their resource levels.

(32% is high for Empire space.) I then looked at how the resources were distributed, and if I wanted to extract P2 goods, eyeballed where this distributions overlaid.

Picking the best option for each PI good that I had available, I used the same basic layout on most of my extraction planets. (Setting up PI infrastructure can get expensive, so I wanted a flexible layout I would not have to keep changing.) (This is not an optimal setup!)

I would put down and upgrade to level 5 a Command Center. Next to it I would place a Launchpad, which I would also use for storage. On planets I was extracting P2 goods from, I put down 4 Basic Industry Facilities. The first pair would process one lot of P0 goods into their corresponding P1, the second pair would process the second P0 good. I then put down one or two Advanced Industry Facilities to combine the two P1 goods into the P2. Finally, I laid two Extractor Control Units with as many heads as I could manage, on 24 hour cycles. I tried to match the total amount they extracted by allocating different numbers of heads between them so there was minimal stockpiling of one good or the other.

I reused these planets as much as I could, but there were resources I had to gather through other player owned Customs Offices, including on Temperate and Oceanic planets. There were also some planets that had 0% resources for some of the P0 goods they were meant to contain.

I visited all systems with the planets I needed and noted the total Tax rates on each of their POCO. Approximately half the planets were taxed above 10% so I did not use them on principle.

Working away at half a dozen resources at a time, I managed – across two alts and with lots of extraction schema changes, to obtain and export all the P1/P2 goods I needed for the Raitaru build. It probably took almost a month, although would be quicker the next time around!

The last stage was processing all this into P4 goods, ready for use with the Raitaru Component Blueprint Copies. I did this on a very sub-optimal Factory planet.

I used two Launch Pads, 4 storage containers (1 or maybe 2 too many), 8 Advanced Industry Facilities (for creating P2 goods), 8 Advanced Industry Facilities (for creating P3 goods), and 4 High-Tech Production Facilities (for creating P4 goods).

This meant however I had to continually change the schema being used and to be careful to only route the exact amount of goods to each set of industry facilities. On that last subject, I mistakenly left routing in place at times that grabbed new resources I would transfer to the planet and place them into facilities I did not want them to go.

For example – when I was building the P4 Organic Mortar Applicators, I moved 1,560 Bacteria down to the Factory to be used. The Launch Pad already had a route configured for Bacteria and moved 40 units x 8 to Idle Industry Facilities previously configured to build Fertilizer. You can’t remove those goods once transferred into a facility. You can either fulfil the needs of the Facilities current schema or change to a different schema that also needs that ingredient, otherwise it is lost. In this case I needed the Bacteria in a High-Tech Facility. Because I was so careful to only extract and store the amounts of materials I needed, I then had to go extract more Micro Organisms to convert into Bacteria, export it and then re-import it onto the Factory planet. I made this mistake more than once – so had to get into a habit of removing routing once I had finished.

As I write this, I am finalising the processing of the last required P2 and have three P3 and three P4 goods to complete. It is about a day or two effort. After that I will be able to complete this series – with the notes around the actual manufacturing step.

Assuming I move into building an Astrahus (or another Raitaru), there are some changes I will make to these set ups. First, I will only extract P1 goods. That will cut down on the number of facilities I will need to build on those planets and increase the number of extractor head units I have available. Second – I will set up several Factory planets with as much permanently set schema and routing as I can manage. As Red Neckromonger suggested, I’d like to be able to dump a set amount of P1 goods into a Launch pad and have it all automatically routed through facilities and built into P2 / P3 and finally a P4. That would save a great deal of time (and mistakes) if I can manage it.

It has been quite a complex and interesting process to do solo, which I hope is apparent for non-industrial types.  For those who do industry, sorry for all my mistakes!

Raitaru.03

The EVE University Wiki gives you an overview of how to do PI, with links to videos and details of what everything means and does.

https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Planetary_Interaction

Again, my posts are not really a How-To guide.  Instead they are looking at the complexity, planning and decision making.

I now reviewed the skills I had and what I felt I needed to have for this project.

I knew I would need the maximum number of planets available to me – being six, so I trained Interplanetary Consolidation to rank 5. (As expected, I ended up needing more than six planets, so I had to bring in a second Alt to help.)

