EVE Online - Catch All & new meat check-in

I spent some time in Hek. I don't remember why I left. I think I still have a jump clone there.

Hek is the main Market hub for Metropolis, even though it's much smaller than Rens which is only about 6 jumps away. There's the popular ice mining systems Nakugard and Barkrik close by. Hek is also on the Rens < - > Jita route so it sees a lot of flyover traffic.

Plus it's a direct connection to the lowsec Sinq-Laison region so a lot of pirates keep trading alts there, though most pirates I (used to) know preferred Molden Heath due to it's proximity to the Drone lands (I used to live out in Etherium Reach before it had a name and was just 7-KXBJ).

I'm not sure if that is a recommendation or not. lol

I'll take it as one. I emailed the Eve Uni guy asking if somewhere near Hek there was an appropriate place for me to base myself.

The alt I am running is down in that region as well, not that you will see him as I don't play much and am euro tz. He has very few SP's, so just using him like a new character, almost finished with the 10 intro missions.

manta173 wrote:

Middle of the email. I was a off in my initial read of it. (it was late... yadda yadda)

EVE University, as with most major corporations, often find ourselves at war. We recommend that you do not accept the invite if you are located in a Major Trade hub, such as Jita, Amarr, Rens, or Dodixie and have relocated your possessions if you want to do so.

So I don't need to move I don't think. My current home base is Abhan VII which is 0.6 I believe. As I am minmatar, I had been thinking about heading that way on my own so I must have projected.

Where are my fellow GWJ'ers at? Maybe I can relocate there before I accept. (Or are we all in different regions?)

Manta, I think you are misreading the email. It is not telling you to move out of high-sec. It is telling you to not have your stuff sitting in the major trade hub systems when you accept the corp invite.

Reason why: war. Some corp declares war on Eve U, at which point they can shoot you with little (or no) warning without being jumped by the space cops. Trade hubs tend to have a lot of people hanging out, making it more likely you will be attacked by someone that has you War Dec'd. And odds are they will outnumber you, and blow you up without any real trouble. If a war target can find and kill you, it keeps them happy, and they will want to extend the war. Don't do this. You will be given instructions on what to do, how to fly, in the event of the corp being war dec'd, and not following those instructions is often a quick way to get kicked out a corp.

Basically, there is no real good reason for you to go into a trade hub system, at this point. They tend to be laggy, overrun with scammers (anything in Local chat in a trade hub is a scam, just the way it is) and hostiles tend to lurk in them.

If you currently are based out of a trade hub, move. Once you have your base in a non-trade hub, then accept the corp invite. If Eve U is on the ball (and they always were in the past) then they will have guides, directions and advice to take it from there.

Thanks.

I just need to research low activity 0.5-0.6 systems near Hek to get me a good home station where I can be relatively safe and still get decent rats until I'm comfy enough to move on.

Do you think Eve Uni will take Alpha clones?

They do, as I just joined them with one.

I'm playing at their high sec campus for now, but I might head off on less populated areas to seek fortune after I get going.

Just got a mentor from EVE Uni. Seems like a great guy that is enthusiastic to help me remember the details and get going again.

I guess this has been another plug for EVE Uni.

Spent quite a few hours last weekend looking into this whole "Planetary Interaction" thing, how it worked and what to do. I've got a rough plan for what I need to do to get a P4 commodity built with four planets. I got the first three planets set up completely or mostly where they need to be to create their P1 products. I think I'm going to have to do some rejiggering, because my first plan my have required too much from one of my planets. I'm either going to have to source something from somewhere else, or accept having an Extractor that continuously changes resources, which seems to require a route redraw as well.

When I get home tonight I'll be able to upgrade the command centers again, and then tomorrow night I'll be able to bring in the 4th planet. At that point I should mostly have everything set up and I'll just have to shuttle things around a bit and wait for everything to move through all the factories. Then after I get home from Thanksgiving I'll have another Command Center upgrade to fill in whatever has ended up being the bottleneck.

Edit: It does bug me that Extractor Heads can't be tallied to different materials, and especially that they don't run on repeat. Do people that want their Planet Industry to be a once a day check in set their extractors for one day cycles, and then cut it short early when they come in? If you cancel it half an hour early you just lose those last two 15 minute mining cycles, right?

Impressive Yonder! That should make for some decent cash.

I have no idea what any of that means.

