Life of a Scientist (Part 2)

In this second part of my research guide, I will put the mechanics explained in the last post into action and show you how to make some serious ISK by researching blueprints and selling these on the public contract market.

The general process how to do this can be divided into the following steps:

  • Find a good Engineering Complex (EC) to research in
  • Check contract prices for researched blueprints or copies
  • Research or copy blueprints which make a decent profit
  • Sell your researched BPOs or BPCs by the contract system

How to find a Structure

First step is to find a proper structure to do your research in. As explained in the last post, Engineering Complexes (ECs) have build in hull reductions for research time and costs, so these are usually the best options you have. To find an available EC, open your industry window (Alt + S) and select the Facilities tab. This tab lists all available locations to research and manufacture in within the selected range. Now you filter for Material Efficiency Research. This will now show only structures you can research ME and TE values in.

Next step is to sort the results by type, and look for Sotiyos and Azbels, which give the best bonuses for your research. If you hover over one of them in the list, you can check if they have research rigs fitted, which gives another big bonus to research speed.

This is how it will look like:

Searching for a good research Sotiyo or Azbel

Each system has also a system cost index, which will increase the cost of a research job. Costs for research job are in general not too big for blueprint other than capital ships and battleships/ battlecruisers. Even a month of research with high system costs index is rarely more than a 10 mill job cost.

Now its time to find one that has the biggest bonuses, least system cost index and is still close to Jita, which is where we will sell our final product.

Checking Blueprint the Market Prices

To figure out what blueprint to research, you need to check the contract system for blueprints that show a good price compared to the unresearched blueprint cost and the time required to research it. Most blueprint on the market will be sold with perfect ME and TE values, which are ME 10 and TE 20.

First thing you need to do, is to check how long it will take for the blueprint of your choice to research it to 10 / 20. You can get an estimate by clicking the View in Industry button on the item info dialog.

View in Industry button in the bottom

You will now see the Industry Window with the selected blueprint, select ME research and set the job run to 10. This will now show the research time without structure bonuses and only your skills and implants applied.

Industry Window froom Item Info

The time to research the TE value is always equal to the ME value for the same amount of runs. So for this Medium Shield Extender I above the research time would be 11 days and 8 hours for ME 10 und TE 20. This will be further reduced by the structure bonuses and rigs of your EC, which I will just assume sum up to around 50%, which reduces the research time riquired to around 6 days. To figure out the exact research time required, you would need to buy the BPO and use it in your selected EC, but for a first profitability calculation, this estimate is usually fine.

Next you open the Contracts Window and search for your blueprint in the Available Contracts tab. Use the Item Category filter and set it to Blueprint Original to filter out all other results. Now you will see all available researched blueprints.

BPOs on the Market in Jita

For BPOs that are very time consuming to research, you sometimes can get along with researching the TE value only to 18, which significantly reduces the research time.

In this example we could get 14,5 million ISK for the Medium Shield Extender I blueprint at max levels, which comes to a bit more than 2 million per day of research. Of course you need to subtract the cost of the blueprint itself, which is 125k ISK, and the cost of the research jobs from this price. For this example, both together are less than 500K ISK for the two jobs and the blueprint, which does not change the profit per day significantly.

Once you found a couple of good ones, you buy the unresearch originals either from NPC sellers or in Jita, haul them to the EC you picked as your research station and start the jobs.

You will now do this calculation for as many different blueprint as you would like to research and find some good ones with high ISK per day of research value. Usually 5 million per day profit on a BPO is quite a good profit, while a value less than 2 million per day is not recommended to research.

I highly recommend to research as many different ones at the same time as possible. The blueprint market is not very big and researching 20 blueprints of the same time can easily crash it for that BPO.

Selling by Contract

Once your research is completed, you haul your perfect BPOs to Jita and sell it on the contract market. At least 90% of all researched BPOs are sold there, so there is not much of a choice where to sell your product.

You open the contracts window again and search for your BPO and check the current price. If it is still ok, right click your BPO and select Create Contract.

In the contract wizard, you pick an Item Exchange Contract, put in a price that is a bit lower than the current one and select 4 weeks as the contract duration.

Researched BPO contract in Jita (ME 10 / TE 18)


After that, you just wait for your BPO to get sold, which can take a while for most BPOs. I have usually around 40 contracts on different characters up at any time and rarely sell more than one per day.

What’s the profit?

So what can you expect as a profit for researching BPOs? If you find about 20-30 good ones at any given time and sell these within a month, you can easily keep 30 research slots running at the same time on the three different characters of an account. Of course you have to put in the skill training on all accounts first, which can be 1-2 million SP per character depending on the skill levels you want. The more SP you spend, the more isk can you make by more slots and faster research times .

Lets say, in the best case we found 30 excellent BPOs, which make 5 million profit per day of research. This would make the following profit per character per month:
5 mill * 30 day * 10 research slots = 1,5 billion ISK per month per character

With three character running jobs, this comes to a stunning 4,5 billion ISK per month per account. If you only find BPOs that sell for 2 million per day, this is reduced to 1,8 billion per month per account, which still is enough to PLEX it easily.

So what is the ISK per hour value? If you spend 30 minutes every day to restart your jobs, buy and haul BPOs and find new ones to sell, this comes to between 120 and 300 million ISK per hour, which makes researching one of the very highly paid activities in the game. However, once you found good BPOs to research, the time required is even smaller, with only buying new ones, hauling them to your EC, restarting jobs and setting up contracts once every couple of days.

Of course you need the proper skills first on all characters and also a decent amount of ISK to get started. To buy enough BPOs to fill all research slots at all times and have another 40 BPOs on the market on contracts, you can easily spend at least a billion ISK on blueprints. If you aim for the higher value blueprints, like capital ships parts or capital ships, this can go up to 100 billion investment. The higher values ones also have longer research times and profit margins, so the actual time investment on your side is even smaller if you can get your hands on these.

I hope this explained the research profession good enough to get you started in your new career as a (mad) scientist!