After pouring billions of ISK for many months into manufacturing, it was like a black hole. I’ve started to see some rather interesting results. Things are starting to scale up, and I've hit some expected and unexpected bottlenecks along the way.

You could say I've had one of my better months in Eve Online in quite some time. Almost 7 billion in income. While a large portion of that was not manufacturing profits. A large amount was from the sale of end goods that I manufactured. Most things I manufacture, I might have between a 5% and well over a 120% margin on them after taxes and all expenses. With the higher end being exceptions and not the rules of how much I make selling something.

That income and cost shown from the in-game graphic is also not the full story. I no longer sell goods in a single market or two. Depending on how many end-of-the-week products I have and the effort I'm willing to put in for a given week. I might be selling in five different markets in Eve Online. Creating some rather interesting issues along the way. More on those later.

For a while now, I have been able to farm the resources I needed for my manufacturing needs. If it’s only tech one (T1) stuff, I more than got that covered. Between farming billions in modules from running missions that I reprocess down into loads of minerals, I can’t mine in large quantities in high sec. Along with having a stockpile of over a billion in the basic minerals like titanium and pyerite.

You could say I had a rather generous stockpile ready to go. It was mostly lacking the blueprints to get things really going. At least at the T1 level. That is no longer the case. I now have almost 120 blueprints originals (BPOs), with most of them being max researched for mineral efficacy and time. The screenshot above is only one assortment of some I use.

As one might imagine, I've had to rethink my organization of my setup more than once as things keep evolving. Even then, there are spreadsheets, lots of containers, and some external tools. My small manufacturing empire is already quite an undertaking in keeping track of everything.

At one point, you could say I was feeling rather tapped out. I had over 5 billion in end goods not selling on the market. I was out of market order slots on my highest trading skill character. I was almost out of ISK. I had billions in raw goods sitting around to be used. I also had billions in goods waiting to restock as my sell orders deplete in different markets.

While I could not solve all these issues at once. There was one I could. That was getting the skilled Tycoon. Each level of it gives you another 32 order slots. I, however, for a while did not have the requirement of wholesale 5. So, there was a little bit of time getting this one along with spending 125 million ISK for the skill itself. Which, at this point, was something I could still afford, but things were getting tight.

Eventually, I did get the skilled Tycoon trained on my highest trade skill character. With the future to also train up another character as well into some better trade skills. At least for now, I've more than doubled my total market orders. Giving me ample space for the short term of listing items on the market and putting in buy orders.

After some market fluctuations and a crazy weekend. I ended up having a stockpile of ISK and lots of market slots to light items on. Thankfully, I was not just all in on manufacturing items. I had quite a lot of faction ammo to sell that I got from running missions that helped keep me afloat before other things sold. Freeing up some much-needed liquidity.

That, however, just created further issues of transporting goods and no longer being able to personally keep up with acquiring goods without buying them myself. You, however, can’t just go buy stuff off the market and manufacture it into other things like you would like. As there is often not enough margin to make it worth your time, there is even a risk of loss.

You need to use buy orders for that and compete with other players who also want to buy certain desirable items as cheaply as possible. As there are lots of players out there who just want to sell and not wait around days, weeks, or even months to sell off whatever they acquired. This also requires even my small scale to start having billions of ISK tied up in buy orders.

At one point, the wallet icon was flashing so often due to sales. I gave up checking on it. A lot of the stuff I sell is usually low-priced tech T1 goods. I also have quite a few high-end cosmos modules that I've crafted as well that have sold for some decent margins and ISK.

The good news is that in some of the markets I sell in. One person is not always just buying a single item from me. I’m selling the ship, the modules to fit the ship, the rigs for the ship, and, in some cases, the ammo needed. So, a single buyer could end up buying multiple items from me at a time. The above is just one small example of such a case occurring recently. That same person then ended up selling me raw materials, which I turned into even more profit. Creating quite an interesting little loop.

There then came the point where I wanted to expand even further. Into tech two (T2) production. That, however, creates all kinds of a mess. A lot of that stuff needed for it, I can't farm myself since I'm not in a massive null sec alliance. So, I must buy it.

You also need the T2 blueprint copies to make such items. These are, however, just copies, so they get consumed on use. This requires you to invention t1 copies you have made of T1 BPOs. This has a decent amount of cost and time. Not to mention higher skill requirements to make it worth doing.

I’ve reached a point now where I'm starting to phase out my main from doing the more basic research of BPOs. You only get so many research slots, and when you start filling them with a month-long invention per one. You have now hit a new kind of bottleneck, like I did when I was first just researching improving T1 BPOs. Expect these to get consumed on use.

There was also another issue I ran into as I started to learn more about manufacturing in general. This is one possible T2 item I'm looking into making. It is quite a long list of needed items. The base raw goods for many of these items needed to come from moon mining, which alliances do. They then get turned into reactions that you can only do in Low sec, null sec, or wormhole space.

After that point, I can craft many of the next in the change ingredients. There was just another huge issue. I did not have the researched blueprints to make those items. So, another month went by of using my characters to research said blueprints.

There is also another huge issue. Beyond just buying what I need at a low enough price to have a good enough margin to make it worth my time and risk. These goods are heavy in the amounts I need them. My current transportation ship won’t even come close. Even more so since Jita is where I must be going, and that is a decent distance away from where I do my manufacturing.

While I can still get by with the ship I'm using for now for hauling. It just becomes more painful as my manufacturing empire grows and my need to buy more and move more items increases.

At some point, I'm going to need to get myself a freighter. While you can pay people to move items for you. That would eat a decent chunk of my margin at my current scale and the type of items I can make. So that's not really a route I want to go down.

There are many different kinds of freighters to go with. I’ve always fancied and trained for Amarr ships. So, it’s tempting to go for the ship Providence even though it’s not the best or the worst.

The base cargo capacity, not including skills, is 456,750 M3. Which would solve a lot of my issues. It’s another decent investment into something that people love to gank in high sec. The ship hull alone is around 2.2 billion ISK. The skill book for it is thankfully only 80 million.

While I can afford to buy it. Along with being able to replace it if it gets blown up with a lot of goods onboard. I’m not quite at the scale where I want to be tying up that much ISK and skill training into it. In a few months, however, that might very well change.

Final Thoughts

While sometimes I do miss when things were a bit simpler before going into manufacturing, like I have been. Where can I go out and say mine 100 million in ores and just sell it without putting any further thought into it? Without thinking, I could turn that into 130 million in end goods a week or a month down the road if I wanted.

There also comes the thought of wanting to scale with multiple accounts. They will, however, have to be Omega, and I don't want to pay with cash for it either. So, I'd need to buy Plex in-game with ISK. With that costing about 2.8 billion, if I were to go per month, it would take a couple of months before it becomes worthwhile. It seems I'll be a few months before I have the kind of liquidity to cover that kind of scaling and the risk it adds.

Information

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Screenshots were taken, and content was written by @Enjar about Eve Online.