Research

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(The Information provided in this guide was pulled from Halada's Complete Miner's Guide)

Research is the process of improving an Original Blueprint (BPO). Two types of research are performed: Material Efficiency Research and Time Efficiency Research. Material Efficiency Research decrease the amount of materials required for the production of the blueprint while Time Efficiency Research decrease the production time of the item produced. Research may also involve blueprint copying, which produces Blueprint Copies (BPC). As the blueprint is researched and copied, the materials and productivity level of the original blueprint will be copied onto the blueprint copy.

Research

Skills Required

• Laboratory Operation I
  
• Research I (5% bonus to blueprint manufacturing time research per skill level)
  
• Science 1 (5% Bonus to blueprint copying speed per level)
  
• Metallurgy 1 (5% Bonus to material efficiency research speed per skill level)

Helpful Skills

• Advanced Laboratory Operation (+1 lab slot per level)
  
• Cybernetics 5 (allows to plug in special implants that speeds up the research process)

Implants

• The Beancounter Hardwiring series

Introduction

Research is the process of increasing the ME and PE level of a BPO to reduce their production waste or decrease their production time.

Wastage is always added to the base mineral amount of what you are producing, and no matter how good your skills are or what equipment you use, you will never reduce the amount below the basic requirements. To figure out what the basic or “perfect” amount is, either look up the BPO on the Eve Database or using an application such as EVE-MEEP.

There has been a lot of confusion and many posts on the forums about what incompetence waste really is. In fact, CCP has changed the way ME and PE affects a BPO a few times already, making it really hard to understand the actual system. Production Efficiency skill says you get a 4% reduction per skill level to the material requirements needed for production, however the player guide says 5%.

According to the skill’s description, which suggests 4%, you should end up with a 5% waste with your skill at level 5 (25% base incompetence waste – (4% x 5) = 5%). However testing in games have proven you get a 0% incompetence waste at level 5, therefore the skill’s description is wrong. Regardless of what it is, you should have Production Efficiency trained to level 5 before you even start producing.

When you reach Production Efficiency level 5, you are no longer incompetent at producing, so you are not personally inducing waste onto your production job. However, as already stated, a brand new BPO has waste embedded in its design and you will need to research it to increase the ME level to reduce that waste. Note that the Production Efficiency skill (PE) has nothing to do with the Productivity Level (PE) attribute you see under a BPO’s information window. The PE attribute affects the SPEED of the production whereas the PE skill affects the wastage. Easily confused, easily explained.

You can reduce this waste by researching the Material Level (ME) of the BPO. You can see the design waste on the BPO under Wastage Factor. This is always 10% (0.1) except for some rare items that have a 5% (0.05) Wastage Factor. Drones used to have a 5% wastage factor, but apparently they don't anymore. By researching the BPO we can reduce the design waste using the following formula: 1 + Base Wastage / (1 + ME level).

Using the above formula on a BPO with 10% base wastage, we can calculate our production waste (assuming PE skill at level 5) to be:

ME0 - 10%
ME1 - 5%
ME2 - 3.3%
ME3 - 2.5%
ME10 - 0.9%
ME50 - 0.2%

As you can see, training your ME level from 0 to 10 reduces the waste from 10% to 0.91%, thus reducing the waste by over 9% in simply 10 levels, whereas training a further 40 levels (11-50) only takes off 0.7% (from 0.9% to 0.2%). The following graph can better illustrate the effect of training ME to higher levels.

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It should be clear that the more you research the less you gain from that research. How does this affect you?

A general rule of thumb used by the producers is that 30 days of research is usually sufficient.

How far do you go with research?

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Mobile Lab Information

When you’ll research either the ME or PE level of a BPO, you’ll want to do it at a POS. The main reason being the 0.75 time multiplier. Saving 25% off your research time (30% if you were smart enough to train cybernetics 5 and have those nifty Beancounter X60 implants in your head) means a lot. How far you are going to take it depends entirely of what you will do with your BPO:

Manufacturing business

If you’re going into production, then you won’t be taking your research to crazy ME levels that even Amy Whinehouse would not consider had she enough brain cells left to actually play the game. But let me explain myself further.

