Portfolio Tracker:
JEveAssets never ceases to amaze. I didn’t realize you could filter out assets not only by character, but by location as well. I was able to freeze out most of my crap and focus only on items revolving around industry for the most part. I still have some items I’m going to move out of this graph to clean it up a bit better, but this is a pretty good start. Over time it’ll hopefully give a clearer picture of what’s going on. So let’s take a look at a graph and see how we’re actually doing.
Total Assets Start: 9,505,270,248.78
Total Assets End: 10,412,374,298.17
Wallet Balance: 1,799,042,233.38
Asset Balance: 7,693,094,861.59
Manufacturing Jobs Value: 327,453,500.00
Sell Orders: 576,882,923.20
Buy Orders: 15,900,780.00
Total Asset Growth: 907,104,049.40
Normalized isk/hr per job slot: 343,600.02
Roughly five billion of these assets are in ships: Hobbes the Freighter, mining barges, blockade runners, a DST and some other blingy ships I putt around in. The rest are in manufacturing/invention assets, BPOs, finished goods and buy orders. Since the ships are static capital investments unless they get blown up, I should be able to show asset growth/loss with some consistency even if it’s inflated a bit. I’ve thought about liquidating some of this, but it feels like cheating at this point; akin to just taking Southpaw’s assets and using them to pad the wallet. What fun is that? I’ll grind the iskies out through the power of marginal production instead!
There are some strange dips and peaks in my assets: I updated the tracker a couple of times while hauling goods in space, and JEve doesn’t see them: they “disappeared” from the tracker. In the future I’ll avoid updating during these times. I also did a haul for Southpaw to Zarzakh, which accounts for the asset spike/dip on 2/18. Makes the asset graph look a little ugly with that crazy zigzag, but not much I can do about that now.
I’m going to list a bunch of items with flashy isk per hour earnings later in the post, some in the millions, but it’s immaterial if I can’t keep job slots full. My benchmark was 550-750k an hour per slot, but I’m falling well short of that due to work and short run times on many of these items. Moving forward, I need to target items that run longer to improve my current benchmark of 343k per hour. I’ve remarked on this the past couple of posts, but haven’t acted on my own sound advice!
The advice will earnestly be followed going forward. There are a glut of T2 ships that I’ve been avoiding because of the low earnings per hour. Even marginal earnings(say 150-300k/hr) that avoid dormancy are better than nothing. I should have kept running Hounds last week at 250k/hr instead of pulling production on them as it would have bumped that isk/hr number up significantly. There are a large variety of T2 ships that fit this marker, so I’m going to have to get to work inventing them!
In a perfect world, I’ll run long ship jobs on work days at lower returns and shorter run items on my days off for higher returns. That means inventions of guns/rigs/ammo should fall on work days, and ship inventions the rest of the time. This should also smooth out my invention bottleneck, but require a bit more market study if I have to forecast what to build a week or so out. Sounds like a plan in motion though, using an ugly graph. We might be learning something!
Making Bank off of Piracy
Southpaw joined the Guristas this past week. While I haven’t had much time to farm sites, whoo baby it was profitable when I did. Worms converted at 3600isk/LP! This is an absurdly high rate of return on such a simple item to purchase(4k LP + 2 mill for the blueprint). The LP is being bought/sold at 1500isk/LP on Guristas Discord channels! Another thing of note is that this frigate hit the Oz Report this past week for Underpriced items(at or near 52 week lows), which is just crazy in my humble opinion. The price is going to continue to fall, right? Since he spoke of it, in reality more will be produced so I possibly hit peak LP conversion for these going forward which makes me all tingly inside. It also saddens me that I didn’t become a pirate a month ago. Southpaw made about 750k GalMil LP or so before he left. If that had been Guri LP instead…
The most costly components for building this ship(and the other Guri ships) are the neurolink conduits, and it’s where I think the real money is. I nabbed a researched R-O Trigger Neurolink Conduit BPO at what I consider a steal at 190 mil. This earned me 2.9 mil/hr while I ran it(!). It pays for itself if I sell about 80 of them and I’m halfway to that mark already in a few days. There’s extremely high trade volume in Jita for these, and I expect that to continue moving forward. I’ve been using my reaction slots to make the Reaction-Orienting Neurolink Stabilizer and Axosomatic Neurolink Enhancer, which further piles on to my profit for this item. We’re utilizing the chain, baby!