To fit in with CCP’s Risk v Reward mantra in EVE, the planets in High Sec generally have poorer and less concentrated resources than what you might find in Low Sec, Null Sec or Wormholes. From previous experience doing PI in High Sec, I knew I would have to upgrade my Command Centers to level 5 to allow me to maximise the number of Extractor Heads I could use. Command Center Upgrades Rank 5 was added to the training queue.

While you can’t remotely interact with Custom Offices or install Planetary Command Centers, you can do a lot of your PI work without undocking. The skill that determines the range at which you can remotely do planet surveys is Remote Sensing. I am not completely sure about this skill, but this is the logic I follow.

The skill gives you the following remote scan ranges:

Level 1: allows scans within 1 ly
Level 2: allows scans within 3 ly
Level 3: allows scans within 5 ly
Level 4: allows scans within 7 ly
Level 5: allows scans within 9 ly

Obviously outside of Capital jumps, Light Years is not really a measurement you think too much about in EVE.

I knew I was going to do all my PI in and around the Akes system in Devoid. I also knew I did not want to have to travel more than 3 jumps to any planets I was going to work on.

I used the Dotlan EVEMaps Navigation tool to work out how far away in Light Years all systems within 3 jumps of Akes were. This is a part of the tool I use when planning capital jumps.

http://evemaps.dotlan.net/planetrange

I simply put in the Akes system, and ensured the Range Options were “Sub-Capital”, Max Jumps (Gates) was “3”, and I had Planet Type as “Show all planets”.

This showed me I had 21 systems (including Akes) within a 3-gate jump range, a count of the type of planets they each had, and the distance in Light Years they were away from Akes:

This tool also crosses into different regions, giving system options you might not always be aware of.  The longest distance was only 3.057 Light Years.  Since that was (just) further than 3 Light Years, I figured I needed at least Rank 3 to survey all planets within 3 jumps.  As I had rank 4 already, my needs were covered.

The last two PI skills – Planetology and Advanced Planetology increase the number of gradient bands and the precision of your scans. The logic I guess is that you can better place your extraction heads.

I settled on Planetology at rank 4 so I could train Advanced Planetology, which I also trained to rank 4. While this rounded out the character, I am not sure it is critical. In the past I’ve compared doing PI on an Alt with Rank 5 in both skills with another Alt with just Rank 3 in Planetology. The amount the better skilled Alt was able to extract with better head placement wasn’t that much more than the lessor skilled Alt.

The next critical skill was getting Customs Code Expertise to Rank 5.  (It is part of the Trade group.)

Another way CCP has made PI less rewarding in High Sec is by setting an additional NPC tax that you must pay to import and export PI goods. This tax doesn’t exist in Low Sec, Null Sec or Wormhole space. You can mitigate up to half this tax however with the Customs Code Expertise skill. (Each rank reduces the NPC tax rate by 10%.) If you are moving any sort of serious volume around, or trying to compete on the market, getting Customs Code Expertise to Rank 5 is almost mandatory.

Last of all from a skills perspective I needed to work out what hauler I would use.

There is a Gallente Industrial called an Epithal which has a special hold for Planetary Commodities (a base size of 45,000m3 +10% each rank you have in the Gallente Industrial Skill). This is a cheap hull that can carry a lot of PI goods, but I don’t like using it. It at times will have to carry goods worth 50+M ISK but is difficult to tank well, and other players know exactly what you are carrying.

I went back to my spreadsheet and added a column for the total volume of each PI good I had to collect. The most was around 13,000m3. I also knew I had to have room to haul multiple Planet Command Centers to allow me to initially set up my planets. I settled on using a Caldari Badger Industrial that was able to carry 14,750m3, with a 20K EHP Tank, and importantly fit a Cloak. The second Alt I am using for PI flies a Transport Ship for their PI. The First Alt will be training to get into a Transport Ship, once she finishes being able to fly a Freighter again.

So that covers my thinking with the skills I needed.  Next post, I will look for planets to work with.

Stargate Holograms

A bunch of holographic icons were introduced to Stargates a little while ago.  If you haven’t already, you should make yourself aware of what they all mean.

