EVE HOW TO

As I mentioned in the first part of my T1 production guide, there are a few T1 ship types that require different build materials than all other T1 ships or modules. These are battleships, capital ships, supercapital ships, and Titans, which all are technically T1 ships.

Historically all these types were also built out of basic minerals. This has changed in 2021 when CCP increased the requirements to a wider range of build materials. Until that point, all these ship types were a lot cheaper to build than today. Also back in the past, basic minerals were so abundant by massive fleets of Rorquals roaming the null sec belts, that capital und supercapital production in null sec was on a massive scale. Combined with the fact, that capitals ships are very hard to kill by subcapital ships, the stockpile of supercapital ships and titans rose to higher and higher levels. Back then you could buy a cheaply fitted Titan for less than 70 billion ISK.

Since then, the build cost of these ships more than doubled bringing the cost to build a Titan up to around 160 billion isk as of today. But the massive amount of cheap pre-2021 ships still exist in the game and therefore the market price for all of these ship types still does not properly reflect the actual build costs. Titans are still sold for around 120 billion a piece, way under the build cost of the hull.

Because of this, especially capital ship production simply stopped after the new material costs hit the servers and hasn’t resumed a lot since.

After this short historical excurse, let’s look at the actual build requirements of a battleship, in this case a Dominix:

As you can see, there are three components required additionally to a relatively large amount of minerals to build it. These material requirements are exactly the same for all T1 battleships.

Let’s have a look at the build requirements of the three components:

All three components need a relatively small amount of planetary- und reaction materials. Looking at the total cost of these components to build a battleship, they make up less than 10% of the total production costs. Furthermore, producing these yourself wasn’t profitable at the time of writing, so I just bought all required materials in Jita to start my Dominix build. As you can see in the screenshot below, the required materials have a volume of 125k m3 which requires a freighter to haul the materials to your production hub. If you refine the minerals yourself, the compressed ores will fit into a regular hauler although it is risky to transport such a high value load in a industrial ship.

I simply used a BPC to build it, since the actual battleship BPOs are quite expensive with also very high costs to research them to maximum levels. Since battleship production is still not profitable at the time of writing, buying a BPO was not an option.

Building the Dominix takes only a couple of hours. Total build costs including facility cost were about 280 million in total, which is around the same as the price of a Dominix in Jita at the moment. The other battleship hulls were in a quite similar price range.

Maybe you can make a profit if you refine the minerals out of compressed ore yourself? Let’s have a look at the ore refining table to check if refining ore is profitable atm:

As you can see, none of the high-, low or null-sec basic ores are profitable to refine with a rather high refining rate of 83%.

Maybe battleship prices will rise again in the future, but as long as they don’t hit a 20% profit margin to the build costs, the hassle of building them is not an option.

Building capital and supercapital ships needs a lot more components than battleships and even larger amount of minerals, planetary and reaction materials to build them. At the time of writing, build costs for a carrier were around 4,3 billion ISK per hull. Price for a hull on public contrast reached from 2,7 to 4 billion for the hull. As you can see, building capital ships is still far from profitable at the moment. That is why I will postpone a detailed guide to build capitals to a later date.

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.

In this third part of my industry series, I want to cover the first step to produce T2 modules and ships by getting your hands on T2 blueprint copies.

There are also still very few T2 blueprint originals in the game. These were given out by CCP in 2003, which resulted in the T2 market being monopolized by a few players that owned the BPOs and finally ended with CCP deciding not to give any more T2 original blueprints out. Instead they introduce the system I will explain in this post to create T2 blueprint copies. The old T2 BPOs are still in the game but usually cost tenths of billions of ISK and are not an option for the average industrialist.

The process of producing T2 BPCs is called Invention and you will need the following things to get it done:

• A structure with a Standup Invention Lab I installed
• Lots of science skills depending on the T2 item/ship you want to produce
• T1 BPCs of the item/ship you want to produce
• Some blueprint specific Data Cores
• Optionally a Decryptor to improve the quality of the T2 BPC and/or the invention process

I will explain each of these requirements in more detail later in this post. One important mechanics of the invention process which is worth mentioning from the start is that invention is chance based. It can and will fail frequently and you can end up empty handed after an invention attempt. The success chance of each invention attempt however can be improved by science skills or the above mentioned Decryptors.

