This is a guide to set up colonies for Planetary Industry.
There are eight types of planets in EVE: Barren, Gas, Ice, Lava, Oceanic, Plasma, Storm and Temperate. To do anything on a planet, you need to have a Planetary Command Center matching that planet's type. These are sold by NPCs all across New-Eden. Eve-University home systems should have them avaible in the general hangars. If you are in E-Uni and have not have access yet, feel free to ask someone who has to help you out.
Step 1: Deploying the Command Center
Enter planet view
To deploy the Command Center you need to have the command center-item in your cargo hold and have to be undocked in space in the same system as the planet you want to colonize. You can be tethered or cloaked for this step.
You can access the planet view by right-clicking a planet in the overview or any other list ans select "View planetary industry". You can get a list of avaible planets from opening the "Solar System: Information"by clicking on the systems name in the top left corner and select the "Orbital Bodies" tab. Each planet has their own information page accessed by the familiar
-icon. The only game-relevant attribute in this window is the radius and the extractable resources. It also has a button "View Planetary Industry" at the bottom.
Place the Command Center
Once you are in the planet view, you can drag and zoom to see the planet from different angles. In the top-left corner are two tabs. "Build" and Scan". The scanning will be explained in Planet Scanning and Identifying valuable planets. To set up your colony you can use templates or go building-by-building.
The location of the Command Center is not overly relevant. In most cases it will not be connected to the rest of the colony and usually not used to export products from the planet. Your Command Center provides Powergrid and CPU to your entire colony. This limits how many buildings you can put in a colony. Everything takes a certain amount of CPU and Powergrid, including the links between the buildings. The Command Center itself does not need to be connected by a link for this. It just needs to exist somewhere on the planet. However, if you double-click anywhere on the planet it will center the view on the Command Center, so having it close to the rest of the colony might make navigating back there easier.
Hit submit
Once you have chosen a location, select your Command Center in the Build-tab and place it on the planet. The "edits pending" will show you the cost in ISK (zero in this case) and an option to submit or cancel. Nothing is paid and can always be changed or reverted back to the original state until the submit button is pressed. A few actions can not be done while there are edits pending.
To continue building the colony you will have to accept the placement of the Command Center and hit submit.
Upgrading the command center
A Command Center is always deployed at its lowest level. The CPU and Power it provides for the colony in this stage is very limited and hardly useful. To upgrade the Command Center you have to click it and select the first tab with the green plus-icon. Here it will show you the level it can be upgraded to, depending on the level in the Command Center Upgrades skill. To upgrade you will have to hit the "upgrade" button at the bottom.
tldr: select the Command Center from the build menu and place it on the planet. Hit submit. Upgrade the Command Center by selecting it, click on the first tab and select the desired level. Hit upgrade.
Step 2: Storage
Building a buffer storage
Input of materials has a lot of variance in the amount of resources gained in a given time. Multiple materials are imported at a time and extractor produce very different amounts of resouces per cycle. All Factories on the other hand process a static amount of resources per time. Even though the factories have one cycle of storage build in, this is usually not enough to compensate for the variance of the injected resources. To buffer the spikes in extraction some kind of storage should always be connected an extractor. If at any time a storage is full no new products can be delivered to it and the goods would just be lost at delivery. If fitting permits it is good practice to separate the buffer storage from the one for the final product to be extracted.
- A Storage Facility is the best option for extraction-planets (see below) in most cases.
- A Launchpad provides decent storage for buffer and final product if it has to be shared. It is also the go to for factory-planets (also below).
- The Command Center would be the worst option.
Bulding a Launchpad for export
At one point you will want to export whatever you produced on the planet to space to use it or ship it somewhere else to process it further or to the market. A Command Center can be used to launch goods to a can into space, but this is more expensive and can only hold 500m³ at a time. At a Launchpad you can export your products to the customs office in space around the planet. A single Launchpad will overload a Command centers CPU if its not upgraded.
tldr: Place a launchpad. For extraction planets with Command Center level 3+ place a storage facility. Put buildings as close together as possible.
Step 3: Getting resources
There are two methods to get resources to the planets surface. Extracting and Importing.
- Extracting: If you are building a extraction-planet, you mine the resources from the planet with extractors, usually refine the extracted materials to some degree and export them up from the planetary surface into space. Follow Step 2.1 for building a extraction planet
- Importing: If you are building a factory-planet, you import the resources from space, refine it with processors to one or more higher grade materials and export them up again from the planetary surface into space. Follow Step 2.2 for building a factory planet
There are hybrid configuration, that use both methods, but in most cases it is more efficient to do one or the other.
Step 3.1: Extract resources
To extract resources from the planet you need to build a Extractor Control Unit (ECU). Each built Control Unit can have up to ten Extractor Heads connected within a certain radius around it. Extractor Control Units, like all buildings can not be moved after they are built. If you want to extract in a different spot you will have to decommission the old one and build and pay for a new one. Extractor Heads do not cost any ISK and can be moved while they are not extracting.