I will use the beloved Raven, mother of all ratting ships, as my example.

The build cost of a Raven these days, at:

ME0, is ~85.2mil ISK
ME10, is ~78.1mil ISK
ME20, is ~77.7mil ISK

Remember that graph? The more you research, the less you get out of it. This is where my “30 days worth of ME research is enough” comes from.

For a battleship BPO, with max skills (in this case, Metallurgy 5), it would take close to 27 days to research a Raven BPO from ME0 to ME10, at a POS, of course. So for about 1 month of training for the first then levels, you shave more than 7mil ISK off your production costs.

However, another month worth of research would only shave another 400,000.00 ISK, not even a million! Considering it takes 4 hours to produce a Raven at PE0, you’d need to sell several hundred Raven to make your second month of research worth it!

My personal rule of thumb for ME and PE levels for BPO I use for producing is:

ME100:PE30 for Ammo
ME10:PE5 for Ships
ME50:PE10 for Modules

This of course has been the source of many debates, which, to be honest with you, is not worth arguing for. I usually never go above 30 days except for special circumstances, which are explained later in the guide.

BPC business

A BPC business is something a lot of people do, mostly because it is a fantastic way of passively generating income. The premise is actually very simple: you purchase a BPO, research it to crazy Amy Whinehouse levels, then produce copies (BPC) 24/7.

Why is it more important to research your BPO to crazy levels? Because other crazy people did it before you, and since the BPC market is competitive, if someone has a choice between a ME10 BPC or ME50 for the same price, they will pick ME50. And why wouldn’t they? They probably don’t even fully understand the insignificant savings between the two of them, but it’s the same price, and ME50 is bigger than ME10.

This is especially important for:

• Capital Components BPC
• Ships BPC (all types)

If you intend to go for a BPC business, you’ll need to put in 3, 4 and even 5 extra months of research to guaranty a good flow of sales. A good rule of thumb, at least for me, is:

ME150:ME30 for Capital Components
ME50:ME10 for Battleships
ME3:PE0 for Capital Ships
ME500:PE100 for Ammo
ME150:ME75 for Modules

I have had a lot of success with these levels in the past. Of course it is TOTALLY unnecessary but people will buy your BPC. The higher you go from there, the better your sales will be.

Note, however, that you lose a lot of profit if you copy over manufacturing. The difference is significant. A BPC business is a great way to make ISK passively without too much effort: with just one POS, a few labs and perhaps 2 or 3 alts, you can make ISK AFK. All you need to do is log in 30 minutes each week to oversee the copying jobs.

Ready-to-go BPO packages business

This is a favorite of mine. The profit margin is bigger than that of a BPC business, and if you find the right market, you can make a pretty penny. People will pay well to save even just a month of research, much more so for a few months. It became a trend to sell BPO packages that are already pre-researched with at least a month’s worth lab time, such as

• Drones BPO package
• Ammo BPO package
• Rigs BPO package
• Tech 2 components package

A good business, if you got the capital but not the time, is to research capital components BPO, or even Capital Ships BPO. On that market, you can make about 100mil ISK per 30 days of lab time.

Example: A Thanatos BPO at ME1 will easily sell at 100mil ISK above the NPC price, and requires just about one month of research.

You can easily have 10 labs on a large POS, which is a good 30 slots of Material Level research. 30 slots x 100mil of income is 3bil ISK in income per month. One large tower costs about 175mil ISK per month in fuel in Empire space, so 2.8bil ISK in profit each month, passively generated.

Of course this entails a huge ISK investment into those BPO, but if you have it, it’s an easy way to make ISK without the effort, is almost risk-free and in less than a year you’ll be even and start making money!

The how-to part of this section

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Material Research Screen

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Pick Installation Screen

The process itself is very easy. And if you do it well, it is totally safe and impervious to corp theft.