There is a support page with details

https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001641900-Stargate-Holograms

..and this great graphic:

The Travel Warning Notice tends to stand out to me – and has accurately alerted me to systems that Suicide Gankers were active in.  The only issue is I’m normally jumping on contact with the gate, so I notice the warning as I jump through…

Raitaru.02

In my last post I mentioned I made a spreadsheet outlining the Minerals and P4 Ingredients I needed to gather to build my Raitaru (using the Blueprint Copies I had purchased).

I knew how and where I could gather the minerals, so it was just a case of working through mining them.

Gathering the 227 units of P4 goods however was more convoluted.

My next step was to go back to my spreadsheet and add a section identifying what ingredients were needed for these P4 goods. There are online tools which map all this out for you – but I wanted to ensure I had a proper understanding of things the first time around, so I worked it out for myself.

The ingredient list for each P4 good is listed on its information window, under the Planetary Production tab.

I dutifully listed these out. Each P4 ingredient needed either three types of P3 ingredient, or two types of P3 ingredient and one type of P1 ingredient.

I then repeated this process for the P3 ingredients, P2 and P1.

I linked each new section so it would automatically calculate how many units were required based on the higher tier ingredients.

The result showed my 227 units of P4 goods would require 61+ Million units of P0 goods.

 

Next, I incorporated a way to keep track of my progress. I did not worry about this for the P0 goods as these were always immediately converted into P1 goods. The P1 goods were more problematic. Some I would extract from a planet and store in my hanger for later use, others would be converted into P2 goods and then extracted.

 

To keep a running total, I took the amount that I needed of each P1 good and subtracted from it what I had stored. Wherever the P1 good was extracted as a P2 good, I used the stored total of that P2 good to calculate how many P1 ingredients were used and subtracted it from the amount remaining for me to gather.

In the end all P2 goods were extracted and stored, so the calculation of my progress for them was easy.

The calculation of the P3 and P4 goods were also easy. The P3 goods were all created on the one factory planet and fed from there into the creation of the P4 goods.

The only variation I had to accommodate was where the goods were being extracted on multiple planets. My stored total of Silicon might look like this:

= (1,000 + 1,500) + 2,000 + 5,000

That meant I had 9,500 Silicon –

2,500 units on Alt2, across two planets (1,000 on one, 1,500 on another)
2,000 units on Alt1, on one planet
5,000 units stored in the Corporate Hanger

If I collected some of these the calculation might change to –

= (0 + 1,500) + 0 + 8,000

Which meant I had 9,500 Silicon –

1,500 units on Alt2, across two planets (0 on one, 1,500 on another)
0 units on Alt1, on one planet
8,000 units stored in the Corporate Hanger

All my Calculations using multiple characters used the Alt1, Alt2, Corporate Hanger notation / format.

Last, I used a simple colour coding system to highlight when I had collected the perquisite number of each ingredient (green) or was actively extracting or processing an ingredient (yellow).

Now – I made several mistakes in my spreadsheet. Some I picked up early without impact, but some I missed until towards the end of this process. That resulted in delays and me having to go back and extract more P1 goods, such as Bacteria.

The first mistake was I did not add the extra P1 ingredients needed for three of the P4 goods. They were not that voluminous however, so it was more a mild inconvenience.

The second mistake was I wrote down the wrong number of goods stored once or twice, leaving me short when I went to process a higher tier good later.

The third mistake was I missed accounting for an ingredient or two when calculating the total number of P1s needed. An ingredient might be needed in four P2 goods, but I only added three of them.

If I consider all the calculations I typed in, I only got 1 in 100 wrong, but it was a bit aggravating.

None of these calculations were smart or tricky or even optimal. I followed what seemed like logical step after logical step, so built lots of simple calculations into an overall project plan. I remark on it here to highlight the sort of complexity that exists in EVE industry which might not be apparent to some.

The more complex decision making aspect was deciding where and how to do the extraction, which I will look at next.

Raitaru.01

This is the first of what should be a series of posts.  It is about the process I am following to build a Raitaru – the smallest (and cheapest) of the Engineering Complexes.  While I hope it is of general interest, it is targeted more towards those who do not normally dabble in or understand the Industry side of EVE.  It is by no means a guide towards the best way to build a Raitaru – just the way I happen to be stumbling along.

