April 2024

Spreadsheets? We’ve got Those

stargrace April 30, 2024 No Comments

I’ve been back in EVE Online since March 15th, and of course one of the first things I did was set up a spreadsheet to start calculating industry profits, and then another spreadsheet to calculate my total daily ISK earnings (across two accounts). We already know that in order to afford one month of game time, you need 500 plex, which (at the time of this post at least) comes to approximately 2.5 billion ISK. That means each day you’d want to earn roughly 84 million ISK in order to afford a single month of game time.

Earning currency doesn’t change much from game to game. Learning the markets takes time, but you already have a pretty good foundation if you’re already doing it elsewhere. It’s also not reasonable to expect a brand new player to be earning as much money as someone who has been around for a number of years and knows how to optimize (and who also has higher skills in the game, and higher skills in general). Most of the ISK on the main account (account E) came from industry. I’m just shy of the 2.5b mark for the month, but considering I just returned to the game, I’m very happy with those earnings. The ISK earned on my second account (S) is from selling off components of a package I got (I think I got the platinum bundle?) which included skill injectors (I sold them empty, I can’t afford to give up skills). Those numbers are highly inflated, and shouldn’t be considered ‘real’ numbers considering the lack of effort I put forth.

It does give me a nice nest egg. I’ve got a few months of game time on each account, and enough ISK to invest further into industry. I need to swap some PI around on my 2nd account, right now the components I’m making have almost zero market in my system, and while I know a lot of people adore the instant shopping in Jita, I prefer to stay away and sell slower (but for a slightly inflated price). Figuring out what sells, is the new game.

In the meantime, there are the constants. Ammo, drones, and a few meta ships. Consumables always seem to do quite well and you can really push out some nice numbers. I live in a system that happens to have ice mining, so I’ve started selling items related to that – and people are buying, even though they’re a higher price than other systems. The next challenge will be to beat this months earnings.

Fly safe! o7

My First Superior Ghost Site (sort of)

stargrace April 26, 2024 No Comments

Even though I’ve been “playing” EVE since 2009, this is the first year I’ve attempted to actually do more than just run NPC missions and explore high sec. I’ve had the skills to fly some pretty hefty ships (boosting orca, tengu, etc) but I’ve had no idea how to actually make use of those skills or what content I could actually accomplish. I’ve been afraid of ghost sites since I heard about them, and I normally leave them alone and avoid them once I’ve scanned one down – but it turns out that I could have probably handled them. There’s just one issue, I still don’t really know / understand HOW. There’s this uniwiki page about ghost sites which I’ve read through, but putting what you read into practice is a whole other thing. Here’s how yesterday went.

I found a WH off of my home system, a simple C2 with not much going on. Scanned down some connections inside, found one to nullsec (I avoid these, I feel so exposed in local I have rarely ever hung around in null) and then found another connection to a shattered C2, bingo!

Jumped in there, and I decided to take my combat probes with me first to see if anyone was hanging around. Maybe flush them out (or scare someone else) I found some mining drones that someone had left behind (yoink!) and not much else. Swapped back over to my regular probes, and found a few relic/data sites – one was a superior pirate site. Interesting!

I was terrified of losing my ship, the Tengu is expensive (I can afford to replace it, but that’s not the point). I had also removed the painter & one of my mid shield boosters (the wiki article suggests armor tank but my tengu is fit for shield so.. shrug) in order to fit the relic/data scanners. I have been contemplating crafting / buying the zeugma analyzer which is both data/relic in one, but they are SO expensive and I’m honestly not sure I want to justify the cost only to have it blown up. Anyway. I warped to the ghost site.

I did not have a cargo scanner with me, so I just hauled ass to the nearest can and hacked it. My hacking skills are pretty good, despite being ‘new’ to all of this I have a lot of scanning/hacking skills maxed out and the rest is just me learning how to play the hacking game better/faster. My heart was beating so hard in my chest! I didn’t really know what to expect. I decided to do things the easy way.

I hacked the can, succeeded at it, pulled out 90,000,000 ISK worth of loot and immediately warped away after that very first can. I know I could have tried to hack a second can, I could have probably even tried to tank the rats / explosion, but I just wasn’t sure what to expect, or when to expect it and I didn’t want to have to replace the Tengu (price tag of around 1.5b). I’m still incredibly happy with that haul, and I think I’m happier NOT knowing what was in the rest of those cans. I escaped, survived, and it was awesome.

After the rush from that site, I decided to try my hand at another site – which I’ll write about tomorrow. It wasn’t nearly as dangerous (well, it’s jspace, everything is dangerous) or as profitable, but it was still another ‘first’ and a lot of fun.

As always, fly safe! o7