Required Skills

The invention process requires you to train into quite a few new skills compared to simple ME or TE research. You can see the necessary skills to run an invention job in the item details of a blueprint copy that has one or more T2 variants available. Not all T1 items have a T2 counterpart, but if they have, you will be able to see the required skills under the invention tab:

You can actually see which skills are used for what T2 BPC if you look at the item details of the science skills:

Each T1 BPC needs one of the four racial science skills, which are either Gallente, Armar, Minmatar or Caldari Encryption Methods to at least level 1. Additionally, there are always two other science skills required to at least level one. Which one again depends on the BPC you want to invent. There are 18 secondary science skill in the game that you will all need to train to be able to invent all T2 BPC. All these skill are quite hard to train to level 5 (1.25 million SP each), so in practice you better focus on a subset of T2 BPCs you want to invent and only train the required skills for these on a high level.

Required Items

The BPC detail window also shows the materials required for the invention process. These are a couple of Data Cores, which are consumed by the invention attempt and have otherwise no effect. Then you will need a single T1 BPC of the item, that will also be consumed. The ME and TE values of the T1 BPC have no impact on the resulting T2 BPC. These will always have by default a 2% ME and 4% TE value. The number of runs of the T1 BPC also doesn’t change the runs on the T2 BPC. A ship T2 BPC will always have one run and a T2 module BPC will have 10.

Finally, you can optionally use a Decryptor on an invention attempt. Decryptors can change the success chance of an invention attempt by a positive or negative value. At the same time they can provide additional number of runs and/or increase/decrease the ME and TE values of the resulting T2 BPC. Sounds complicated? It absolutely is. If it is worth to use a Decryptor highly depends on its cost, the production cost of the resulting item and the cost of the input T1 BPC. If the costs for the invention attempt are high, increasing the success chance might be worth it, even if other properties decrease. If the build costs of an T2 ship are huge, e.g. a jump freighter, getting better ME values might be worth it.

This is a list of all available Decryptors and their effect on the invention attempt:

You should simply buy your required Data Cores and Decryptors on the market. There are plenty of ways to acquire them by different activities in the game, but you will not be able to get enough of the right ones to start literally hundreds of invention attempts, which you will need to get seriously into T2 production.

Invention Location

To find a proper location for your invention jobs, you can again use the Facilities Tab of your invention window and filter for facilities with Invention services. You will then get a list of all the structures that allow an invention job.

If you hover over the little invention symbol, you can see the bonuses you will get for your job in that structure. Raitarus, Azbels and Sotiyos have hull bonuses that shorten invention time and cost and there are also structure rigs, that can reduce time and cost.

Invention in the Industry Window

Starting an invention job in the industry window is a little tricky compared to other research activities like ME or TE research. Lets have a look at a practical example:

I bought Data Cores and Accelerant Decryptors for 10 invention attempts in Jita and hauled everything to my favourite research base in Tama. The BPCs I created myself from an unresearched Magnetic Field Stabilizer I BPO.

To get started you need to select the T1 BPC you want to use in the Blueprint Tab of the industry window. This will show the BPC in center. Below the BPC you need to press the invention button, which is the second one from the right. This will now set the UI to the invention mode.

Next you need to pick a Decryptor if you want to use one. You can select one by clicking on the Decryptor symbol which opens a drop down where you can select between the different types. Of course the Decryptor and the necessary Data Cores need to be in your hangar together with the BPC.

Last step is to choose which T2 BPC you want if there are several different T2 items build from one T1. An example would be the Rifter BPC which you can invent into either a Wolf or Jaguar T2 BPC. My Magnetic Field Stab has only one T2 version so this step is not required in this example.

You can see success chance of the attempt in the outcome window on the right. If you are interested in the exact calculation, you can hover over the percentage. The three required science skills give a bonus per level to the invention chance. I trained all to level 4 which is only around half a million skillpoints.

You can also check the time calculation by hovering over the job duration:

The last property of the invention attempt is of course the total cost a a run. You can see the cost by hovering over the left of the BPC in the invention window:

You can see that the material costs for each attempt are around 700K ISK. The job cost for the facility are very low with only 465 ISK per attempt.

Finally you can press the Start button and the job goes into your Jobs tab. Now you need to wait for the displayed amount of time after which you can deliver the job again from the Jobs Tab. Invention times for modules are quite short, ship invention takes a little longer.

Delivering the BPC is the exciting moment, because you will now either get a message that the attempt failed or succeeded.

As you can see my invention attempts were rather bad, with 3 out of 10 attempts being successful. The newly created BPCs will appear in my hangar and are ready to build 33 Magnetic Field Stabilizer IIs.

That’s it for this invention guide. You can now build the T2 item, which I will explain in the next post of this series.

Of course there is also the option of selling your T2 BPCs on the contract market. The market for module T2 BPCs is rather small but there is some need for T2 ship BPCs that are mostly traded in Jita or Amarr. To calculate the profit, just use the number that was displayed in the industry window before you started the job and compare it to the current contract price.