The very first step of the process is the spark of the idea.  From memory this came from the blogger Kirith Kodachi and his posts about his Structure Assembly lines. He was building lots of structures Solo – so why not set myself a goal to build one?  To take this further – I would follow the example of The Nosy Gamer and gather as much of the raw ingredients as I could myself.

Economically this is a horrible idea.  With consideration of Opportunity Cost, I should concentrate on the tasks I can generate the most ISK per hour from and outsource the resource gathering and building of a Raitaru to those more skilled, better located and with optimised tools to do so.  If you have followed this blog you would know I don’t think much of Structures for Solo play, so I am not likely to even use what I build.  Instead my interest lies in the challenge of doing the largest and most complex build I will have done so far in my EVE Career.

My initial goal was to build an Astrahus on my Main Character.  It soon became apparent however that it would require a lot of time and focus, which I didn’t want to tie my Main down with.  The goal withered on the vine.

When I reestablished a separate Industry Alt months later, I quickly revisited the goal.  To make it a bit easier for myself I decided to switch over to the cheaper (and I hoped easier) to build Raitaru.

The second step is to identify what you have to do to manufacture one.  This is outlined in the Raitaru Blueprint – the details of which you can find using the client search function or looking it up via the Market.

Under the Manufacturing section of the Blueprint it tells you how long it takes to build, what skills you need to build it, and what ingredients it needs.

I needed the Outpost Construction skill to rank 1, and 9 structure components.  My industry Alt did not have the required skill – but I had plenty of time before I would be ready to build, so I added it to her training queue.  (As shown above, that is now complete).

The third step was to source the required Blueprints.  Using a tool like https://evemarketer.com/ I found an Original Raitaru Blueprint cost 4B ISK, and the Structure Component Blueprints cost 200M each.  That is a 5.8B ISK expense.  I would then need to research most of them to make them more efficient.  Given I don’t plan on building many of these, I decided to search through the in game Contracts looking for a Blueprint Copy Kit. This is where the owner of a set of original Blueprints made one or more run copies of them for sale (and profit).

The important factors in purchasing such a kit include price, location, completeness, and how well they were researched.  By researched I mean if their Material Efficiency (ME) and Time Efficiency (TE) were better than 0%.  This is shown on the top of the Blueprint (original or copy) information box (below is my Hammerhead I BPO):

Material Efficiency is shown next to the Diamond like symbol and Time Efficiency is shown next to the Hour Glass.

Material Efficiency reduces the required input materials needed during the manufacturing process.  The maximum ME a Blueprint can have is 10%.  That can save you a lot of ISK on big builds.

Time Efficiency decreases the time it takes to manufacture a Blueprint.  The maximum TE a Blueprint can have is 20%.  Given the Raitaru takes over 4 and a half days to build, a better TE would be nice (but not mandatory).

Once you start looking at these kits you will find they come at different prices and have different ME and TE amounts.  Looking at the original BPO I could tell it wouldn’t matter what ME a one run Raitaru BPC had.

An ME of 1% would only have a positive impact on each individual ingredient where 100 or more were required.  1% of 100 is 1 less unit required.

An ME of 10% would only have a positive impact on each individual ingredient where 10 or more were required.  10% of 10 is 1 less unit required.

The Raitaru had 9 ingredients – of only 1 unit each.  10% less of 1 is rounded back up to 1.

I looked through the 9 Structure Components and they all required Minerals and P4 Planetary Materials.  The P4 material were in low volume – at most 10.  The Minerals were all at least 100 units – normally in the thousands of units.  Any ME level would reduce the volume of Minerals required, but only an ME of 10% would reduce any of the P4 ingredients.

There were no additional Blueprints required for the ingredients of the structure components, so my kit would need just the 10 BPC – the Raitaru and its 9 required components to build.

If you are looking to maximise profits, you can use tools like Fuzzworks Blueprint Calculator to see the impact of the different researched levels.  A link to a Raitaru Blueprint is shown below:

https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/blueprint/?typeid=35825

The most reasonable kit I found at the time was one for 20M ISK for the Raitaru (ME4, TE12) and 9 components (ME7, TE14).

