Day 61 : Biting the Industry Bullet

After the rant of a few days ago I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and put some cash into industry. Literally. One of my first choices of experimental product is ammo.

Firstly I spend some cash buying up some blueprints, putting as many of them as I can through some Time Efficiency research. They’ll come into play in a few days. I’ve only 3 research slots at the moment and the skill queue is otherwise employed so I can’t get any more for a while. Material Research won’t do as much for me when the amount of minerals required is so small, besides - who can find a free Material Research slot when they want it?

I spent some money putting some mineral Buy Orders in place. I wince and yet it is only about 5% of my cash. It feels good to have it in play.

Along the way I discover a stash of six Navitas frigates that I’d built previously and done nothing with. I know that they sell well up at Jita. I think this is because there is a constant turnover of cheap T1 hulls up there for PVP. Have you seen the crowd up there? People with more cash than time will spend nearly five times the production cost on such a hull. Then again it could be that something is about to happen to the Navitas, just as it did to the Atron last week. It will be a serious error on my part if it does. As I write this I am thinking that I need to get home and trigger some production.

Back to the trade & industry. I cannot be bothered shipping 15,000 m3 of hulls all the way to Jita with no plan for the return journey so, as an experiment, I set up a Courier contract. I don’t think I’ve done this before and I’m a cheapskate so I set the rate at about 4k a jump. I set the collateral at exactly what I hope to get for the ships. Hopefully this will put the contract in the range of interest of a fairly young player with decent industrial hold capacity who doesn’t want to fly empty up to Jita.

I then wander off, mine for a bit and then go and watch a film.

The next morning my Buy Orders have all been filled. I’m sort of surprised it happened so fast but it is good news. I trigger several manufacturing jobs. One for ammo, and another for my speculative new market. It isn’t top secret but you’ll have to do a tiny bit of detective work to find out what it is. It should be fairly obvious to someone who has read what I’ve put up in the last week or so.

Even more surprising is that I have six Navitas hulls sat at Jita. That was a success then. I’ll have to remember that one. I’ve made a noob error here, though not the one you are thinking of. My alt character is in Jita so he can sell them. My mistake is not putting the contract through the corporation which means I have to run an Item Exchange contract with my alt, wasting 10K. Not much, but it all counts. The time setting it up is worth more to me than 10K. If I’d used the corporation then I think the ships would have been in the corp delivery area and I’d of been able to just grab them. The alt has a small starter fund to pay the broker so he sticks all the ships on the market at a competitive price. In classic Jita mode they’ve all sold by mid morning. I’ve made just under a million at over 400% on the materials without actually doing anything myself, though I did spend 5 or 10 minutes clicking around. The time involved will drop if I do it again since I’ll use the corp, since the alt now has a decent source of cash, and since I’ve done it before. Lets hope the courier thing wasn’t a fluke. My main worry is the two minute blip while on the alt during which the main character skill queue isn’t running.

In the evening I take the result of the manufacturing jobs and stick it on the market. Ruining things slightly in the name of experimentation I spread it around a couple of nearby systems where I think the sales conditions differ. It all sells rapidly and the fastest where I’d expected which means I’m starting to get my head around things.

Now, this is all low income stuff. This is actually losing money over mining because I’m not getting the stuff out in large enough amounts yet, and I’m still too new to have enough practice and infrastructure in place. Lets say I do ten minutes “work” in game, clicking around and setting this all up. I earn around a million. That’s about half the rate at which I mine, a bit less. However, I’m nearly at the point where I can learn Daytrading and Supply Chain Management which means I’ll be able to run the manufacture process from afar. Add to this the fact that my time researched blueprints are back meaning I’ve multiplied my potential output over the day (I’m still working to days - bad Space Noob!). Lets say I aim for 4 million a day with 10 minutes actual input. That is over twice the profit per minute rate of my mining and I’ve only done 10 minutes actual work. I’m doing other stuff while the manufacturing takes place, and after the first ten minutes I can go and enjoy doing something else entirely. My aim is to make maybe 4 million a day with 10 minutes or so clicking while eating breakfast, not counting some speculative moving to markets which I’ll combine with other tasks I have at those markets. Once I get to this point I’ll start looking at the next market up - bigger investments for bigger profits.

Of course, all this has ruined the 119 day skill plan I worked out the other day. I’ll have to refactor it. It looks like combat skills aren’t that interesting to me after all. However, should I be constantly attacked or wardecced I can now lurk in station and generate cash from there with little effort. I no longer have to leave the station to make cash. This is a bigger safety net  for enjoying the game than being able to fight back. Of course I’ll be fighting back anyway since I’ll be producing my own ships and learning skills as the assembly lines make me the required cash. Also because I am too bloody minded to ever give up.

UPDATE : I’m now hooked on EVEMon. I can watch my orders and jobs tick while I’m at work. My life is slowly being taken over.

UPDATE 2 : I've been reviewed by none other than Mord Fiddle! I feel kind of, well , giddy about this. It cheers me right up.

UPDATE 3 : Whiplash induced by a double take at the blog stats. Mord Fiddle broke my stats graph. It ain't everyone who can say that.