So I just started playing the game again after a six year hiatus, and have been sucked back in! As a former budding industrialist/enthusiast, I’m looking to “reboot” my alt to get some cash flow going. I wanted to coalesce my thoughts somewhat, set some goals, and lay things out in writing to help steer myself in a direction that will hopefully keep me on track, so why not do it on a forum where other Unistas can hopefully learn from my triumphs/failures, and I can get some input from more seasoned individuals? Not sure if I have the time(or there’s interest) to do a post a week, but I will aim for at least biweekly.
A little about my characters:
So I have 3 alts that deal in industry: my “main” alt is Jadot Calumet. His focus is mainly production/invention, but he’s also a hauler, and trader. When I was last playing the game he used a couple of PoS’ set up in Stacmon and Blameston to ply his trade with a dummy corporation. He started out making guns and ammo, and moved toward T2 ship production with a focus on T2 Cruisers(mainly Logistics Ships). He was gearing up to move shop into a wormhole(my “main” Southpaw Hardin was in a WH corp) and start training to T3C/cap production when I stopped playing.
My other two characters are station traders. One is a buyer in Jita, who also occasionally sells things I’m looking to dump/flip quickly, and the other is a seller that I position near “opportunity hubs”.
Goals:
So my primary goal is to raise enough money to purchase an Anshar. Jadot is trained for it, but I don’t have the cash currently to comfortably purchase and fly it. I also don’t know how! So, the goal is to net roughly 15-20 billion isk. This probably isn’t considered a lot to most people in game nowadays, but I am rather cash poor at the moment so it’s going to be a somewhat difficult task.
The second, and much further goal, is to produce one. I have the skills to do it currently, but I’d like to build it from the bottom up: this means gathering up all of the necessary blueprints required to build all of the components(and research them if I can’t procure them on the market), and set up a supply chain to spit them out. This task is somewhat monumental, and possibly unachievable, but we’ll see what the months ahead bring.
Now that we have that out of the way, lets get to work!
Current sales this week:
Snapshots of itemized sales for the week
So I’m looking to net between 550k-750k per hour per job slot. I have 11 job slots, so that’s roughly 6-8 mill an hour, which equates to roughly 1-1.35 billion a week in profit. Some of these products don’t currently fall into that category(the ammo), but I had a GLUT of these blueprints so decided to run all of them off to get started. Southpaw dabbles in faction warfare currently(I like solo frig combat), so I also picked up some Faction ship BPs that were good isk to LP(over 1k).
Enyos were profitable, netting me about 630k isk/hour. I guess the incursus is a ship that is given out to new accounts, because they currently trade at roughly 30% below production costs(rip my 10/20 incursus blueprint). I was able to get the crystalline carbonide armor plates and photon microprocessors at a very reasonable price, and with those profits purchased those fully researched bpo’s(38mill total) so I can manufacture them for future runs on Gallente ships. The prices on these are starting to head towards 30 million, so I don’t see myself building any more for the next couple weeks unless something changes. There are more profitable ship opportunities out there.
Small transverse bulkheads were another good profit this week, and I wish I could have gotten some more out but had some bad luck with invention. It’s the most popular rig in faction warfare as far as I can tell, so there’s always going to be good demand here, but probably not at the isk/hr I got(about 575k). I’ll probably pump a few more of these out and then move on to something else.
Ammo, ammo, ammo. When you’re just getting into industry and invention, this is your friend. There’s a lot of variety, and a huge demand. There’s always an ammo type available that’ll get you 350-450k an hour, you just gotta find it and not overproduce it. I got lucky the past couple of weeks with hail. There was a cartel looking to corner it in Dodixie and I sold about a million rounds into them at between 100-116 a round. The beginning of this week was the tail end of that, and prices are starting to reset on this product. Unfortunately there wasn’t much profit to be had in the M market, and I don’t have the L blueprints so missed some opportunities there. I personally don’t make missiles or beams, but there's a good opportunity here so I might look to picking up these BPOs over the coming weeks.
Had a ton of Neutron blaster ii BPs(roughly 120…not sure why lol) and they’re profitable so I’m ran the crap out of these and will continue to. As long as the price stays above 835k I’ll be making at least 500k isk/hr, and any remaining materials I’m going to put into Ion/Electron Blaster if the price starts to dip below that. I’m also trying to get Blaster Cannon BPs invented as the isk/hr on those are very good right now but I might miss that opportunity by the time I get them out. This is important to point out too for new industrialists. Look for products that share similar inputs and diversify your outputs, even if the isk/hr isn’t as good. As supply spikes on the output of one item(causing the price to drop), and the input materials rise in price, those other items are going to go up in price. You’re seeing this now with blasters: as light neutrons are currently falling, ion and electron seem to be trending upward.
Federal Defense Union LP is currently trading at about 800isk/lp. As you can almost always get 1k isk/lp profit on fed antimatter S, this is a good way to make profit, and fill any gaps in your Production job slots. Beginning of the week I ran comets at ~1100isk/lp, and as that market trended downward converted to Brutix Navy Issues at ~1200isk/lp. Another good LP market is Concord(Incursion LP). I haven’t looked into it since I got back, but when Southpaw was doing incursions back in the day I could make roughly 1500isk/lp. Since it’s trading currently at between 1200-1400 I’m guessing the margins are roughly the same.
Supply Chain Woes:
I love to haul, but it’s time consuming. I can’t always make it to Jita to pick up raw materials, so you need to hire haulers. I’ve been doing 400-500 mil collateral contracts @ 10-12 million payout, and getting the products within a day. That’s roughly 30-40% below PushX rate which is reasonable considering the turnaround time.
I’ve done an extremely poor job at managing input/output costs. My buy orders get fulfilled faster than I’ve expected, which isn’t exactly a bad thing but since I have so little cash on hand I’ve been getting into some crunches where opportunities have been potentially missed on other more exotic raw material investments.
I also REALLY need to start thinking about reactions. I’ve yet to do any of this, but a lot has changed since I last played revolving around this skill and need to do some studying/skilling around it. I’m missing huge profit here.
Brokers fees have changed for the worse. Even with maxed out broker skills I’m losing .8-1% profit every time I modify an order. No idea how day traders are getting rich anymore, unless they’re only flipping items with ridiculous margins, unless I’m missing something…?
Conclusion
So this is a pretty good start. A T2 ship, some T2 products and some LP conversion at a reasonable profit margin to reinvest in some products that will net me more isk/hr. The next post(if there is one) will be more invention/copy/research focused, as I'm trying to spit out some product diversity in a more consistent fashion. I'll probably also have a more permanent off-the-beaten-path trading location outside of the Major hubs, so I'll go into that more than likely as well and see if that can stick. Thanks for reading!
