Finding items to build

As any budding industrialist, I was faced by the eternal question “What should I build to make money ?”. Well, making money seems like a good first step, even if I am having fun just building things and this could be enough.

At my disposal, I have at the moment one character with decent skills related to industry and science :

From there, the first way of looking at it for me was the different item tiers : T1, T2 and T3.

T3 production is something which interest me dearly, and something which I may end up doing at least to try it, but I believe that my current skillset doesn’t really allow me to enjoy fully from it. I am also aware there are already several big players in this niche and I am afraid of them at the moment. While I don’t have any strong opinion on the T1 vs T2 part, as long as there is profit, I believe the skill barrier to T2 production is interesting and may give me more opportunities.

Let’s go with T2 then ? Nope. In the end, I decided to forget this approach to decide which items to build and decided to go with other constraints inherently linked to the fact that I’m using wormholes :

• Output items should fit in a DST (60k m³)
• Logistic should not be a pain in the ass

The input / output volume is not something easily computed, so time to start digging in the SDE.

For those who don’t know, the Static Data Export (SDE) is a collection of database tables containing static data about the EVE universe. You will find there the stargates coordinates, existing items, skills, modules properties, and more especially in this case, blueprints information.

I am looking here at the following tables :

• industryActivityMaterials containing the input information for a blueprint
• industryActivityProducts containing the output information for a blueprint
• industryActivity containing the blueprint information, such as the time needed
• invVolumes listing the volume of each item

Using all those tables, I can build a SQL request which will give me the input and output volume for each blueprint in the game. The final SQL request looks somehow like that :

SELECT *
FROM
  (SELECT iam.typeID,
          it2.typeName,
          SUM(iam.quantity * it1.volume) AS volume_in
   FROM industryActivityMaterials iam
   JOIN invTypes it1 ON (iam.materialTypeID=it1.typeID)
   JOIN invTypes it2 ON (iam.typeID = it2.typeID)
   WHERE iam.activityid=1
     AND it1.marketgroupid IS NOT NULL
   GROUP BY it2.typeName,
            iam.typeID
   ORDER BY iam.typeID ASC) info_in
JOIN
  (SELECT iap.typeID,
          MIN(IFNULL(iap.quantity* iv.volume,999999999999), (iap.quantity* it3.volume)) AS volume
   FROM industryActivityProducts iap
   LEFT JOIN invVolumes iv ON (iap.productTypeID=iv.typeID)
   LEFT JOIN invTypes it3 ON (iap.productTypeID=it3.typeID)
   LEFT JOIN invMetaTypes imt ON it3.typeID=imt.typeID
   WHERE iap.activityid=1
     AND it3.published = 1
     AND it3.marketgroupid IS NOT NULL
     AND imt.metagroupid NOT IN (3,
                                 4,
                                 5,
                                 6)
   ORDER BY iap.typeID ASC) info_out ON info_in.typeID = info_out.typeID
JOIN
  (SELECT typeid,
          industryActivity.time
   FROM industryActivity
   WHERE activityID = 1 ) ia ON ia.typeID = info_in.typeid

I am looking for manufacturing activities (iap.activityid = 1) for published items (it3.published=1), which can be sold on the market (marketgroupid IS NOT NULL) and which are either T1, T2 or T3 (metagroupid not in 3 (Storyline), 4 (Faction), 5 (Officer) or 6 (Deadspace) )

Using a database browser like SQLLite, the result is at least self explanatory (unlike the SQL request) :

Example : Building a Small Shield Extender II will take 2340 seconds, need 11.05 m³ of materials and output 5 m³ of items.

Exporting the list as a CSV and loading it into excel, I can apply more filters

• Filter 1 : Volume in should be less than 60.000 m³
• Filter 2 : Volume out should be less than 60.000 m³

Quite simple already, and I am down to 1786 possible items. Since I am lazy, I want to limit the logistic aspect to one DST trip each week.

