Proposed change of scenery

I am currently cramped in my lowsec system.  There are 4 planets with good (2%) tax, and one with OK tax.  However, I am missing access to all the resources I need at a price I want to pay.

I have bought out all the cheap sell orders in the area; and local buy orders are not reliably filled.

On top of that; the system appears to be a pipeline to null, with unfriendly hunters camp it on the weekend; and often during the week.  This is inconvenient.

I now have a Viator (T2 cloaky hauler).  Everyone agrees that these are good things to have, and that they are 'impossible' to catch if I do the right things every time.  Hunters have been telling me this, so they must be right??

(There is also a complete lack of consensus as to how to fly or fit one, but that is a discussion for another day).

Impossible is a big word.  I have nightmares about coming across heavy interdictors (whatever they are), and a gate entrance swarming with drones and containers.

I have survived gate camps in my Viator, but I also survived with an Iteron Mark IV with lots of warp core stabilisers and lots of shield.  This does not mean that I desire to stick my head into a noose.  If I am not there, I can't be shot at.  I prefer to avoid camped gates.

One of the fears I have is that a couple of dreadnoughts would come and re-arrange the furniture; deciding to take out my customs offices and put up their own.  It happened in the system next door; I had purchased the mats for a customs office, and had organised with someone to take out the NPC station.  Then infrastructure started being re-inforced all over the place.  I have a web of blue (I talk to anyone and everyone), and players would come for 'the good fight', but I have very little desire to have one.  A good fight is where you you win by a small margin.  I would prefer to win by a very large margin; or avoid the fight altogether.  I also have nothing resembling 'twitch' reflexes.  And no-one deliberately turns up to be roflstomped - well not in expensive ships anyway.

I however have visited a class 2 wormhole with a low security static.  I lack the resources, character skills and player skills to properly exploit this wormhole.  Umm.  That has never stopped me.  I also should not have been in and out of lowsec in a t1 industrial either, putting up customs offices that I would be ... hard pressed to defend.

In the wormhole I have a basic frigate with a probe launcher and a cloak.  I also (now) know how to tell the difference between a sleeper site and a wormhole entrance.  One of these has ships that makes rookie ships go boom; the other one only might have ships.

The wormhole is largely untouched; an abandoned POS; a couple of (cheapish) player customs offices, and a (nearly) full set of planets.

There are a couple of other players that are interested in the wormhole, and we have plans of moving in.  We are gonna real soon now.  Honest.  As soon as I have the courage.  And these orders sell to free up isk.


Customs offices, command centers, control towers, structures, boats, probes, fuel, alts, blueprints.  I know we will forget something, and that the wormhole will collapse several times before I get what I want in there.  Logistics will be a pain.

The other great thing about a class 2 wormhole?  There is a maximum size of ship I need to worry about.  While a few unfriendly battleships can certainly turn up and ruin my day; my chances of defending infrastructure against a battleship or 3 are far better than my chances against a pair of dreadnoughts.

This sums up my upcoming WH move. 

So you sit in your camp and you stare at the fire
The doubt drops away as the hopes get higher
And you sing to yourself
It’ll be all right in the long run

And the sun gives ground to a long cold night
And you screw up your courage for another fight
But you know in your heart
It’ll be all right in the long run
After all; whats the worst that can happen?

Lo Sec PI

As some may be aware; I am a large fan of low security PI; but it does come at cost.

The benefits are the potential for significantly reduced tax rates as well as better resource extraction.  I have access to 4 Player owned customs offices (poco) at 2% tax; two of which are mine and two are an alliance member's.

I pay tax on my own poco simply to assist with accounting and keeping track of roughly what I am saving via owning some, and answering an important question.  Is it better to own my own?  Is it better to negotiate with others for cheap access?

There are some local hunters who also use my Poco's;  They regularly sweep the area, keeping undesirables on their toes; and I provide cheap access in return.

However, I have lost a lot of ships.  An Iteron was never designed as a low security hauler.  It is in fact spectacularly bad at it.

I started a second account; and had an empty basic t1 hauler scout with a toon that had no implants, acting as bait ahead of my real hauler.  I was too predictable; and unfriendly hunter sitting cloaked on gate took out my second ship. Yes I did see that he was in local, but assumed he was too far away.  He also has a scout alt in the preceding system.

I talk to anyone and everyone.  There was another hunter who I thought was friendly without confirming it, who turned out not to be.  That said; talking still works.  I then asked the hunter what it would take to be blue.  He has a dislike of pure industrialists. In return for being mostly left alone, I put together an Atron tackling ship; and now just need to work out when is a good time to go on a roam.  I have no intention of crapping in my own back yard.  I also want to learn how a hunter on a roam works; in order to better defend against it.  Going on a couple of roam turns theoretical into practical knowledge.   For me this is win/win.  Hopefully this weekend.

