In this first part of my new industry series, I want to show you how to produce small to medium T1 ships and T1 modules, which are Eve’s most basic items to build. This guide is not meant as a fully detailed explanation of all industry features but will just give you enough information to get started building stuff and making a profit.
T1 ships can be categorized into two categories: Small to medium ones (frigates, destroyers, cruisers and battlecruisers) and large to extra large ones (battleships and capitals). Large and extra large hulls need additional raw materials to build and will not be covered in this post but in a later one.
T1 modules are the most basic version of a module that do not have a meta level. All so called “named” versions of a module with a meta level can only be found in NPC wrecks and show a meta version in the item info. You can find the meta level of an item under the Attributes tab of the item details. If there is no meta level, it is a T1 item and the production is covered by this guide.
To build a ship or module you will need the necessary raw materials, a blueprint original or blueprint copy of the item you want to build, and a NPC or player owned station that has a factory module installed in it.
When you open the infos of a blueprint and switch to the industry tab, you will see the unmodified base time, required raw materials and skills to build it. All T1 items are very easy to build and mostly need the Industry skill to level one, which can be trained in a couple of minutes.
I covered the research of blueprints and production of blueprint copies in one of my previous posts already. If you haven’t read that one yet, now would be a good time to do it.
Raw Materials
T1 ships and modules only need the most basic raw materials to build, which are minerals. These are gathered in form of ore from asteroid belts and mining anomalies. By refining this raw ore you will end up with a selection of the seven most basic minerals.
I will not explain the process of refining ore in this post because this is a rather complicated topic. For the matter of this guide, I recommend to just buy the required minerals on the market and haul them to the station you want to build in. This is a good strategy to get started with industry and if you only produce items worth a couple of million ISK a day. Once your operation gets bigger you need to refine the ore yourself, but for now let’s start small and buy everything on the market. The Jita market is usually the cheapest place for shopping minerals and has an almost unlimited stockpile of minerals for sale. Of course you can also set up buy orders to save some isk on the minerals if you have liquid isk to invest and some decent market skills.
I also recommend to buy at least a small stockpile of minerals instead of buying the exact amount needed to build an item. This gives you much more flexibility in your production and you spend less time buying and hauling minerals. A good strategy is for example to always keep 20 million worth of each mineral type in your production base.
Small and medIum T1 ships and basic T1 modules only need these basic minerals to build. If you have a blueprint that needs different materials (e.g. battleships or faction ships), the production process is not covered in this guide.
The Industry Window
The central UI for all industry is the Industry Window, which you can open by the Alt+S shortcut. The industry window has an upper part, where the details of the currently selected blueprint are displayed. In this guide we will only cover the details in the industry section of the window, which is selected the orange factory symbol below the blueprint. The other blue buttons below the blueprint are used to copy and research blueprints and open a different view .
In the lower part are three tabs which are used to display and search for all your blueprints (Blueprint Tab), search for industry facilities (Facilities Tab) and an overview of your current production (Jobs Tab)
If you have a blueprint selected, you can see the amount of minerals needed to produce the item in the upper left section of the screen. If you want to produce more than one item/ship, you can increase the number by increasing the job runs to produce more. The amount of jobs you can produce depends on the blueprint. Blueprint originals can run any number of runs while copies only can produce a certain amount before the are destroyed. This amount is set when the BPC is created.
If you hover over the arrows between the required minerals and the blueprint you can see the actual material cost in ISK. You can also see any material consumption bonuses the job will get by the structure you build in and the material efficiency of your blueprint.
If you have enough minerals in the hangar the blueprint is located in, you can start the job with the Start button which puts the job under the Jobs tab.
If you switch back to the blueprints tab you can still the the blueprint, but the currently used ones are transparent.
Lastly, you can search for good industry facilities in the Facilities Tab. You can filter by public and corporation facilities, the type of job you want to run and the range from your current location. For this guide we will always search for Manufacturing facilities as the type filter. This feature is very handy, because not all NPC and player owned stations have an industry facility installed.
The little red bar on each of the job type symbols represents how many jobs currently run in the facility, which increases the cost of the job. The lower the red bar, the less ISK you pay in addition to your material costs to start the job.