• Filter 3 : Volume in needed for one week should be less than 60.000 m³
• Filter 4 : Volume out needed for one week should be less than 60.000 m³

You will remember that I exported the time needed for building one item in seconds. I can do a bit of simple math to get the volume in one week.

I’m now down to 1005 items, which I can sort by time per job for example (less clicking make my mouse happy)

 

With the constraints I added to the document, very few ships are left and I noticed at this point that the Racial Starship Enginneering skills are needed for many ships. I discarded those, and browsing the rest of items I noticed three big families : Ammo, Components and Modules. Problem now is to know which one as worth producing or not, and what to really build. Time to open IPH.

In the Manufacturing List tab of EvE IPH, it is possible to generate information regarding blueprints : expected profit, salve-to-volume ratio (SVR), and Isk per Hour

The trick here will be to make IPH believe we own the blueprints of the 1005 items listed previously and then build the list while selecting the option “Owned BPs”.

You can manage your blueprint from the edit menu, and more especially you can export and load blueprints from files. Creating an export file will list the status of all your blueprint, and from there excel will do the rest :

1. Create a back up of your blueprints. The file should be named Blueprints Backup – <date> – <character>.csv
   
2. Open a new workbook into excel, and import the csv. Go to the “Data” menu, choose “External Data > from text file”. A dialog box will ask you how the data is formatted, specify that the data is delimited by a comma
3. Create a second spreadsheet (named BPSheet for this example) in your workbook where you copy the list of blueprint names from your previous filters, let’s say in the column A
4. In the first worksheet, we will change the columns value to use the data in the second sheet. We will make IPH believe that we own the BPO for all those items listed (yes, even T2 since those BPO technically exists). When a BPO is owned, we will change the following values in the columns :
   • Quantity will be set to 1
   • Runs will be set to -1
   • BP type will be set to “BPO”
   • Owned will be set to “True”
5. To modify the value of the “Quantity” column, we will use the following formula :  IF(ISERROR(MATCH(F2,BPSheet!A:A,0)),”False”,”True”) where F2 is the column “Blueprint Name”
6. Use a simple formula to modify the other columns and then extend the formula to all lines. For example you can use something in the lines of IF(columnQuantity = 1,-1,0) for the “Runs” columns
7. Once you modified all lines, select the whole sheet and copy it into a text editing program, such as Notepad++ or Sublime Text

   

8. Open the replace mode (default is Alt – H on the above programs), go to regular expression modes and replace all the occurrences of “\t” to “,”. Backslash t is the regex character for tabulations while our delimiter in the file is a simple coma.

   

9. Overwrite the backup file with your newly formatted data, and save the new csv file
10. Load the new Blueprint back file into  IPH and voilà, you should now have the list of all those interesting blueprint within IPH ☺

 

After updating the prices in IPH, we can now go to the “Manufacturing List” tab and generate all the data we want regarding our blueprints. Few options have to be set :

• Blueprint Filters, choose “Load: Owned BPs”
• Invention Decryptors, choose “Optimal”
• In the market filter, be sure to check “Include items w/o SVR” and the region you plan to sell your production
• In the middle of the screen, you have several tabs : “Base”,”Components” and other possibilites. You have to set here which type of facility you are going to use. Since IPH does not support Citadels at this point, choose a random Nullsec system as location and output as facility type. This way, you can set up manually the ME and TE modifiers. 

In the end, my options look like the picture below :

and when clicking on the “Calculate” button, you will end up with a nice list of profit, isk per hour, and SVR for each items :

I will first sort the items by their isk per hour value. One item produced means one production line used. I will be more happy if a production line give me 1m isk / hour rather than 100k isk / hour.

The second value I am looking at is SVR, short for Sales Volume Ratio. As far as I understand, IPH is getting the average number of items sold in the past and compare this value to the number of items you can produce. If the SVR value is less than one, it means that you can produce more than there are items usually sold. This is something I want to avoid because small markets are often something overly specific and I don’t want to end up with a stack of 100 modules to sell when one is sold each week.

