The Lazy Wormhole PI Guide

Due to having little time for space combat, I have recently concentrated on money-making opportunities, specifically those that do not involve spending a lot of time online. One of the obvious options is planetary interaction (PI).

Now, there are many PI guides out there but most of them are either introductory or focused on maximising output and profit. I had tried the maximum output approach in the past and burned out rather quickly because it involves splitting extraction and refining and this requires a lot of hauling.

This time, I decided to try a lazy approach, minimising my interaction with planets.

This means refining on the spot and limits you to P2 products. While this means that you lose some efficiency, it allows you to leave the planets unattended for a longer time. It also requires that you operate in 0.0 space, preferably wornholes as they get the best output regardless of class while the productivity of k-space nullsec plants varies depending on security status.

The required skills are:

• Command Center Upgrades V - to put all those facilities online
• Interplanetary Consolidation - as high as possible because why bother with PI at all otherwise, but you can add extra planets later
• Planetology IV - I've heard V is even better for finding hotspots but IV is a prerequisite for the next skill
• Advanced Planetology IV - to optimise your extractors' placement
• Racial Industrial IV - to use your race's largest hauler and minimise trips
• Hull Upgrades II - to use Expanded Cargoholds II; you can rig your hauler with another character

Remote Sensing is irrelevant in w-space where all your planets will be in a single system.
If you are committed to your corporation, you can train these skills on an alt (or multiple ones) on the same account or a separate one. Like, the one where your T3 booster sits.

First of all, you need a w-space base of operations. Join a wormhole corp or, if you have a few alts or friends, set up a tower in an empty system yourself. Ideally, it will be a C1/C2 system with a hisec static connection, making hauling very easy. A C1/C2 with a C1/C2 static will also work, and will probably have less traffic.

Next, survey your planets and figure out what to produce there.
Here are your options by planet type, with lowest Jita sell prices based on eve-central data:


Note that planets do not always have good supply of certain resources, limiting your options.

Now, put your command centers in your cargohold, preferably while staying under POS shields, and start deploying your colonies. Apart from a fully upgraded command center, you will need:

• a launchpad
• two extractors (one for each raw material)
• six basic industrial facilities (for 47-hour cycles, significantly longer cycles require less processing power)
• three advanced industrial facilities (one per two basic ones)

Put them down close to each other to save on link costs and make sure everything is connected to the launchpad. Now, install the necessary schematics at AIFs and BIFs and launch the extractors. Make sure to route everything through the launchpad which serves as a buffer. Arrange extractor heads so that you get roughly equal numbers of both of your raw mats, otehrwise you risk clogging your buffer with bulky P0.

Your setup should look like this.

Such a setup will produce about 250-350 units of P2 per cycle, depending on raw material abundance, yielding you 1.25-1.75 million ISK per day if you go with the most popular commodities. This means 225-315 million ISK before tax per month for a character running all six planets. Not much money but not much effort either since all you do is log on every other day and restart extractors. Plus, this is meant to be done with multiple PI alts.

Hauling frequency will depend on your output. Having an Orca makes life much easier but with a static hisec hole I think regular industrials should be fine.

 Have I missed something here? Please tell me if so.

HML Changes Revised

CCP developers have revised their plans to nerf heavy missile damage projection.

While the 25-percent range nerf this is still going to hurt large long-range HML Drake and Tengu fleets, it looks like both ships will remain viable for solo and small-gang PVP where fighting mostly occurs within overheated and gang-boosted point range.

The ships just might have to trade some tank rigs for damage or rate-of-fire ones.

Still, HAMs are becoming an option as well. Overall, looks like a healthy change.

NERFerno

CCP has followed up on the heavy missile nerf by announcing plans to tweak ancillary shield boosters and upgrade the NPC AI, causing even more tears from some players.

I guess it has been a while since the previous big nerfs such as that of nano ships and the playerbase has become used to ships and modules only getting better.

 Some players. however, have legitimate concerns which I think CCP simply cannot ignore.

Tattered Drake

So the long-expected nerfbat has come and hit the Drake really hard. Forums are full of heavy missile drake (and Tengu) users' tears.

"Holy piles of worthless drake hulls batman!"

"Regular players never see this shit coming, are hit hardest by it. Just like when Blizz decided to nerf IAS in D3. People that live on the forums knew about it, and made bank selling equip that was going to become worthless. Millions of normal people, that just play games, and don't spend all day reading about them, got fucked over and lost almost all worth to their gear.

Changes like this are terrible for a game. Punishing the new, and casual players is the best way to lower your userbase."