Are you mining planets and processing it automatically?

Yonder wrote:

Spent quite a few hours last weekend looking into this whole "Planetary Interaction" thing, how it worked and what to do. I've got a rough plan for what I need to do to get a P4 commodity built with four planets. I got the first three planets set up completely or mostly where they need to be to create their P1 products. I think I'm going to have to do some rejiggering, because my first plan my have required too much from one of my planets. I'm either going to have to source something from somewhere else, or accept having an Extractor that continuously changes resources, which seems to require a route redraw as well.

When I get home tonight I'll be able to upgrade the command centers again, and then tomorrow night I'll be able to bring in the 4th planet. At that point I should mostly have everything set up and I'll just have to shuttle things around a bit and wait for everything to move through all the factories. Then after I get home from Thanksgiving I'll have another Command Center upgrade to fill in whatever has ended up being the bottleneck.

If your end goal is to P3/P4 production, you might just find it more efficient to buy the P1/P2 products off the market instead of harvesting it yourself, and focusing on just producing the high-end products. This is especially true if you find the need to export/import/transport from one system to another.

Another thing to take note of, and include in your spreadsheets, are the effective tax rates on the Customs Offices on the planets you want to mine. There may be a few Barren planets near you, which are good for both harvesting Base/Reactive metals or planting Advanced or High Tech processors. Tax rates scale with the level of the products, so it's better to put the advanced processors on the planets with the lowest taxes.

Yonder wrote:

Edit: It does bug me that Extractor Heads can't be tallied to different materials, and especially that they don't run on repeat. Do people that want their Planet Industry to be a once a day check in set their extractors for one day cycles, and then cut it short early when they come in? If you cancel it half an hour early you just lose those last two 15 minute mining cycles, right?

Right - you don't lose anything from previously completed cycles, but anything cancelled mid-cycle is wasted. If you're on a 30-minute cycle and it's minute 29, wait until the cycle finishes before cancelling the process.

There are two other details to note about Extraction programs. The first is that the longer the run time, the lower the per-cycle yield becomes. For example, mining the same deposit might get you 40,000 units per cycle in an 8-hour program, 30,000 per cycle in a 24-hour program, and 20,000 per cycle in a 48 hour program. The longer your program runs unattended, the more resources you'll get overall, but with a lower per-cycle yield. If you really want to micro-manage your PI, running it in 1 hour at a time is the most efficient, but requires you to manually re-start it every time.

IMAGE(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RSFSaRBcOew/TT0QTtQ1mPI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/yJB8RY5jlMU/s1600/pi_survey_program.png)

Mining Efficiency is on an exponential decay curve, so the best mining will usually happen on the onset, and then get less as time goes on (with some occasional upticks because Reasons). When I know I'm not going to be able to play for a day, I'll set it up for a 2 or 3 day period, knowing that I'll get the most efficient processing early. If I'm going to be logging back in sooner, or playing for a long period of time, I'll set it for a shorter program so that the yield is higher overall.

The other trick with PI is that the spots on the planet with the best resources change from day to day, so that when you re-start the extraction cycle, you'll want to re-scan the planet and move your extractor heads to match. It's not 100% accurate though, so you'll want to upgrade your "Planetology" and "Advanced Planetology" skills as quickly as possible. Checking your PI daily allows you to reorient the extractor heads for more efficient mining.

Finally, it's a good idea to keep a checklist of your daily process, if you do anything more than Stop and Start your extractors:

Spoiler:

1) Did you remember to click "Submit" after making any changes to your PI base structure layout (new Extractors? Different Production Plans?)

2) Did you remember to click "Start Program" after moving your extractor heads?

3) Did you remember to create links between all the buildings you've created?

4) Did you remember to route your materials from the extractors to their proper storage facilities?

5) Did you remember to route your materials from storage to the processors?

6) Did you remember to route the output of your processors back to storage?

7) ARE YOU SURE YOU CLICKED SUBMIT?! (can you tell I've been bitten by this one?)

Planetary Industry (unfortunately the 5-6 necessary articles linked to from that page to understand it aren't laid out as well as many of their topics, at least I had a harder time piecing it all together than much of the Eve mechanics on that Wiki.

So basically you can put command centers on planets, those command centers provide the power and Computation to run your colony on that planet. Colonies consist of Extractors that pull the raw (P0) material out of the planet, and then various stages of processors to refine those materials into P1, P2, P3, and P4 materials.