(At the time I did not find any ME10 Blueprints for the Structure Components.)

Below is one of the Component BPC’s in the kit:

It took me an EVE session or two to research, purchase and move the required Blueprints, and a number of weeks for my Alt to do her required skill training.

So when I had that all covered, the fourth step was to open up my EVE Spreadsheet and add a new Tab for my Raitaru build project.  I listed out the 9 components I would need to build first, what minerals they required and what P4 Planetary ingredients I would have to make.  These volumes were taken direct from the Blueprint Copies, taking into account their Material efficiencies.

I then set about mining and starting up Planetary Production.  I put my Blueprint Copies and all the ingredients I was collecting into a Station container.  As my screen capture shows above – I have now collected all the required minerals for the build, but I have not completed any of the P4 ingredients.

The Tritanium, Pyerite, Mexallon, Isogen and Nocxium were readily available in High Sec Asteroid Belts.  I mined using three characters – mostly on my Main (who is very skilled) and my Industry Alt (who is not so skilled).  I picked the Asteroids I mined based on what minerals I needed the most instead of what was most profitable.

Zydrine is not available in normal High Sec belts, but I was able to source most of it by hunting down Jaspect, Hedbergite and Hemorphite Anomaly sites in High Sec, and adding a bit from refining loot salvage.

I did not pay close attention to how long this process took.  I think there was around a month of sporadic hour long mining sessions, including some semi-AFK time in a Retriever.  Making use of every mining Anomaly site, and hauling minerals from the various locations I ended up mining all added to the effort.  It didn’t seem too arduous however as it was spread out.  It encouraged me to undock and look around.

Megacyte is also not available in normal High Sec belts, and can’t be found in any Anomaly belts in High Sec either.  I could either have mined extra to be sold to cover the cost of buying it, or looked to Ninja mine in Low Sec Anomalies or Wormholes.  Instead when I moved my Main’s Industry collection over to my Alt, I found he had enough of a Megacyte stockpile to cover what was needed.

So at this point I have the required blueprints and minerals, but I need to finish sourcing my PI ingredients.  I have a collection of P1, P2 and P3 ingredients covered.  By the end of this weekend I will have the last of the required P1’s extracted, and just need to process everything with some level of efficiency through factory planets.  Here is my current P1 status:

More to come on the much more time consuming PI gathering in my next post.

(Post Version 1.1)

Into the last 10 percent of the Extraction

I have 91% of the required P1/P2 ingredients for the Raitaru Build now. I am powering forward with the involvement of a second Alt.

This endeavour has been more successful than my goal to build an Astrahus with my Main. It is a lot easier with a character who stays in the one area and is focused only on Industry Goals.

I will move what I have accomplished so far on the Astrahus from my Main Elmis to my Industry Alt Illesha, and get her to complete the task.

Speaking of moving, I’ve decided to transfer most of my Industrial assets to my Industry Alt. After an effort spread across a couple days, I finished transferring my BPO library to Ilesha today. It required a total of eight round trips of forty jumps each, hauling on average 600M ISK worth of BPO each time.

I managed to do this without the intervention of the multiple ganking groups I passed on almost every journey. These groups were more plentiful than usual and stationed in systems I am not used to seeing them in, particularly on the Amarr side of the trade route to Rens.

One day I am going to get caught and generate an embarrassing killmail in my hauling Exequror.

I used the spare time while hauling to set up a Factory planet with Illesha to start the process of converting my P1 and P2 supplies into the P3 then P4 ingredients needed for the build. I haven’t created a full Factory planet before, so I expect there will be some costly trial and error as I work it all out.

A lesser solo game with age

I’m 85% through all my old Blog posts. I have not been reading them in strict order – instead I have tended to randomly pick a starting point and read a few months at a time. Today I was working through the second half of 2014, and my endeavours relating to the Cruis Industry Expansion.

Back then I had anchored a Medium POS, then swapped it for a Small, fitting and playing with a variety of different Industry Arrays. It has been a very sad reminder about how functional POS were for my Solo play, and the enjoyment and value I got out of them. To try and do the same thing with a Structure comes at a ridiculously higher cost, 500+% more to buy and fuel.

