Now, that we got all the prerequisites covered in the previous blog posts, I can finally show you how to start your T2 production business.
T2 module and ship production is a quite complicated matter, which requires all the mechanics I covered in the previous post of this series plus some additional steps that I will cover in this post.
Compared to T1 production, T2 production is not done in one single build step but needs you to build or buy several intermediate products that are required for the final build of your T2 BPC. Some of the intermediate products can be build yourself with the already required blueprints and skills. Some are very specialized and are usually not worth the time and skill points needed to build them yourself.
To get a good overview of the required materials and component to build a T2 module, you can view the necessary items by looking at your T2 BPC in the industry window. How to get your hands on the T2 BPC, I covered in this post.
Required Materials and Components
Let’s take look at this T2 Drone Damage Amplifier as an example:
The required items to build a DDA II are on the left side of the indstry window and can be divided into four groups.
The first group of items required to build the module are two planetary materials, in this case Transmitters and Miniature Electronics. These materials are produced by planetary interaction (PI), which is quite a complicated topic itself and I will not cover in this post. For you as an industrialist, just buy the required materials on the public market. There are a zillion different planetary materials in the game, so just buy as many as you need for your T2 items.
The next item group required are so called Components. These are items that are produced out of moon materials, which again must be mined from moon asteroids and then further processed. It is usually worthwhile to produce the required Components yourself. There are again quite a few different Components for different T2 modules and you will need to research the Components BPOs or buy researched copies on the market before you can get seriously started in T2 production. Most of the BPOs/BPCs are quite cheap and the research times and costs to produce a component are quite reasonable. In our case we only need Photon Microprocessors, which require four different advanced moon materials. Just buy the moon materials on the market and start to build your own components. Part of the profit in T2 production will come out of this step.
The third required input material, that you will need for any T2 module or ship is Morphite. Morphite is a mineral gained from mining and refining Mercoxit, a type of asteroid that can only be found in null security space. Again, for you as an industrialist it only makes sense to buy it on the market. As with other minerals, the time required to mine it yourself is just too long to get enough for a serious T2 production shop. Since you will need this for any T2 module or ship, you can just buy it in bulk.
There are two final T1 items that are required to produce your T2 item. The first one is a T1 version of the item you want to build. In our case this is a T1 Drone Damage Amplifier. I already covered how to produce these in this previous post. Of course you could also buy it on the market but there is usually some profit in producing your own when you get started with production.
The second item is a so called R.A.M. module. There are 9 different R.A.M versions available for different T2 module/ship categories.
R.A.M. modules are simple T1 modules the can be build like any other T1 item by basic minerals and a BPO/BPC that is available on the market. Since you will need quite a lot of these, it makes sense to research your own BPO and start to build them on your own. In our case we need R.A.M. – Electronics which we build out of basic minerals.
Finally, one quick note about the required skills for T2 production. The skills to produce a T2 module or ship are the same you need to invent the T2 BPC. Usually, you won’t buy your BPCs on the market but invent them yourself. That’s why you already have the skills to build a T2 module or ship, if you invented the BPC first.
Summary
As you can see, there are a lot of things to do to produce a T2 module. To make things a bit more clear, here is a short summary what and in which order to do to get your hands on those T2 items. If there is a separate blog post about how this is done, I linked it in the list:
- make T1 BPCs out of your T1 BPO
- produce T2 BPCs out of your T1 BPCs by invention
- buy basic minerals for the required T1 items (or reprocess them yourself)
- produce the T1 version of your item
- produce the required T1 R.A.M. for your item
- produce the required Components for your item
- buy the required Morphite
- buy the required planetary materials
- start your T2 BPC (yeah!)
Running a T2 BPC is actually quite fast. That is why it is worth to do each step not only for one BPC but for several at a time. I have currently 30 T2 Drone Damage Amplifier BPCs in my hangar, so when I got shopping I buy enough input materials for 300 modules. While the build jobs for these are running you can invent more T2 BPCs with your free science job slots at the same time.
What’s the profit?
Calculating the profit of a T2 production line is quite complicated because of the many intermediate products you will need to produce before you can get started. There are actually tools like ISK per Hour that will do that for you in great detail. For this example, I will just try to give you a quick and conservative estimate what to expect if you pick a moderately profitable item to build like the T2 Drone Damage Amplifier in the example above.
First let’s check how much we would need to pay if we bought all input materials on the market by hovering over the material summary in the industry window. Since these are sold on the market for a profit too, it will give us the upper limit of the material costs. If you produce the intermediate products yourself, the cost will be smaller.
Buying the materials will cost me 7,4 million ISK plus an additional 0,4 million to start the build job. At the time of writing DDR IIs were sold around 1 million ISK in Jita, which comes to 2,2 million profit minus taxes on a 10-run DDR II BPC. The cost to produce a T2 DDR BPC is around 1 million ISK per 10-run BPC, so the final profit per build would be 1,2 million ISK.
The job duration is a bit over 2 hours per 10 DDR IIs. Let’s assume you can start 5 BPCs per manufacturing slot every 2 hours per day and you have 10 manufacturing slots available on you character. That would come to 50 BPCs that you can run during a day, which would profit you 50 BPCs * 1,2 million ISK per BPC = 60 million isk profit a day. Of course you need to build your intermediate products first, which will block your manufacturing slots for a little bit but also will increase your profit. For the sake of this calculation, let’s just assume these effects even out.
So what would be the ISK per hour value for this? Buying the raw materials on the market and starting the manufacturing jobs is actually quite fast in terms of active game time. If you get this done in an hour, which should be plenty of time to go shopping and start the jobs, this results in 60 million ISK per hour as well. If you have more characters trained to run manufacturing jobs, you can further improve your personal isk per hour buy shopping for all characters at once and run even more jobs per day. As you can see, the profit can go up quite a bit by scaling up your production capacity. If you have a lot of spare ISK, you can even buy all the materials needed for a couple of days or even weeks to minimize your shopping and hauling time.
I hope this will get you started into your career as an T2 producer, which is one of the most complicated production mechanisms in the game.