) Manufacturing in Eve Online has been something I've stayed away from for most of the years I've played the game. I, however, decided a couple of months ago to start tossing ISK at it. I knew it would require a lot of planning and time to pull things off.
Industry in Eve Online, in general, can be a great way to lose ISK or earn less ISK than you could of. That is because for a lot of players, just selling the raw materials that go into making items would have gotten them a better price.
That is kind of crazy to think about. Many people view manufacturing items in most games to be seen as a value add. The issue is that manufacturing in Eve Online is a war of one percent. Where the profit margins can be so razor-thin unless you find somewhere to cut 1% here, 1% there, and so on. It’s not going to go well for you.
The other issue is timing. As prices and raw materials fluctuate in price. What could be a 30% profit margin the day you start manufacturing an item could be 5% loss by the time you get it to market.
There are also a lot of people in Eve Online who just enjoy the industry side of the game. While sure, they would have been better off just selling the raw resources. They just enjoy making items and seeing their wallet flash with hundreds to thousands of sales a day of stuff they have made.
This is also one of those things you can easily try to go too fast in and just lose your behind. That is why my own goal is not really to get into making tech 2 or 3 items. While those items show massive profits when you check them out on various out-of-game calculators. Once you add in the actual costs not included, and the massive complexity of making those items. Shockingly, anyone is even doing it.
To ensure I don’t go overboard, I ended up setting some ground rules. While you can go out and just buy blueprints that other players have researched. I wanted to do all my research.
Many even go out and just make money only doing researching blueprints. Depending on supply and demand. Along with the skills you have trained. It can be a decent way to make a bunch of ISK, not doing much at all.
) Blueprints in Eve Online can be improved with material efficiency and time efficiency. You can reduce the overall cost of making an item by up to 10% and make it 20% faster to craft. It can, however, take a single blueprint day, weeks, or even months to fully research.
This process also costs you ISK. Those who are doing this in Null Sec, Wormhole space, or at their stations. Will have an advantage over those who are just doing it close to a trade hub in high sec.
Not to mention the cost and time of acquiring the blueprints to research as well. On the lower end, you could be spending a million or more ISK on a single blueprint. On the higher end, hundreds of millions. All before you do any research on them.
This is also where the war of one percent starts to come into play. The closer you are to a major trade hub, the easier it could become to get things to market. There are also higher costs using more active stations than less busy areas of the game.
There is a bit of a tradeoff between having to haul items, risk of getting ganked, price competition, inventory turnover, and so on. If you are some massive industrialists, it is all about inventory turnover. I am, however, just on the small side of things, so I get my advantages that the big guys won’t waste their time on.
) I’m in a rather odd area. It’s cheap to manufacture items and research blueprints, as there are not that many doing so. So, depending on other locations I could have set up at. I’m saving between 3.71% to 12.42% on manufacturing and other industry tasks.
That right there is enough to take a lot of blueprints that would be a loss for many to now be profitable. That still requires the blueprint to have 10% material efficiency. Where I could then have a 1-20% profit margin, depending on the item, if there was any profit to be had.
) Expect since I'm just a small time. I also wanted a location I could sell at. Thankfully for me, a lot of stuff I can charge 1-50% higher than Jita prices. The issue is inventory turnover. While I could get a lot more profit, it could also take months to move the same amount of inventory as I could for cheaper in a single day at a major trade hub.
You can see that a lot of the sales I get are rather small. There can be days when I'm not getting any sales at all. Then there are days when I have 200 million in sales (usually the weekend). This, by any means, is not a lot. I am, however, still quite early into my manufacturing days in Eve Online.
Early on, a big focus was just on making what I consider to be quality-of-life items. Those things are like shuttles, containers, and even certain types of ammo if they are profitable. People tend not to want to go to their nearest major trade hub if it’s just a little more to get it a couple of jumps out instead.
) I’m also still farming most of my materials to craft items with. Even some of the things I'm making, if I don’t get a sale, I could end up using them at some point myself. Granted, that is not for every item I'm making.
This also kind of ensures that if I don’t sell an item for the price, I need to make a profit. I’m not fully losing ISK on the item. I’m just making less than I could have gotten if I had sold the raw resources instead. Thankfully, that situations have not come up yet.
My little operations have also started to grow to the point. I'm starting to have a certain raw material bottleneck in my ability to get those resources. I am operating for the time being out of high sec, so that tends to be an issue. At some point, to expand, I'll have to start buying raw materials.
) I now have over 40 fully researched blueprints. I have also started to shift from just making quality of life items to having full setups for a ship. Slowly turning my own little space into quite a tiny little hub for people to shop at.
I’ll go out and research populator ship fittings for the smaller ships that use tier 1 modules. Then I'll run through and see how much, if any, profit could be made making the ship and all its fittings.
Final Thoughts
) My little manufacturing operations will take many years and hundreds of billions of ISK to get fully off the ground. It’s kind of why I've stayed away from manufacturing in Eve Online. I’m, however, at a point where I wanted to see how far I could take things. So far, the profits have not been great, but I'm also not so into the negative either, where I feel like I'm not making any headway.
It’s also kind of nice when I don’t have a lot of time to play Eve during a certain month. I can still log in and have something going on. Granted, as you can see above, it’s not been a lot over the past 30 days either.
Information
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Eve Online.