There have been a surprising number of areas of my solo game which have suffered, or I have had to abandon due to how CCP has changed their game.

Despite the odd aggravation, reading through all my old posts have been a cathartic process, and overall, I have enjoyed the trip down memory lane. It has highlighted types of blog posts I should do more of, and other styles I should focus less on. It has even prompted me to revisit areas of the game.

To that end I found myself in Jita the other day purchasing some Orca’s. Since I had time, I figured I would try buy orders to save myself a little ISK. I don’t often do that in Jita as I am never going to be able to reliably beat the fanatical Traders and Market Bots. After an hour of 5-minute price updates I managed to stay on top of the order heap just long enough to snag one purchase, saving me 35M ISK. I then got the remaining hulls off Sell Orders – which required much less time and aggravation.

One of my Alts on the move

My Industry Alt continues her collection of material ingredients for building a Raitaru. (Even though I can’t justify the silly expense to run one.) She has 93.8% (by volume) of the minerals, and 78.7% of the P1 material requirements.

I hit a roadblock with the last 25% PI ingredients. I couldn’t cover everything using just the 6 planets on my Industry Alt. I don’t want to have to dismantle setups from one planet and re-tool on another as it would become very expensive. To address this, as I mentioned, I upskilled my EveHermit Alt to fill in the gaps in the process. Today I had him visiting dozens of nearby systems finding sources for Complex Organisms (which turn into Proteins) and Planktic Colonies (turn into Biomass) which did not have unreasonable tax rates on them. With perseverance he found them.

I have been very busy in game for the last month. Not having to spend every night of the week transporting the kids to all their normal school term activities frees up a lot of time.

Meet the Crew

Meet my new scout / scanning Alt.

She is one day old, has 10.8M SP, and is able to fly Gallente & Minmatar Covert Ops and Interceptors.  She has reasonable navigation, tank and scanning skills, and can use the T2 modules for Analyzers, Light Drones and small Projectile and Hybrid Turrets.  She has several caches of ships and clones set up across three regions, and will occasionally amuse herself running Hi and Low Sec Exploration sites.  She will remain nameless and out of my Corporations / Alliance, so she can undertake the occasional scouting / spying job for my Main.

 

Next is my new Support Alt, Ardaven.

He is 11 days old, has 34.9M SP, and is able to fly most T2 Amarr Frigate, Destroyer and Cruiser Hulls.  He can also fly an Orca and Porpoise.  He can fit, tank and fly these all appropriately, use Amarr EW, T2 Sentries, and T2 Large Laser Turrets. He is starting to build up a cache of ships and clones, but it is taking a little while to review fits.  He is in my main Corporation / Alliance, and will be regularly flying in support of my Main.

My last main Alt is the refreshed Illesha Rose.

She is 9 years and 3 months old, has 14.4M SP, can fly most T1 ship hulls to basic levels, and has moderate Trade, Industry, Resource Processing and PI skills.  She can also fly T1 Barges ok.  She is only a fraction of her old (before SP extraction) self, but will keep watch over and use my Player Own Custom Offices, and re-train her large library of injected skills if I want her to do something Industry like.  She already has a cache of ships to cover off this task.  She is in a separate corporation, but it is not much use trying to hide her.  She was the one who created my Alliance for me.

So my initial plan was to build three Alts using Skill Point Injectors for scouting, support and industry on one account, which I have done.  I lost count of the number of times I have heard “Skill Training Completed” over the last fortnight.

Not in my initial plans, I also threw SP at another existing Alt – EveHermit.

He is 1 year and 11 months old, has 14.5M SP, and has joined Illesha’s Corporation to cover off her remaining PI needs.  He has reasonable scanning skills, and can appropriately fit, tank and fly T2 Amarr Covert Ops, Assault Frigates, Interceptors, and their Tactical Destroyer.  This will allow him to run Hi-Sec Exploration content on occasion.  He can also fly Amarr Transport ships and the T2 Expedition Frigates.  He will help out Illesha, and is already located in the same system with an appropriate cache of ships.

The other characters to get SP injected is my Main Toon – Elmis.