Some of those materials are only useful for further planetary refinement, but others (and all of the P4s) are required components to construct things like fuel blocks, ships, player structures.

The colonies also have storage containers, and Launch Pads to get the material into orbit where you can pick it up, or to accept imports you drop down from orbit.

Thanks Alz!

Alz wrote:

If your end goal is to P3/P4 production, you might just find it more efficient to buy the P1/P2 products off the market instead of harvesting it yourself, and focusing on just producing the high-end products. This is especially true if you find the need to export/import/transport from one system to another.

Yeah, I'm definitely starting to think that as well. As I was setting up my planets initially (and running out of power on my Storm planet that I was hoping to get 4 types of P1s from) it was really looking like I wasn't going to be able to source my own stuff effectively. That's when I decided I needed to go from three planets to four, and have all the advanced factories on the fourth.

The other issue is that I'm in High Sec, and thus my resource availability isn't great, but as far as I know High Sec processing has the exact same stats as Null Sec processing.

The only reason I didn't start out importing P0 or P1 is that there aren't good supplies of either near me. I would have to go over close enough to Amarr to make an order, then have it hauled in to me. That's fine and all, I just didn't wasn't sure that's what I wanted to do to start out with, especially when I saw how cheap all this setup was. If I end up deleting everything and starting fresh I'll only be out 8-12 million, which is fine by me.

It looks like the storage facilities are large enough that I may be able to get away with hauling in P1 stuff once a week, maybe even less frequently, so that's probably by far my best option.

Yonder wrote:

Thanks Alz!

The only reason I didn't start out importing P0 or P1 is that there aren't good supplies of either near me. I would have to go over close enough to Amarr to make an order, then have it hauled in to me. That's fine and all, I just didn't wasn't sure that's what I wanted to do to start out with, especially when I saw how cheap all this setup was. If I end up deleting everything and starting fresh I'll only be out 8-12 million, which is fine by me.

It looks like the storage facilities are large enough that I may be able to get away with hauling in P1 stuff once a week, maybe even less frequently, so that's probably by far my best option.

Glad to help! I have a spreadsheet somewhere that I made when I was first surveying the planets near my home turf, and I put in the market prices of the P1 products to compare it with the final cost of producing P2 products. I find that I'm best off buying one rarer type of P1, harvesting two more common types of P1 across three planets, then producing two different P2s together (they share a common P1) on my manufacturing planets to avoid flooding the market.

On an average day, I spend about 45 minutes to an hour and 10M isk to produce 35M worth of P2s, for a 25M/day profit. My biggest problem now is that I'm finding one of my P2s is getting flooded in my home market system, so I have to decide whether I want to switch my outputs, or start trucking down to another market system. I also want to see if I can reduce my spend by either finding lower-tax planets to manufacture on, or extending to a 2-day extraction cycle to have more time to spend on my other passion: mission loot arbitrage.

I'm thinking about finally starting up an Alt. I've honestly always thought it was pretty cheap to have a bunch of alts, but it would be convenient to have a Non-Corp hauling alt to go back and forth from my local area to the nearest trading hub without worrying about war targets and hauling fees. Also now that I'm actually exposed to people that know how to play the game via Eve Uni it seems like players having alts, even hotboxed alts, is basically ubiquitous. Also, apparently one of the things Plex does for you is let you increase skills on two characters on your account at the same time, so it's even baked into the basic mechanics.

Alts are great, but keep in mind that if you plan on multi-boxing (ie, running more than one client at a time on your computer) they all need to be Omega clones. If you want to run an Alpha clone, Eve will prevent you from signing in with any other accounts at the same time on that box.

Each Omega account gets 3 pilots to train, but by default can only train one at a time. You can get a Multiple Pilot Training Certificate which allows you to train on a second pilot, or run two to train all three simultaneously. It looks like they go for about the same price as a Plex (1.1b - 1.2b in Jita) so if you're looking to just train an alt without creating a second account, this is another option.

If you just want to pay for a 2nd account, or can generate the ISK to buy a second Plex, it's very convenient to have another client to fly around with. Especially if you train them up for Mining

Having alts is pretty much standard operating procedure, even if its just the two other slots of the three on the account. An alt out of corp to do some hauling is very useful, and an alt to scout the area, set up safe spots and warp in spots during a war was also a good thing.

