Tag Archives: PI

PI Perfection

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Sorry it’s been a while (again), family stuff. So while I do have a little time on my hands, let me take you through what is now an 18 planet PI operation, spread over 3 alts on the same account.

I took advantage of the recent additional character training time given as a Christmas gift from CCP and brought all my characters up to 6 planets of capacity, and ultimately maximum command center upgrade capacity too.

What had become apparent as time went on is that there are wild fluctuations between productivity for certain base materials versus others, so much so that one planet focused on a single type of material could potentially make as much as two planets focused on something less easy to mine.

So I took a step back from trying to make as many P2s as possible. What I realised was that with my additional planet I could make a second production planet, which could actually produce a P3 component. So my basic aim of producing a P4, recursive computing modules, remained the same, but with a different methodology.

Also, my original production planet could now produce P4s faster, and I could harvest slightly more base materials by not producing every P2 on each harvesting planet. Some planets switched to dedicated production of a single or a pair of P1s on that basis. This is how my planets now look:

1 dedicated biomass
1 producing water cooled CPU
1 producing water cooled CPU
1 producing supertensile plastics
1 dedicated chiral structures
1 dedicated biofuels
1 dedicated precious metals
1 producing test cultures
1 producing plasmoids and chiral structures
1 dedicated oxygen
1 producing reactive metals and bacteria
1 producing reactive metals and bacteria
1 dedicated plasmoids
1 producing test cultures
1 producing test cultures
1 dedicated precious metals
2 production planets

Thrilling, I know. Sorry. The overall aim here is to get around 2.5 million of P0 for each P1 product. So for high concentrations of resource such as oxygen, I can almost get that out of one planet. Precious metals planets get perhaps half that, so I need 2. Combine them with a dedicated biofuels planet, and it’s biocells ahoy at the production planet which also produces nanites from P1s and thusly produces transcranial microcontrollers as a P3 product on-planet.

The dedicated plasmoids planet was new, and may allow me to dedicate another planet to chiral structures, although their yield isn’t too bad. See how it goes. The other nice thing about the new arrangement is that I can just contract all my products to the toon with the production planets. That saves a lot of time arsing around with split contracts. One production planet then feeds the P4 production planet on the same toon, in the same system. Much tidier.

So, not exciting, but steady. I now have over a billion ISK in the bank, and no idea what to do with it. I have also ventured into Providence as I accidentally read that jump clones are available there without the standing grind I was potentially going to put in. So I may have some action reports as I try that out doing some PvE in null, although my time will shortly be limited again. I might see if I can get my non-main toons set up with research agents, even if only low level ones. Every bit helps, as they say. Have fun one and all.

The Flip and In Other News

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In Other News first… my laptop is pushing up the daisies. Not entirely sure if I can resurrect it at the moment (although the hard drive is fine), but meanwhile, I shall be the more-than-averagely Occasional Capsuleer. Wave your hand if you happen to have a vaguely Eve capable laptop you’re not in need of right now and live in the UK…

In the meantime, I have performed a spot of necromancy and resurrected my really, really old Acer as a temporary stand in. Having made enough space to make the install, it is now home to a shiny new Eve download and I even managed to make a trip to Jita and restart my PI without it blowing up in my face. I am also training up for an extra PI planet while on holiday; might as well use the non-playing time in a vaguely useful way having brought Combat Drones up to V for Kronos.

So, the Flip. This is a term I have coined for an irritating problem I sometimes run in into while doing PI and trying to make a P2 product on a single planet. Some resources on planets are, inevitably, in short supply. So producing two P1s can often result in few of one, and lots of another. Being lazy (and short on time) I do my best to balance them out to avoid surplus, but on some planets no matter how few extractors you put on, say, Biofuels, you always end up with way more than you need. The solution? The Flip.

It’s pretty simple actually. If producing Biocells, for example, Precious Metals production is likely to be well below Biofuels production. So, after a couple of weeks of producing both, stop producing Biofuels and use the extractors to pull in Noble Metals instead. Repeat this until you have eliminated your reserve of Biofuels, then Flip back to Biofuel production.

Assuming you have a decent surplus, given the disparity in resource richness, you should find that this allows you to keep production steady and in line with your other planets without resorting to importing additional Precious Metals or otherwise having to mess around with your supply lines. You keep everything on-planet, and carry on regardless. You might do this using one planet for Precious Metals and one for Biofuels, but the imbalance would still be there and you’d have to move bulkier resources around, which means more taxation.

Right. Holiday time. On my return, I’ll share a little statistic that might help with your PI planning…

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…