You can see the job cost charged by the facility by hovering over the Total Job Cost label in the lower right part of the Industry window. The job costs consists of two parts. The facility tax, which goes to the owner of the structure and the system cost index, which is driven by the red bar in the Facility window and is a fraction of the actual item cost on the market. These taxes can be reduced by structure bonuses and other effects like the factional a warfare bonus.
Selling your goods
After your job ran for the required time you can deliver the item by clicking the Deliver button in the Jobs tab of the industry window. The item then appears in you hangar ready to be sold.
The next step is to haul it your market of choice and either sell it immediately to a buy order or put up your own sell order. That’s why a basic level in trade skills come very handy for an industrialist. Selling to buy orders is quite a profit cut in almost all cases, so you should train at least the most basic trade skills to put up some sell orders and reduce the market taxes and fees.
Ideally, you should sell your products at the same trade hub where you can also buy more minerals for the next batch of items to produce and haul these back to your production base.
Production Related Skills
The first skill you will need to get into production is the Industry skill. Each level of Industry unlocks more blueprints you can use. Most T1 blueprint only require level 1 but some more advanced items require higher levels. You will also get a -4% modifier to your build time per job for each level.
The Mass Production skill will give ability to run one additional job for each skill level . With Mass Production level 5 you can also train Advanced Mass Production which gives even more job slots to works with. With both skills level 5 you have a maximum of 11.
Finally, there is the Supply Chain Management skill which lets you start jobs remotely. Each level increases the range for starting and delivering jobs.
These are all skill needed to get you started. If you want to sell your good on the market some level in the Trade and Retail skills will give you additional orders to sell stuff on the market. There are also the Broker Relations and Accounting skills which lower market taxes and fees and are totally worth to train as high as possible. The Advanced Broker Relation skill will also lower the costs for changing a price on the market. This might be worth it if you have problems selling your items andthe need to adjust the market prices of your sell orders a lot.
What’s the profit?
The most important point is of course the ISK you can make by production. In general, the profit you can make on a single item you produce is obviously the difference between your production cost and the market value of the item.
Production costs for an item consist of the ISK you spent on the minerals, the taxes and fees for the facility you used, and the cost of the blueprint if it was a BPC. Since T1 BPOs are very cheap you can eliminate the BPC costs by simply buying a blueprint original. I consider BPOs more an investment than an actual cost to produce the item, since you can always sell the BPO on the market again at a later date if you don’t want it anymore.
If you didn’t buy the minerals but mined them yourself, you should still consider the mineral cost as if you bought them on the market. The reason for this is that you could instead sold the minerals instead of building with them, which are the hidden “costs” of your mined minerals.
The market value of an item can be very different in different regions of Eve. I recommend to always use the Jita market value as your market price, since this is in most cases the cheapest price. If the price in a different trade hub or region is a lot bigger than in Jita, you can always simply buy the items in Jita and sell them in the different region instead of building them. If you build the item anyways this inter-regional profit is not really related to your industry activities. Very bulky items e.g. cruiser hulls are an exception to this rule, since they are harder to move between regions if you don’t have your own freighter. In that case, it might be profitable to build them close to where the good prices are.
Finally, you will have to pay the market taxes (sales tax and brokers fee) if you sell your item. These can be between 5% and 10% depending on your trade skills and if you sell to buy orders or put up your own sell orders.
Let’s use the simple example of the production of 10 Cap Booster 50 from a BPO to calculate the profit. Mineral costs for a job run of 10 are 5.200 ISK at the time of writing. The market value in Jita is around 1000 ISK eack which comes to 10K ISK for the batch of 10. Build costs are 500 ISK and market taxes to sell them in Jita on sell orders are around 500 ISK for my trading character.
This results in 10.000 – 5.200 -500 – 500 = 3.800 Profit per 10 booster.
Producing these takes around 3 minutes, so you could theoretically build 480 * 10 Cap Booster per day in a production slot, which results in around 1.8 million ISK a day.
With 10 production jobs running simultaneously , you could make 18 million ISK per day producing these on a single character.
This simple example shows how profitable it can be to build even the most basic items. However, I highly recommend to build as many different items in small quantities as possible. If you find 50 different items and produce only a few of each, it is much easier to sell them fast and reinvest the ISK into new materials instead of trying to sell 10K Cap Booster 50, which can take a couple of days or even weeks.
This is it for the first part of my production series. Now go out buy some minerals and start your production adventure!