Planetary Interaction Revisited

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So, post holiday I have returned with a cunning plan for my PI systems.  When I first started running PI I only had my main up and running, so I trained him up with Interplanetary Consolidation V and created a 6 planet system for producing Recursive Computing Modules.  A little bit of a squeeze, but it worked quite well.

I then created my same-account alts to do more PI.  As I did that at the same time, I essentially took my existing process on my main and doubled it up.  However, they only had ten planets between them.  It still worked well, I contracted materials from one alt to the other to take down to a production planet as I essentially had spare planets.  It saves trying to squeeze layers of production into a single planet, particularly if you can’t take your command centers up to maximum.

Then along came Player Owned Customs Offices to Hisec.  Ah, the joy.  Having recently and rather miraculously got one of my own up and running I came to realise the wide range of taxation that exists on these POCOs.  The upshot being, there was good reason to reconsider my choice of PI planets.  However, I realised it was also an opportunity to look at my PI activities as a whole.

So.  6 planets on my main, 10 planets on my other alts.  16 planets to play with.  4 in Losec, that I didn’t want to switch out.  So I stuck with Recursives.  I allocated 2 planets to each P2 product, meaning I needed 12 as a start point so I could produce 2 planets worth of Recursive components.  The trick was getting the balance roughly right so that resources are harvested in about the same amounts.

My main had a production planet, as did the alts.  Now I saw I could use just one planet for production, the planet where my POCO was to offer the best saving on taxation.  I also set out to produce P2s on as many planets as possible, to compact the amount I needed to transport.  I also shifted some planets to lower taxation POCOs.  P2s are useful because even a non-maxed Mammoth can haul plenty of them around.  It also means that the production planet isn’t trying to convert P1s up the chain to a P4.

It has, admittedly, been a pain in the backside doing all this re-jigging.  But if it works, it’s going to simplify things somewhat, even though it means coordinating all three characters.  It’s doable, though, and I’ll let you know how it goes – just putting the last pieces into place right now.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed something.  16 planets, 12 for P2 production, 1 for production.  Ah ha, I hear you ask.  You’ve got 3 planets left.  Why, yes I have.  And that did give me pause for thought.  What I realised is that I could branch out to produce some new products, and also to provide more materials for my main production line if need be.  Again, not sure if this will work in the long term, but it’s another line of income.

So what have I learned in the course of revisiting PI in this fashion?  Well, it’s not massively expensive to do.  A few million per planet.  Routing is still a manual process – my advice is to go back and check if you’ve caught everything.  It’ll become obvious quite quickly if you haven’t.  If a route is being used, it gets highlighted – I hadn’t noticed that before.  Also, I can’t seem to see other player’s networks any more – I don’t know if that’s just me, or if there aren’t any…

In terms of setup, this is Hisec.  Assuming a 7 day cycle, I’m hoping the P0 materials won’t overwhelm a storage facility.  I use those as buffers, then a basic industrial plant for each resource that delivers back into the storage facility if I’m making a P2.  The P1s are then fed to an advanced industrial plant, that outputs into a spaceport for collection.  It’s slow going, but I am of course the Occasional Capsuleer and am nothing if not patient.  This approach means I have more capacity to put extractors on planet, which in Hisec is obviously a bonus.

The other upside of my changes is that I’m now based on planets that are largely around the 10% taxation mark with Customs Code Expertise at V, as compared to 20% + in some cases.  Some of them were taking the piss, basically, and you can always find alternatives if you can be bothered.  It’s not massively expensive to relocate, but granted it can be a touch time consuming.  As I happen to have time on my hands at the moment, it was something I could have a crack at.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I just need to go and see if the wheels of industry are turning in the correct fashion, and I need to figure out what to do with the last vestiges of the old system!  Any questions, let me know.  I’m also interested in the location of any Interbus stations you might know of, or any planets without POCOs in Hisec.  I’ve put POCOs up in some of these circumstances, but space is a rather big place of course…

I refer to http://www.eveuniversity.org/ for a lot of my core information on PI and would encourage you to have a nose around there if you’re unfamiliar with PI.  Until next time…

IRL Holiday Protocol

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As I will shortly be the even more Occasional Capsuleer for a week or so, there are various tasks I set myself to try and avoid complete dead time in game.  These are pretty obvious, and one I’ve failed miserably to plan ahead for, but anyway…

  • Training.  Goes without saying, but, make sure you get a decent length skill training.  I’ve experimented and even with alts on the same account you can’t rig it so that another toon starts training after one finishes.  Which is a touch harsh, but I guess if you could get basic access to your account you might at least be able to activate the training queue.  I can’t assume that, so I set enough time to allow for delays in travel etc before I can get online again.  When I return I shall have Customs Code Expertise trained up to the max, just to try and minimise my PI costs in hi sec.
  • Planetary Interaction.  As it happens, my typical resource gathering period is 10 days, so this works out nicely.  I’ve simply stopped and restarted all my extraction processes so they’re not sat idle.  Yes, you can harvest more aggressively than this, but this sort of period means I have no backlogs or storage issues.
  • Manufacturing.  Had I been more organised, I would have bought a load of minerals and just made… stuff.  I haven’t been very active in manufacturing of late as I tend to use reprocessed minerals from missions, but it’s categorically a passive income maker in terms of the manufacture time so I really ought to pick it back up.
  • POS?  I’ve never tried setting up a POS for mining, or anything else for that matter, so if you have, I’d be interested to hear your experience, particularly in trying to do it in hi sec which I believe is trickier than it sounds.  I imagine that if you fuelled it appropriately you could leave one ticking over for an extended AFK period?

Anyway, see you all on the other side…

Planetary Interaction – a Word to the Wise

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Just a couple of things I though I’d cover while they were in the front of my mind.  Like most things in Eve, it is perfectly possible to make mistakes doing PI and for the UI to fail to point them out to you.  In fairness, if you make changes and try and exit without submitting them, it will flag that.  However, there is one thing it won’t, and I suppose can’t, do or warn you about.

Failure to route.

I have made this mistake myself.  For some reason I change the resource I’m harvesting, or the blueprint a manufacturing facility is using.  Where once there was a route for the resulting product, there may now be none.  So all that product will go into a deep dark hole, never to be seen again.  Irritating?  Yes.  Expensive?  Possibly.  Avoidable?  Absolutely.  Every time you make a change, think about routing, where things need to come from, where things need to go.  The game will not do it for you – it can’t know if you want to just store output, or pass it to another processor.

A short post, I know, but perhaps a useful reminder if you can’t figure out why your end product has disappeared…