Rigging the Market
Another big winner were Medium Explosive Shield Reinforcer ii’s. At roughly 1.1 million isk/hr, I wish I had run more. I stopped as the price dipped a bit on these, but it shot back up mid-week and has held that profit margin until today where it’s plummeted so I’m out of these officially for a bit. This is primarily a ratting/anomaly rig for afk Ishtars in Nullsec from what I can tell, so if you’re out roaming make sure to kill some for me to drive the profit margins back up! Small Transverse Bulkhead ii’s continue to hold strong at around 750k/hr, and hopefully that continues moving forward so I don’t have to go and find other rigs to manufacture.
High Slots for the Win
On top of Gallente guns, which have maintained their profit value of 600-900k/hr in various flavors of Light and Heavy, I added some projectile and missile weapons to the mix. Rapid light ii’s before the nerf were netting me about 900k/hr(at around 475k as of this writing), 280mm Howitzer Artillery at roughly 800k/hr, and Heavy Missile Launcher ii’s around 750k/hr. HAMs looked good as I was inventing them, but by the time I finished the profit margin plummeted to 475k/hr so I didn’t run those BPs. I sold a few 200mm Autocannon ii’s at a modest profit of 550k/hr when I saw howitzers dipping in price, but it was a mistake of sorts. Howitzers will probably rise in price due to the Firetail buff, which benefits Scram/Kite arty builds in Faction Warfare. I expect a bump upcoming so I kinda just wasted the materials on the Autocannons.
The Riddle of Steel Continued…
The mystery of 800mm Steel Plate i continues! Almost immediately after my last post the price plummeted to 800k on the T1 version, but shot back up to 1.4 mil midweek. I have no idea what is going on here, but I’ll keep selling the T1’s for 1.5-2 mil/hr profit and not complain. I did run off some of the T2s when the dip occurred(pulled my T1 order on what remained) and took a modest return there, but it was obviously a mistake if people are just going to pay that much for the T1 variant.
Putting Capital into Capitals
My first Capital component rolled off of the Production floor. I reacted the components to make 121 Capital Crystalline Carbon Armor Plates. There are only 3000 or so of these sold a week, and it’s usually all in one or two purchases so I don’t plan on making many more of these going forward. I’m just looking to pay for the researched BPO(which cost 98 million), which is gonna take a while at the clip they sell at. Only two ships use this component, the Anshar and the Hubris. There are only 3 lossmails for the Hubris the past 3 months, and 24 Anshars so I probably pissed away isk making these stupid things. If they do sell, it’ll be at about 2.8 mil/hr profit at current listing. If they don’t sell, I’ll put 'em toward the future Anshar. Speaking of which…
The Anshar Project
After some thought, I’m changing the final goal. I’m going to build the Anshar I take my first jump in. There’s really no reason not to. As long as I can break even on the thing I’ll be ecstatic. I’m very much enjoying the industry grind this project has taken me on. At the moment, I enjoy it more than I do flying around with Southpaw.
Jadot Calumet really isn’t my alt at all anymore, to be fair. I spend almost all of my time flying around to and fro in my haulers, making my deliveries and pickups. I stare at Donchians looking for buy value. Study trade volumes to find sell value. Calculators, spreadsheets, scratch sheets, cheat sheets, shopping lists. I feel like the It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia Charlie meme, 50,000 windows open looking for the 800mm steel plate conspirators(I’m gonna figure it out!!!). I think I spent more time mining than doing faction warfare this week, and I really don’t like mining!
There’ll be something poetic about building the Anshar from scratch, plugging my capsule into it, and getting it blown up as I bounce off a station my first jump. I mentioned in a chat with someone that I felt a bit like Don Quixote chasing a windmill pursuing this project, so I might as well fully commit to it. This is such a crummy way to make isk nowadays with all of the activities available to players, but it’s fun to me. That’s all that matters. Anshar Production or Bust!
ConclusionMiguel de Cervantes Saavedra wrote:When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
To end, I’d like to post a couple of Youtube playlists I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to and watching. One is somewhat old, of a gentleman that started the Guns ‘R Us Toy Company Corporation. You can find the playlist here: Building my Industrial Empire
The other is still ongoing. It’s a bootstrap challenge someone is undertaking, to build a Cynabal from scratch only using items he loots/produces himself. You can find his playlist here: Corvette to Cynabal Bootstrap Challenge
Both of these series have taught me a lot about some of the changes that have occurred over the years to industry that I needed to catch up on, and the game in general. Until next time!