What is currently working for low security planetary interaction:

• Keep your friends close.  Talk to the locals.  Make new friends.
• Keep your enemies closer.  Talk to the locals after you have been killed.  Put them on your watch list.
• Some hunters and hunted alike will deliberately stay logged in; so you can not tell when they are active.
• A scout ship tells you at least who is in local.  An empty industrial ship makes great bait. It however is not foolproof.
• Immediately after downtime is a good time to shift product.  Anyone on is active and not AFK.  (one of the few advantages of my timezone in Eve).
• There are more hunters on the weekend than during the week.  Local fills up with hunters on Saturday and Sunday.
• Warp stabilisers are the best 'tank' on an Iteron.  The only time I have escaped with an Iteron intact is when I had more stabilisation than they had disruptors.  
• Yes I know that heavy interdictors can lock me regardless, but I am yet to see one.
• The time you spend at a poco is only for loading and unloading the customs office.  Warp to a 'Random' Safe Spot and cloak to shift goods between planet and customs office.  Once goods are on planet, then you can sit in a station or in hisec and re-do your planet.

What will be nice is that I am about to finish training on a cloaky hauler.

A trading game

Lately in Eve, I have been playing with my first blue prints - fuel blocks for POS.  I already have a bit to do  with planetary interaction (forming a significant input of POS fuel), and it seemed a natural extension.

I play Eve a little different to many (most?) around me.   I have not yet been an initiator in ship based PVP (though I do plan to be).  I don't mission for ISK (but will for standing).


I also have been a little quiet on Eve lately; using up my post count* on WoW. 
Some bloggers are relatively prolific writers; churning out 5 posts / week.  Over the last 3 years, I have averaged about 2 posts/week, but write as the inspiration takes me. With what will be 14 posts published in 16 days, written over about 3 weeks, I didn't have time to make any Eve posts.

It was good to look at again WoW, but the series made me realise that I like crafting games.  I played Capitalism Plus,  Civilization in several incarnations (almost always as a manufacturer), Sim City; basically, any game where I could assemble and manufacture an empire.

I found myself playing WoW in the same way.  But WoW's designers have specifically stated that they don't want you sitting outside an auction house looking for bargains, but would rather you were out in the world farming your own mats.  I was already suffering from a little burnout; and that comment certainly didn't help.

I realised how much I wanted a crafting game, and then realised I already was playing one

1 ISK/1Copper undercutting and high frequency trading

One trading style is frequent, very small undercutting for buy orders (0.1 ISK in Eve, 0.1 Copper in WoW), and it's equivalent 'overcut' for Eve sell orders.

There are traders who do this and are traditionally tied to their auction house, and swear by the method.  I dislike it; but accept that it happens.  (Losec ganking happens too - it doesn't stop me from going to low security systems though).  I do have a variation (below) that I am comfortable with.


If you are curious about small over/undercutting; it is worth looking at how the professionals do it in first life.  It is called High Frequency Trading.

This article at slashdot has some 'interesting' discussion and links, largely negative.

If you are interested in this approach, It is worth reading this Wikipedia article for a less emotional (hysterical?) article on the topic.

From the Wikipedia article:
High-frequency trading (HFT) is the use of sophisticated technological tools to trade securities like stocks or options, and is typically characterized by several distinguishing features:

• It is highly quantitative, employing computerized algorithms to analyze incoming market data and implement proprietary trading strategies;
• An investment position is held only for very brief periods of time - from seconds to hours - and rapidly trades into and out of those positions, sometimes thousands or tens of thousands of times a day;
• At the end of a trading day there is no net investment position;
• It is mostly employed by proprietary firms or on proprietary trading desks in larger, diversified firms;
• It is very sensitive to the processing speed of markets and of their own access to the market;
• Many high-frequency traders provide liquidity and price discovery to the markets through market-making and arbitrage trading; high-frequency traders also take liquidity to manage risk or lock in profits.

In online games; there is a slightly simpler approach because the games (claim to) 'protect' you from some automation. 

• Find a product that you know is bought and sold regularly
• Your chosen product should have a buy/sell difference greater than your market costs (buy brokerage, sell brokerage, sales tax)
• Reduce your costs by learning accounting and grinding both faction and corporation standing.
• Place your bid orders so you get the product.
• When your buys are fulfilled, set a sell price so it sells quickly.  A low time to sell is as (or more) important as a high sale price.

