EVE Online Planetary Interaction – Maximize Your Profit


***Incursion Update***

My new Planetary Interaction guide for Incursion is here:

http://www.rootninja.com/eve-planetary-interaction-incursion-guide/

More useful sites:

http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Planetary_Commodities

http://sites.google.com/site/eveplanetaryplanner/

Maximize your effort

You only get so much grid and cpu to work with. Make the most out of your extractors, processors, storage, and links. If you want to make a decent profit working with planets in high sec, go for the T3 products. T4′s are a lot of work shuttling product between planets, and T2 and under just isn’t worth the time. You would make more bank mining or doing missions compared to the basic stuff.

Create a T3 product on each planet type

Each planet has only tier three available. On lava planets, it’s Smartfab Units. Instead of trucking goods off of one planet and back onto another, you can build basic processors that feed 2 advanced processors which feed yet another advanced processor. You waste more grid/cpu on the processors, but for self-generating income, I really like this approach.

Launchpad > Storage Facility

Consider replacing your storage facility with a launchpad. The launchpad costs far CPU than the storage facility, but the power usage is the same. Power is the only factor here, so there’s basically no reason to use a storage facility when you can use the launchpad and get double the storage capacity.

Minimize Links

Put your launchpad in the middle. If you put it on one end or the other, you’ll quickly run into the maximum link limit. If you put it in the middle, the furthest an extractor should have to jump to get to storage is 6 nodes, and that’s only when multiple extractors are linked together.

The shortest 3-way path is the center of the circle.

Draw lines connecting the three points, then draw the biggest circle inside the triangle that you can. The center of it is your best bet for a storage location.

Upgrade

It’s better to overload and upgrade a single link than to create a second one. But when you have just a few bits of energy left, any wasted on extra links won’t make any difference.

Balance

Create more extractors for the minerals that are LESS abundant. If you’re trying to produce any level of product, you’ll need to create equal amounts of each mineral required for the blueprint. There’s no sense in gathering five time as much Bacteria than Water if you’re trying to combine the two to make Test Cultures. You’ll just end up with stockpile of one and a deficiency of the other.

Buffer

Route all minerals and products to your storage facility. Then route from storage to processor. This way you never waste any excess. There’s nothing worse than having 2999 out of 3000 units and having a ripe extractor finish its cycle. In that case, you may as well have only made 1 unit per cycle because the rest is sent to /dev/null. You may have to upgrade a few links, but if your put the processors close to the launchpad in the middle, the cost to upgrade is minuscule.



11 thoughts on “EVE Online Planetary Interaction – Maximize Your Profit

  1. Hi, thanks for the Geometry refresh, but how do you ‘draw’ that on the planet?
    Did you make screenshots of all your planets, draw on them and then eyballed the correct location to the actual planet?

    I wouldn’t speak so categorically for P3 item manufacture, some of them make more isk/hour than their constituent parts, others do not. But its certainly more satisfying to have a full fledged production line, than just a strip mine.

  2. You take your extractors and have them push to your launch facility. Then from there you can route to your factories back to the launch facility so there is never any loss of material from the extractors and your factories are all by the storage facility. You can fit 3 factories on 1 link at 90% stable.

    • Yes, that’s exactly what I mean by “Route all minerals and products to your storage facility. Then route from storage to processor” Storage/launchpad/command center, they’re all good for buffering. The stability changes depending on how much you’re harvesting per cycle. If you’re just barely stable with the one of the lower yield cycles then you’ll need to upgrade your links if you want to use a different time that gathers more units per cycle.

  3. I tried routing my extractors to my storage facilty, but it won’t automatically feed on to the processors, so you have to do it manually using the expedite function, and there is a delay in between the number of times you can do it.

    I have seen a number of guides suggesting this storage buffer, how do you automate it to supply the processors?

    • Once you route from extractor to storage, go through a cycle. When you have good in storage, you can set up the route to a processor. From then on, it will continue to route automatically as more comes in and the processor it’s routing to is ready for another batch of input.

      It is a pain to have to run a cycle before you can setup the next hop, but if you run the shortest cycle, it’s only a 5 minute wait.

  4. You can create the routes immediately, just click on the ROUTES button on the Launch pad once you’ve created the inbound route from the extractor. This will show an incoming route of those items, you select the incoming route, click Create Route and then click on the Processor module and then click Create Route to confirm. Click Submit to save it all. About the only thing you can’t do is select the extraction cycle until you’ve built the extractor.

  5. You do know that you don’t need to connect everything right? You might be better to have a seperate launchpad for each resource and position it in the best spot on the planet for that resource. The initial cost is greater but it means more isk in the long term. I understand that say…3 launch pads takes more pdu than than 1 BUT you take from that the links you won’t need and increased yield per extractor. That means less extractors or more resource for your pdu :P

    • There are many ways to build it. I started this way. For the planets I don’t want to visit but once a month, I make completely self sufficient as I described, but i’ve since changed to manually importing the raw materials used for specific combinations and running zero extractors on my high sec planets.

  6. Also the storage unit has it’s uses. Firstly it doesnt cost anywhere near as much to build which is relevent for new players AND if your optimising PI you will proberbly end up with a planet JUST for factories which take up more cpu. In this case where it is only storage you need. The storage unit is better.

  7. I found thats it’s more profitable to build ‘production’ bases than extracting materials by yourself.

    The idea is to build lot of factories manualy haul all metarials necessary to manufacture high tier products.
    By doing so I can easily have 10mil profit per day from one base.

    I provider you a link with calculations

  8. “The shortest 3-way path is the center of the circle.”

    You don’t need a circle. You show the triangle’s corners with an ‘angle bisector’ line, the intersection of the 3 angle bisectors is the center of the circle (as you see in your drawing). No need for the circle then, as you have already located the center.

    Guessitmating an angel bisector is pretty easy (after perhaps drawing a few to get the idea down).