The downside, they won't be as effective as your main, so it gets old plodding along, hauling bulk goods at a painfully slow speed.

I woke up this morning to find 85% of my buy orders for my initial materials were filled. I bought the rest from the cheapest sell orders, and left with 36 hours worth of P2 inputs for a single P4 factory. It was only 36 million in isk so the gankers left me alone, and I had scouted the first couple jump away from the Trade Hub for war targets in my shuttle.

I had gotten access to my fourth planet during the night, so I set everything up on the smallest barren planet. I should have my first 8 or 9 products when I get home. It looks like if I had set up all of my processors just a bit more clustered I would have the CPU and Power to double the whole operation at my current skill level, but as it is I'll need to upgrade once more, which will give me room for a second storage anyways.

For now my first three planets are just doing their ineffective P1 production. I don't want to go all in on a single material, so I'm going to eventually shut them down and move to Barrens and Temperates for three new P4 production lines, but I need to map them out.

I'm also going to start to run into a startup capital issue, setting up the planets is still pretty cheap, but more expensive than the P0 versions. The real increase is that first round of P2 inputs. I'm going to be gone for Thanksgiving, in a perfect world I would have four planets stocked with almost three days (the max inputs that a storage facility can hold for my first P4 product) of inputs to hum merrily along for most of while I'm gone, but it doesn't look like I'll be able to do that. I'll be lucky if I can have two planets fully stocked for three days of production before tomorrow afternoon, given the packing and other holiday preparation miscellana I need to accomplish.

But if I do accomplish that I'll come home to enough money to get the rest of the operation started! Glass half full.

Yonder, what's the ISK amount in start up capital you're in need of? It's Eve, and I'd be willing to make a deal.

Hmm, I'll get back to you. If the other three production lines are similar to my first... Somewhere in the general vicinity of 400 million isk. If you're up for it maybe I could pay you back 70% of the loan a week later and another 70% the week after that. (Man you can make a high profit margin in Eve, that would be crazy loan sharking in the real world)

Ok, tonight I kit up for low sec ratting and also another ship for pvp tackling. I am running out of skills to train.

I don't know what I need to do at this point as I had been working on battlecruisers before and they are off limits to me.

In an effort to encourage some friends to get into the free version of EVE, I made a new Alpha (free to play) account yesterday lunch time, so that I could take it on our scheduled Monday night Tier1 frigate roam.

I went through the "opportunity" (tutorial) missions and one of the career agent mission arcs and then parked in Hek - a safespot right on the edge of faction warfare space.

At this point, the character had a +0.02 security rating, and had spent seven hours being a stand up citizen.

Then I went on the fleet roam in a 3,00,000 ISK Merlin frigate and ended up on 12 of 15 kill mails, doing top damage on two and getting the final blow on two others.

We killed somewhere north of 300,000,000ISK worth of ships, I had someone put out a 5,000,000ISK kill right on my new character and I ended up at a security status of -2.14, making me a "banana."

At this point the account was not quite 11 hours old.

Should only take me a month of killing npc pirates to get that security status back. Or another four hour roam to make it unsalvageable.

Ok... I don't know how I can get to doing stuff like this. But aside from the security status issues, this sounds amazing.

We're winding down for a week or so, while everyone scatters for Thanks Giving, (to the annoyance of our Canadian Fleet Commander), but if you're still having fun and want to try out a roam later in the month we can make that happen. As a warning though - our last two roams have been amazingly successful, so the next one is guaranteed to an absolute clusterf*ck of calamity and lost ships.

On the plus side, if you're in corp then you get free ships - one of the significant benefits of everyone flying T1 Frigates - so the only thing you can really lose is any implants in your pilot's head.

You don't have to be in corp to come along though - we have a couple EVE University pilots join in and some other corp-adjacent pilots.

I am EVE Uni, and have a jump clone in Hek, but just moved all my gear 17 stops away. lol

I can risk being a WT to get a rifter or thrasher over there, I just need to fine tune my loadouts. Any recommendations for what would help the most?

Yonder: I can swing that, but drop it down to the friend rate of 25%. Just pm your relevant in game info.
Bismark: You're going to get me to resub, aren't you?

T1 alpha clone roams sound great. I am training up a new Gallente right now. I like big drones and I cannot lie.

Crom, why did I read this thread?

(runs away gibbering)