Extraction PI with screenshots

This post on a basic PI extraction planet with one stage of processing.  It has lots of pictures; and hopefully less walls of text.  The character that I did this on had Command Center Upgrades 3; Planetology 3.

Other players have created youtube videos; and Eve Uni has a mix of out of date and current information.  I am not much for videos; preferring something static to review later.

Some pictures are overly optimised to reduce page loading time (i.e. it looks much nicer in game).  You can also click on any picture to show a larger image (reducing eystrain, stress, and possibly being podkilled while trying to read miniscule writing).

Select the planet, then "View in Planet Mode".  One way to do this is via the overview but there are other ways of viewing the planet.

 This brings up your planet that you can star to do things with.

Initially we are going to scan the planet (1); choose base metals (2) and 'tweak' the slider (3).  The slider can be adjusted from both the right hand side (maximum resources) and the left hand side (minimum resources)

You want a good range of colours on your planet view; white is maximum; blue/back is minimum.  I like to adjust the slider until I see variations of red on my planet.

This image has the 'maximum' slider set too low; and I have lost the ability to see resource density in a sea of white.

Similarly, this image has the 'maximum' slider set too high; I can see that there is some resource but the detail is lost in a sea of green.

I may decide to swap my extraction to another resource; so in this image chose a possible second resource to extract

Finally putting my command center down somewhere between these two resources.  Note it is not necessary to have your command center anywhere near your extractors, factories or launchpads.  I like to because there have been times I have mismanaged on planet storage and it gives me just a little 'wriggle room'.  Not much, but enough to justify a link.

The other reason to put your command center somewhere near your usable buildings is that when you first open your planet, it centers on your command center.

Other authors have not cared either way.

After you have placed your command center - click "submit" PI.  Changes are not 'permanent' until submitted.

 I chose that small back dot just up and right of the red eye on the center of the screen.

 The first thing to do is upgrade your command center.  While it theoretically is possible to do PI with a basic command center; you are incredibly restricted in what you can do.  Choose the left hand circle with the plus.

Upgrade your command center to the best you can for maximum flexibility.  This character has Command Center 3 so can upgrade to a level 4 command center.

Place your Extractor Control unit.  Notice the darker circle.  This defines the area your extractors can reach.

Choose the resource you want to extract from the top right of the popup form.  Click on the left hand side radio buttons to turn on the number of extraction heads you want;  The more heads means the more extracted but the more power consumed.

I like to max out the extractors 'heads' for an extractor. This is part of the reason for upgrading our command center above.

If anything is controversial so far - it is the number of heads to put on an extractor.  For the purposes of this guide I am recommending maximum extraction possible my chosen resource.  Conventional wisdom will have you extracting less and doing additional processing.  I will discuss this further in later posts.
 

As you can see from the power usage above; I have used up a significant portion of the command center's power with these 10 heads, but not much CPU.

Choose how long you wish to leave your PI planet unattended for, by sliding the 'Extraction area size' on the bottom left of the popup control.

Your extraction is generally most efficient for the first few time segments, and falls off over time;  However many players don't like to be tied to their PI.  You will also notice that the 'heads' get bigger the longer the timeframe meaning that you can't get as many into the best spots.

The time can be be as little as 1 hour; as much as 14 days. I have chosen a week in this installation.

Note the current time, and the cycle time;  for my example above it is 2 hours;  for a default maximum extraction time of 2 hours; it is 15 minutes.  In a couple of steps time; I will tell you to have a cup of coffee, or go mission/shoot something/participate in first life for this duration.

 

Next, I have put down a (optional for many worlds) storage facility and sufficient basic factories and a launchpad.  In low or null, you may need to upgrade the link to the storage unit so I keep this link as short as possible.

At some stage you may want to move your extraction head (actually deleting it and putting a new one up).

In high security systems; the first storage facility is optional, and you could pipe both raw and finished product through a lauchpad.  I find it easier to see what is happening at a glance.  In null, a close storage unit is almost required.

Once you have your extractors working, route the output to a storage unit or launchpad.  click on the circle with two arrows (2nd from the left); choose the item, and the storage/lauchpad you want to send the output (and yes; I took the screenshots slightly out of sequence)

To work out how many basic factories we need, look at the extractor head details again, and note how many units you will extract in what time; in this instance just under 1,600,000 units in 7 days.

Acknowledging a higher extraction / hour at the start rather than at the end; we still want to process the entire amount.

A single basic factory processes 3,000 units every 1/2 hour; (6,000 units/hour becomes 144,000 units/day; becomes 1,008,000 units/week).  So for this extractor setup on this planet, I want 2 basic factories.  This leaves me a small amount of basic factory capacity, but I prefer this to a slow build up of  raw material.