Placing the Extractor Control Unit
Scan the planet for resources you want to extract as explained in the Planet Scanning and the Identifying valuable planets article. Select the ECU from the build menu and place the Unit with the darkened circle over the spot, where you want to extract. After hitting submit you could start setting down Extractor Heads, but it might be better to build the rest of the colony first and see how much "fitting"-space is left after for placing extractor heads.
Start extracting
To open the extraction program window either double-click the ECU, or select it and click the first icon 
. In the upper right corner of the extraction program window we can select which of the avaible resources will be extracted. One Extractor Unit can only extract one type of resource at a time. While a resource is selected the scanner automatically shows the planets heatmap for that resouce.
Below the resource selection is the duration slider. This determines how long the the extractor runs before it stops and has to be started again. The longer the runtime the less resources are extracted per hour. The duration also changes the radius of the heads and the individual cycle time that define how often resources are delivered.
Extractor Heads can be created and deleted by clicking on the dots on the left side of the program window. They can also be created and deleted by CTRL+LMB on the planet inside the Extractors radius while the Program Window is open. Drag and drop the heads in a position where the heatmap promises good results. Overlapping heads result in a penalty for both heads and should be avoided.
The lower right corner of the programmer window shows the amount of resources that can be expected to be extracted. The numbers change in realtime with the movement of the heads. Once you are happy with the placement of the heads hit "Start extraction" and submit to start the process.
tldr: Scan for a good resouce spot. Go back to Build menu. Select the Extractor Control unit. Place it on the planet, the range circle around it over the spot you want to extract.
Step 3.2: Import resources
For a factory planet you only need to build one or more Launchpads to import resources from the customs office in space. This will act like the buffer storage for the extraction planet explained in the next section. The difference is, that it needs to be periodically filled by you instead of an extractor unit.
Step 4: Processing
Raw materials (R0) produced by the extractor have no immediate use outside of PI. They can only be refined into the first level of PI-products (P1). This first processing-step already reduces volume by 75%. With this the Launchpad takes longer to fill and the colony can run longer without exporting. Refining of raw R0 resources is done in Basic Industry Facilities.
How many Basic Factories are needed depends on the amount of raw materials the extractor can produce. Too many Factories will not have enough resources to run all of the time and their fitting would be better spend in additional extractor heads. Too few will let the buffer storage fill up eventually and any excess raw materials would be lost. Each Basic Industry Facility consumes 3000 raw materials per cycle. Each cycle takes 30 minutes. So each Basic Industry Facility will consume 6000 raw materials per hour.
To balance extraction and processing might take a few tries and the setup might have to be adjusted over time. To try out how many extractor heads and factories are needed to hit a balance without paying for every change you can hit submit in the edits pending. Everything done after is not paid for and can always be reverted by clicking cancel until you hit submit again.
I recommend first setting the runtime of the extractor and putting down heads one by one as described in Start extracting. Everytime you hit 6000 units per hour or a multiple of it place another Basic Industy Facility next to an existing one or the storage. Once you can not place any Factories anymore, maximise the amount of heads. In the beginning and whenever the buffer storage is empty over-extraction will just fill it again without loosing the materials.
If you have already started extracting before, you can just try to build as many Basic Industry Facilities as you need. The Command Center might not provide enough fitting to build one Basic Factory for each 6000 materials per hour extracted. In this case the buffer storage will fill up and you can reduce the amount of heads for the next extraction to free up some fitting for additional Basic Facilities.
tldr: Hit submit. Doubleclick the extractor. Select a resource and a duration. 1) Ctrl-click on the surface to place a head and drag&drop head(s) to hotspots without overlapping. 2) After each head check Avg. per hour. For each full 6000 build a Basic Industry Facility. 3) repeat until full 10 heads are set or fitting is exhausted.
If you are not happy with the results, hit cancel in the edits pending and try again. Nothing is lost but time. Costs are only paid when pending edits are submitted.
Installing a
Step 5: Links
The links cost more Power and CPU the longer they are. The radius of the planet and the distance between the buildings are the factors here. To save on fitting for links you always want to place buildings as close together as you can. Once you built the storage you need to connect the buildings with Links to be able to transport resources from one to another. CTRL+LMB the Extractor, then release CTRL and click your buffer storage. Materials can be routed through up to six transiting buildings. It is enough to connect each new building to exact one already existing building for all buidings to be connected.
Routing the resources
If you already started extracting you might have a red circle around the extractor. This indicates a possible problem with the building. Usually this means that resources are either not delivered to or from the building. If you followed the instruction above the extracted resources are not yet routed to be delivered to the buffer storage. For this we need to select the extractor again and use the 
routing tab. Here the extracted resource can be selected with a double click that takes us directly to routing without having to select and hit "create routing". While the cursor is changed it expects us to select a destination. This can also be done by a double click on the destination or by clicking the destination facility once and hitting "create route".
tldr: Ctrl-click a building. Click an ajacent building. Repeat until all buildings are linked. Click the extractor, select the routing tab