"Been in eve for ~5 months, maybe longer. 3-4 months ago, everyone, EVERYONE was telling me "train drake, train tengu".
Not cool CCP. Not cool."

I remember getting my first Drake after training Batlecruisers IV. I spun the ship in the hangar while listening to the Imperial March, so happy about being able to move on to level 3 missions.

The consensus at that time seemed to be that the Drake was a newbie PVE platform and sucked in PVP, being unable to fight its way out of a wet paper bag, as someone said on the forums. Of course everybody fitted their Drakes for max shield regen and not for damage.

Then someone came up with the HAM Drake setup which traded some tank for short-range damage and could take on many other battlecruisers in a duel.

Then Pod Liberation Authority (PODLA) came up with the nano Drake, which traded even more tank for speed, damage projection and dual webs.

At some point also, nullsec alliances found the cheap and easy-to-train for Drake useful and fleets of hundreds of Drakes became commonplace.

Funny thing is, the ship itself has not changed for years, only the environment did.

So, what now for Drake fans? With reduced damage, the PODLA Drake looks less appealing, although it could trade a web for a tracking computer and get better at hitting smaller targets from a long range. One nano could also be traded for a third BCS although it would still not compensate the 20 percent damage reduction.

Or maybe something like this?

[Drake, HAM nano]
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II

Experimental 10MN MicroWarpdrive I
Large F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
X5 Prototype Engine Enervator
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Warp Disruptor II

Heavy Assault Missile Launcher II, Scourge Javelin Heavy Assault Missile
Heavy Assault Missile Launcher II, Scourge Javelin Heavy Assault Missile
Heavy Assault Missile Launcher II, Scourge Javelin Heavy Assault Missile
Heavy Assault Missile Launcher II, Scourge Javelin Heavy Assault Missile
Heavy Assault Missile Launcher II, Scourge Javelin Heavy Assault Missile
Heavy Assault Missile Launcher II, Scourge Javelin Heavy Assault Missile
Heavy Assault Missile Launcher II, Scourge Javelin Heavy Assault Missile
[empty high slot]

Medium Hydraulic Bay Thrusters I
Medium Rocket Fuel Cache Partition I
Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I

With the removed Javelin penalty, it has PODLA Drake's speed, DPS and EHP and range of about 40 km. Cap is under more pressure though. One could also trade an invulnerability field for a tracking computer to further boost damage projection at the expense of tank.

Heavy Industry

As I've mentioned before, I had accumulated a sizeable library of T2 rig blueprints and decided to put them to use.

First, I just pulled salvage and rig prices from eve-central to calculate margins. A bit later, however, I figured out that I should also check market volume which prevented me from building rigs such as Large Remote Repair Augmentor II which have great margins but almost zero turnover.

In the end, I settled on the most popular armor, shield, energy and weapon rigs and bought about 4.5 billion ISK worth of T2 salvage (I had my own stock as well) in Jita.

I was afraid to undock even a T2 hauler with so much stuff inside so I moved it out of Jita in a battleship.

Then I ran production lines nonstop for about a week and shipped the rigs back to Jita.

Selling them turned out to be the most time-consuming part. Updating orders twice a day, it took me almost two weeks to move the whole stock.

The result, however, was quite satisfying: over 2 billion ISK in net profit.

Small Fish

Sometimes when you're trying to catch a big fish you only get a small one.

A Tengu and a Proteus were reported to be in Kurniainen.

The easiest way to catch them would be baiting so I undocked my dual-rep Dominix and started belt-ratting, However, there were no signs of the strategic cruisers.

What I saw instead was a Nemesis stealth bomber who first disappeared quickly but then reappeared closer and redboxed me.

I let my armour drop to about a half while firing up my MWD and approaching the bomber. Perhaps because he felt I would explode soon, he allowed me to get within overheated scram range and that was it.


Syrias Bizniz > oh god... :D

Spreadsheets

Having run a lot of Magnetometric sites, I've accumulated a sizeable collection of T2 rig blueprints.

But I had no idea what they were worth and could not be arsed to check each one's price individually.

Thankfully, jEveAssets helped me with putting my collection into spreadsheet form.

First I ran a search of my assets:

Then I exported the results into CSV and imported them into Google Docs.

This forum post helped me figure with getting market prices via TypeId.

But of course they were all zeroes as I've been looking up blueprint prices. Fortunately, by looking at eve-central URLs I noticed that ItemTypeID=BlueprintTypeID-1, bingo!

Offset all TypeIds by -1, seems to work... Except jEveAssets has given me duplicate entries in cases where I had multiples of the same BPC. Had to clear that up manually.

Now, let's sum up those figures.

DAYUM!!!

Now I need to find a way to calculate material costs without going insane.