Other planets will require significantly more basic factories.

Chose the schematic.

As this planet is only processing once, route the output to a launchpad.

Remember above that I told you that you would need a break?  Now is the time for that break  You need some raw material in your storage facility and that will not happen until your first extraction cycle completes.  Once your storage holds a few units of raw items, route these to your basic factories.

After all of this was finished; I still had nearly 25% of Power and lots of CPU left;  This planet probably could have one Command Center upgrade less, but I will consume that in another post.

Go away for hours, days or 2 weeks - depending on how long

Finally - you need to take the stuff from your launchpad and haul it to a market.  Lauchpads can hold 10,000 m3. Update Epithal is the preferred PI hauler.  A deep space transport is also suitable.

Go to the system and access your customs office.  You can be anywhere in space and cloaked if you want.

Move stuff from right hand side to left hand side; wince if you are paying lots of tax. (apparently I harp a lot about PI tax)

 

Go to your customs office (if you are not already there); and drag your loot from the customs office and onto your ship.

And finally; haul it to your selling station.

2M isn't a whole lot - especially after paying 1/4 in high sec taxes.  It is low stress and can be 'when you get around to it'. 

However this is PI basics, this post has extracted raw mats and processed once; There are potentially another 3 levels of processing to do.

Minor updates 1 Sept 2015. Use an Epithal plus a few typo corrections.

Basic Extraction based PI - Intro

This is the first of a series of posts, with what I recommend as the smallest skillset to do PI profitably.  There other things you can (and probably should) do, but it's the basics of raw extraction and one level of processing; in both High and Low Security systems.

TL; DR:

• Learn Remote Sensing 1; Command Center Upgrades 2
• Choose a planet (with a customs office)
• Buy a command center from the market suitable to your planet. 
• Haul command center to system with planet (1000 m3 storage required).
• View planet in planet mode
• Build an extractor, upgrade it; build some basic factories and a  launchpad
• Extract something; 
• Process it once
• Launch it to your customs office
• Haul processed materials from customs office to whatever market you want to sell it at.
• Sell it, Profit

This post walks through:

• Looking for something to sell; 
• A brief explanation of export tax; 
• Some differences between losec and highsec;

Future posts will walk through:

• Required skills; 
• Finding a planet;
• What to buy; 
• What to build;
• How to export;

Looking for something to sell

First of all; lets look at the market for raw extraction and first level processed items.  Open your market browser  and look for Manufacture & Research; Materials; Planetary Materials; Raw Materials.

PI Raw items

150 units of Raw Material are converted to 1 unit of Processed Material (in 'batches' of 3000 raw units to 20 processed units).

Processed Mats

I like to extract what is profitable; on the planets that I have access to;  Some players have an end product in mind; and will build to that.  Three things to consider.

• Market prices; as a general guide the higher the price something sells for; the better.
• Resource availability; high prices are often caused by low availability.
• Taxes.  Export taxes make or break whether what you do is profitable.  A so called 10% export tax applies on high security customs offices; 17% (uggh) on NPC lossec customs offices, and whatever the owning corp wants to set it at for player owned customs offices (adjustable based on standing)

Against my better judgment, I am going to point out some possible items to sell.  They are right for me where I am as of writing this post.  I can not stress enough; do your own pricing for 'where' and 'when' you are.  I don't mean just Jita pricing from two months ago.  I will talk more about pricing later; but for the time being; you can just look at the in game market groups - by clicking on the items group (i.e. 'Processed Materials' in the above image) and ensuring that groups are selected.

A look at PI taxes

In High security systems; chose high market prices over high availability ; at "10% tax" Raw material has an export tax of 0.5 ISK/unit ; and Processed Materials have an export tax of 50 ISK/unit; paid when lifted off planet into the customs office.  Many high availability resources sell for around those prices so chose low availability high profit items instead.  For 10% customs offices I would recommend working towards (after export tax) 400 ISK/unit items (eg Electrolytes) instead of 5 ISK/unit items (eg Biofuels)

If you look hard enough; you can find lower taxing systems.  Some (including those that I belong to) corporations and alliances offer this (yes we are recruiting).  Even some pirate corps offer both protection and systems with cheap customs offices (eg Basgerin and their pirates). On a 3% tax customs office; you are only paying 0.15 ISK/unit for Raw and 15 ISK/unit for Processed material; making a huge difference to profit margins. 


For another example:

You will need to do your own sums; but if you have a low tax customs office; you can profitably chose a middle priced abundant resource to extract and process.  For example, if you have 4 times the availability of toxic metals or water vs the previous screenshot of biomass; with tax being far less important; you may choose the easier to extract item.