He is 12 years and 3 months old, and has 245M SP.  He can tank, fit and fly every hull in the game aside Titans and the Flag Cruiser, and has almost every skill available to rank IV or V.  He also now has an additional 17M SP in his unallocated pool, thanks to the Absolute Injection Augmentor Boosters given as Christmas Gifts this year.  I used these for all my Alts (one or two doses) during their setup, giving me an extra 300 to 600K SP for their development.  The boosters were selling for as little as 4M ISK towards their expiration (which I think just happened with the latest Downtime.)  They were an absolute boon.

Now that I have come this far, I might as well finish this off.

This is a second Scout Alt:

She is connected / linked to my main if you search.  She is 5 years old, and has 5.2M SP.  She has average scanning skills and can fly Gallente Covert Ops.  I have occasionally used her for purpose, including during my last two War Decs.  The problem is I hate her name, and have considered scrapping her for that reason alone.  I think she is safe for now.

Those are all on my main Account.

My last Alt is on my Third account, Orkorde.

She is 11 years and 5 months old, and has 1.3M SP.  She has been nothing but a price check Alt for all that time – which hasn’t been needed for years with tools like EVE Market Helper.  Just recently I have been training her in all the Alpha skills possible, just for the interest of it.  This is a very slow process at half training time – made worse by me regularly forgetting to update the skill queue.

If my quick calculations are right, I currently have around 344M SP.   That is quite a drop from the 475-500M SP I had before (foolishly) deciding to extract SP and bio-massing most of my Alts.  When I started this process I had the vague plan to spend all of the ISK I gained from that earlier extraction process.  I still have a bunch of ships to buy and fit, which should bring me about to that ball park figure.  Quite an ISK and SP drain to remove then re-add Alts.  Anyway – hard lesson learnt – EVE is more fun with Alts, especially when you are playing solo.

The cost of savings

I’ve spent a couple days recently in game working on my second replacement Alt.

I spent 77B ISK on Skill points – ingesting 34.5M. After the purchase of skills, implants, ships and some holding cash, we can round the cost of the Alt to 80B ISK.

I presume I could have done better on the character market – but this way I’ve got exactly what I want (or at least, think I want).

The Toon has no Structure Management, Planet Management, Resource Processing, Science, Production or Corporation Management skills, aside what was given at the start or required as prerequisites for other skills. Most skill points have gone into flying and fitting Amarr ships.

The primary goal of this character was to be able to support my main in the defence, repair and any required recapture of my handful of Player Owned Customs Offices. That has been covered off.

One of the ships the Alt had to be able to fit and fly

As a bonus they can also fly Amarr Logistic Frigates, Covert Ops, Electronic Attack Ships, Interceptors, Assault Frigates, Tactical Destroyers, Logistic Cruisers, Recons, Heavy Assault Cruisers and Strategic Cruisers, along with being able to fly an Orca and Porpoise. The last two were a bit of an unexpected bonus, and were why I put a couple more million SP into the Alt.

That all allows the Alt to also support my Main in Missions, Mining and out of Hi-Sec explorations if I need.

I enabled dual training on the Alt account and am currently working to get the Alt into the Amarr Transport ships.

All told it is an interesting little Toon, more useful than expected.

Been visiting this a lot lately for SP Injectors

Meanwhile I have proven myself a liar. When the timer runs down, and I remember, I have continued to ingest Absolute Injection Augmentor Boosters and Large Skill Injectors on my Main. The difference between 150K and 500K SP feels a bit too good to pass up, even if all I am doing is storing it for a rainy day. While the result won’t be many new skill ranks, it has grown into a big enough pool of SP that it can’t be argued as doing anything other than moving me forward / further away from most newer players. Both my new Alts have used the same boosters to get an extra 300K SP (500K instead of 400K x3) towards the end of their SP ingestion.

I haven’t kept a close watch, but I’ve spent over 100B ISK on this entire process over the last month or two, and still have one more Alt to set up. This is not ISK earnt through great in game play, but SP ISK extracted from my previous Alts. As the bank balance has been reducing, I have been mindful of one of my favourite quotes:

“You can not save up your life, it has to be spent to have any value.”

And so – within reason – it is the same with ISK. That 100B ISK sitting in the bank for the last year was adding nothing to my gaming experience.