Skill that will help…

• Scientific Networking I

The Scientific Networking skill is required if you want to research your BPO at a POS without having to physically put the BPO in the lab itself. All you really need is level 1. What this allows you to do is to lock the BPO in a corporate hangar (coming up next) so no one can take it out of there. Therefore, your BPO remains safely locked in a secure place, impossible to steal, while you take full advantage of the POS speed bonus.

To use a POS lab, the BPO absolutely must be in the corp hangar. You cannot use a POS lab from your personal hangar, since POS equipment is considered corp asset.

Once the BPO is in place, right-click as you would to produce, but choose either Material Research, or Time Efficiency (PE) Research. You’ll get a familiar looking window.

It is pretty straightforward from hereon out, except perhaps finding the POS lab installation if you have never done this before.

To do so, click on Pick Installation, to open yet another familiar window.

The trick here, is to select Corporation under type. This will show all installations available to your corporation only. Hopefully you labeled your labs in such a way you can recognize them. Look for Mobile Laboratory (or the Advanced kind) under the Installation Type and you’ll have found your labs!

Pick one, choose a free slot, then click on Use Assemblyline! Voila! You’re done!

Locking down the BPO

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Corporation Vote Screen

Locking down the BPO can only be done by someone who either has:

• CEO roles
• Director roles
• Shares in the corporation

Take note that regardless of who initiated the lockdown process, the CEO will required for the final step.

The process involved three steps:

• 1) A Lockdown vote is proposed
• 2) 24h is allowed for shareholders to vote
• 3) The CEO sanctions the action if the vote passes.

Step 1

Right-click on a BPO, and select Propose Lockdown Vote. This option will only appear if you satisfy one of the three criteria mentioned earlier (CEO, Director or shareholders).

Step 2

Directors and shareholders will receive an eve-mail notifying them a vote has been initiated. The CEO and directors will need to navigate to the corporation window via the corp button. Then find the Politics tab, Votes, and Open Votes.

As you can see here, my corporation currently doesn’t have any open votes.

Shareholders will not have access to this window. Instead they must open their wallet, find the Shares tab, right-click the name of the corporation in which the voting is ongoing, and click on the Votes option.

A similar window will open, where they will be able to vote either Yes or No.

The CEO should be able to follow the progress of the voting in the politics window, seen on the left.

Step 3

After the 24h voting period has ended, the CEO will need to head to the Closed Votes tab, and sanction the vote for it to go into effect.

When this is done, the BPO is fully locked down, and can only be unlocked via another vote.

Note: The process of voting has never been very clear to me. As soon as you propose a lockdown vote, the BPO will lock instantaneously even before the voting period ends, and if a majority of people voted yes, it will remain locked without the CEO having to sanction it.

The reverse however, is not true. If you initiate an Unlock vote, the vote will need to be favor of yes and the CEO will need to sanction the vote for the BPO to become unlocked. I am unaware whether this is a feature or a bug, but regardless of what it is, your BPO are secured and you don’t have to worry about a director going rogue and unlocking your BPO while you flew away to Barbados with your girlfriend for a week of hot lovemakin’ on the beach.

Copying

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Advanced Mobile Lab Information

Copying is the process of making a BPC out of a BPO. As it was said a little earlier, this is better done in a POS lab, due to its faster speed. If you were ever going to use Advanced POS labs, this would be the time, as it has 2 more slots and is even 10% faster than a regular mobile laboratory.

Coupled with the appropriate Beancounter implant, you shave a total of 40% off the copying time. If you’re running a BPC business, this is quite a significant timesaver.

The process is pretty straightforward. Note that there is a limit on how many runs you can give a BPC, which can be found under Production Limit on the BPO itself. Note that this Limit has nothing to do with how many runs you can make if you are building using the actual BPO.

Some copy job might require materials (such is the case for tech 2 BPO, for example). If this is the case, while the BPO can stay in the corp hangar, you will need to put the material in the POS lab itself.