As a crude measure of profit when doing extraction and one level of processing; profit = (sale price - export tax) * units processed.  Chose a mix of higher sale price, lower tax and higher availability of raw material.

Security

The lower the security of a system; the better the resource availability (at least until those pesky players drain a planet dry);  There are better resources in 0.5 than 1.0; 0.1 than 0.4; so whatever your preference (High security; Low security or Null) lower has better resources than higher.

Of course low and especially null have ... players that would like to be acquainted with the inside of your ship and pod, and have the can opener to find it.  My experience on null is mostly from reading but I did see a couple of null sec planets and liked what I saw; at least until I tripped on that can opener.

To be continued.

Hisec PI a mugs game but not why you think

There are problems with these two Hisec pictures.

Hisec Barren resources

Hisec PI Customs Tax is 10%

This Losec (0.3) Picture is much better. 

Lowsec Barren resources

However, even this tells only part of the picture: I am only paying 2% tax; something that is not achievable in hisec.


For today's discussion;

• Total profit = (Unit sale price - Unit cost) * number of units; ignoring any other factors (including transport, equipment, piracy, processing)
• Unit sale price is set as the average of lowest sell and highest buy of raw material prices (to keep things simple).  Pricing is a little old and a spot price i.e. subject to change.
• Unit cost is set by the tax rate (10% in Hisec; 2% in my Losec Planet); and 
• Number of units is set by resource availability (crudely measured with a tape held up to the screen)

Each point above could have a post about it's correct treatment (eg. I rarely sell raw mats), but too keep the wordcount down; it will do

Profit after tax for Hisec Barren Planet

1.0sec	Volume	Ave Price	profit after 10% tax
Aqueous Liquids	6	1.45	5.70
Base Metals	9	1.10	5.40
Carbon compound	10	1.15	6.45
Micro Organisms	10	0.34	-1.65
Noble metal	3	2.82	6.96
		1.37	4.57

The exact amount you extract does not matter for this argument (whether you use all or some extractor heads; whether you extract for 1 hour or 14 days); the numbers still 'wash up''; all I am looking at is the proportions and prices of items.

As you can see, on this planet in hisec, on these prices, the biggest profit is from the difficult to extract Noble Metal; followed by the easy to extract, middle priced Carbon Compound.  It is unlikely that I will be extracting and selling Micro-organisms.

Profit after tax for Lowsec Barren Planet with various tax rates

0.3 sec	Volume	Ave Price	17%	10%	6%	2%	0%
Aqueous Liquids	9	1.45	5.40	8.55	10.35	12.15	13.05
Base Metals	17	1.10	4.25	10.20	13.60	17.00	18.70
Carbon compound	19	1.15	5.61	12.26	16.06	19.86	21.76
Micro Organisms	17	0.34	-8.76	-2.81	0.60	4.00	5.70
Noble metal	9	2.82	17.73	20.88	22.68	24.48	25.38
average	14.2	1.37	4.85	9.82	12.66	15.50	16.92

This is a table of profits for the same items of a lowsec planet.

As you can see, at a 10% tax rate; Losec Micro Organisms are still a loss; and Noble Metals still has the best return nearly twice as good as it's nearest competitor.

In fact; at these prices; Noble Metals has the best return at any tax rate; hardest to extract but the higher price more than makes up for it.

That said; as the tax rate goes down, the gap shrinks; from about a 40% 'lead' to a 15% lead for Noble Metals over Carbon Compounds.

Finally, where tax makes a huge difference is on pure manufacture worlds.  For example I am making Integrity Response Drones on a low tax planet.  Ignoring direct component costs, and looking only at the tax rates involved.

Tech Level	Total	taxable value	10%	6%	2%	0%
P1 (import)	1,280	500	32,000	19,200	6,400	0
P2 (import)	40	9,000	18,000	10,800	3,600	0
P3 (import)	6	70,000	21,000	12,600	4,200	0
P4 (export)	1	1,350,000	135,000	81,000	27,000	0
Total			206,000	123,600	41,200	0

Import taxes are 1/2 that of export taxes.  As you can see; when I had my 10% highsec manufacturing planet; I was paying roughly 200K/drone in up front PI taxes; No that I have access to low tax words; this is reduced to roughly 40K/drone.

While losec planets and customs offices are in abundance; Low tax Player Owned Customs Offices (POCO) are in relatively short supply.  However, if you intend to seriously do Planetary Interaction; then organizing access to a cheaply taxed POCO is an important consideration. 

Interbus does not mind losing their NPC CO's, and at very roughly 100M Isk, they are easy enough to put up.