Creating a Planetary Industry Alt: Difference between revisions

This is a guide for skilling and maintaining a [[Planetary Interaction]] (PI) alt character for your main account in about 12 1/2 days with the goal of earning a semi-passive, low-risk income in high security space to support your more exciting activities in Eve Online. This guide will explain the skills required, the skill plan to follow, estimated amounts of money needed to start, and some estimates of how much money you can expect to make. Although this guide will not cover the actual way to conduct PI, the Uniwiki has some well-written pages on how to get started and set up your planets. Also, Seamus Donohue of Eve University has made some wonderful training videos on Youtube, which I encourage you to watch to learn the process.

Planetary Interaction is an excellent way to make money in Eve. The skills required are relatively easy to achieve and the startup costs aren't very high. The most challenging part of PI is the actual process, which, like most everything else in Eve, can have a steep learning curve.  However, once you've developed a good technique for maintaining your planetary colonies, making a decent income from them becomes routine and fairly simple.

3. Be over quickly. The training plan is 12 days for a reason, which is that your main is losing time waiting. This is a bare minimum plan that gives your toon only what he needs to serve his Main character master.  

Alright, so you've randomized your way through the character creator, and have a fat wad of cash in your new alt's account (more about financing below). Now it's time to be careful and patient. This plan is predicated on using both remaps you'll have available. Scary, yes, but remember this toon is just for PI, nothing more. And, if you do decide to train this character further, you'll be maxed on Intelligence, which isn't too terrible. You certainly don't have to remap, either, it will just take about 14 1/2 days instead of 12.

You may note that Targeting, Signature Analysis, and Long Range Targeting aren't necessarily required, as well as Retail. The skill plan was based on using Evemon and selecting a Core Basic Certificate and Basic Trade Certificate so your character could mount the ECH IIs, some basic shields, and have enough slots on the market to buy and sell a bit. It's up to you whether you want to train those skills. As the plan is so amazingly short, I left them there in the event I decided to use my alt as a spy and trading alt. You could (and probably should) replace them with Shield Operations, if you're so inclined. If you are more concerned with speed, this plan can certainly be tweaked with High Speed Maneuvering and Acceleration Control to level II, but try to keep it under 13 days, otherwise your main may start to feel neglected, and you'll have missed the point!

If you've followed this plan, you just spent between 11-15 days training up your alt. So, first things first: Restart training your main character! (The first time I did this, I opened up Evemon to see an empty training queue on one of my mains. That was painful.)

Once you have enough money, you can simply set up all five planets and let them go nuts. A P1/P2 manufacturing plan will yield somewhere between 2500-3500 units of P2 material a month (3,600 units if you run it perfectly, assuming 30-day months). If you have set up your planets to extract balanced amounts of P0 materials, then your advanced facility should be able to run non-stop all day, every day. This isn't terribly easy, however, as you will need to occasionally tweak your extractors to not gather an over- or under-abundance of one P0 material, and not run out of a P1 product and hold up production. Regardless, the goal is to keep your advanced facility running at all times, and then sell your processed P2 materials (like Coolant, for example) once or twice a month. If you live in nullsec or wormholes, you may have to export more often due to having more resources to extract and process (I honestly don't know, I haven't lived in nullsec or WHs yet). This doesn't mean you can't make more advanced materials, like Hazmat Detection Subsystems. The plan simply considers export only and to not have to spend more isk on imports for the more advanced products. That is a financial decision you must make.

As stated earlier, this is a plan for quickly creating a character able to contribute to your overall budget needs. And what can you reasonably expect? Well, based on rough estimates of the current Eve market in early 2012, P2 products go for around 7000-9000 isk/unit. So, if you were to export approximately 3,000 units of P2 products from each planet that averaged 8,000 isk on the market, then you would see the following results, assuming 10% taxes from exporting initially:

It should be noted that these numbers will be lower due to colony reorganization, including deleting and moving extractors to the best resources, adding storage and basic production units, and clicking "accidents."  

"So how much will this cost me?" you ask? Not much, in my opinion, and it also depends. Five million isk will pay for all the skill books and leave enough left over to buy your command centers (81,000 isk at last check) and that indy hauler (which you'll need because the Command Centers are massive, at 1,000m3 a center), with some change left for the actual colony building, which runs about five million a planet (yep, that's more than five million, I'll explain in a second). If you are willing to start small, you can finance your own operation by using the sales of your first planet's materials to fund more advanced operations, and additional planets (this is starting slow, but a perfectly good plan that will be maxed in no time).  

Of course, there are an infinite number of ways to set up planets, including factory planets, which I haven't tried and would be vastly more expensive. This plan, however, calls for a simple P2 production plan. Be sure to adjust your numbers accordingly, based on how you operate.

So, do you go for it or not?

7. Dust 514 might be pretty cool.

PI can be a great way to make some extra money. The training plan explained above takes less than half a month. The ability to run five extra planets per character can benefit in both isk and industrial mats that can be used in manufacturing. The process of setting up colonies and running them is pretty low. The risk in high sec is very low. The potential of running lucrative planets in lowsec or nullsec is very high, if dangerous. The more characters you have running planets, the more isk you'll make. Like any other job in Eve, it isn't perfect, but the plan is as efficient as I can make it.