On the above picture for example, the low SVR value on the Prototype Hyperspatial Accelerator means, if I can produce them 24/7, that I will flood the market. On the opposite side, even if I produce Small Ancillary Armor Repairer (SAAR) non stop, there are six times more items in sell orders in the region I chose (spoiler : it is The Forge).

I simply run the computation again specifying a filter of a SVR value of at least 4. Here is an example of what I get, ordered by decreasing value of Isk per Hour.

I decided to ignore Blueprints which are not easily obtainable, such as the ‘Wetu’ Mobile Depot which is loot only. Same for SAAR, while extremely interesting money-wise, obtaining a constant supply of SAAR is not something trivial.

There are items without any SVR. It often means that the market is empty for those items. Example for the Capital Nuclear Pulse Generator :

In this case, the item is not interesting. I am however not removing those by default just in case I find a special snowflake which remains interesting.

After some filtering, I have a nice list of things to build and not build :

One quickly check on the market will allow you to avoid items spiking at a particular time. In this example, the Ice Harvester II is slowly increasing in price since one month. It may means that the supply is shorter than demand (good, you can produce items and make and sell them easily !) but it can also means that the price will drop once again one day.

After one trip with my BR (Yeah, we got a highsec entrance in the chaine today \o/) I got reminded that all my study before was related to the volume for one item only. It simply means that if I am running ten lines for ten different items, It would be 10 DSTs per week. Something which doesn’t please me at the moment so we will see how it goes from there.

In the end, I decided to go for something much more simpler with a very high SVR. The cake is in the oven, we will see how it goes 🙂

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How I started industry (again) and how I lost 1b

If I should put a price tag on sheer enthusiasm, I would start at one billion. At least. Not all stories start with a success story sadly !

Let’s go back few weeks. I managed to get a little ISK on the side and decided to try my hand at industry (again) with an initial investment of 2 billions. While I absolutely love the industrial aspect in EvE Online, and while I believe I am at east with numbers, maths and optimization problems, my (several) half-attempts somehow failed previously.

I heard that one picture is worth ten thousands words, and this one illustrates perfectly

For my defense, living actively in a wormhole since two years makes me forget about those blueprints all the time.

So I started with two billions, one Raitaru at my disposition and a great tool named EVE Isk per Hour. Since logistic in a pain in W-Space, I decided to go for low volume – high margin items, and more especially this little gem :

Capital Trimark Armor Pump II Blueprint, here I come ! I bought one BPO, quickly used the “Select Decryptor” menu on EvE IPH to find the best decryptor to use, launched some invention, and I ended up with my first mistake :

Instead of creating one BPC with 500 runs, I created 500 BPC for one run. Even with ten slots available, invention is going to be a bit less fun that expected (and I am not sure I expected much fun at this particular step).

 

One thing which is extremely interesting about T2 rigs is that you don’t need the T1 version in the build components, you only need raw mats coming from salvage. For this one, you are especially looking at Intact Armor Plates. Those are quite expensive, and linked to the second error I made.

This is the price graph of those Intact Armor Plates in The Forge, where I bought most of them. As you can notice, there is a light price spike in the last week. Sadly, this is enough to create a big damp in my margin. Guess who bought items at this time without double checking ? Right, second error. At this point, I am mainly thinking about just getting back my initial investment before thinking again and avoiding other mistakes.

In the end, I have some items in Jita in sell orders, the competition is quite active but it’s refreshing (at least something I know and expected !). I put the rigs to sell directly from Jita 4-4, but I may do it from a citadel in Perimeter next. Those broker fees hurt, especially on high value items such as those.

What about those 1b lost you wonder ? I was a moron and thought that hauling few jumps in low sec wouldn’t be a problem, and that was the only k-space exit in our chain at this moment.

I guess I’ll have to be less stupid next time 🙂