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Sunday 18 January 2015

Started Planetary Interaction

My newest market i am entering is Planetary Interaction.

In its simplest, Planetary Interaction is is the extraction of resources from a planet and then the repeated combination of these resources, with processors on the planet, to make further products for eventual sale on the market.

The final products are mostly the POS / Sov Structures and POS Fuel.

The beauty with Planetary Interaction (known as PI) is that each of the items extracted (Resources) and all the products processed (P1, P2, P3, P4 where, you guessed it, P1 products combine to make P2 products etc) are available to be bought or sold on the market.

Therefore, it is possible to buy P3 products on the market, haul them to a planet and then process them into P4 products to be hauled back to a station and sold on the market.

Or it is possible to buy P2 products on the market, haul them to a planet and then process them into P3 products to be hauled back to a station and sold on the market.

In other words, you can make ISK from PI without actually extracting Resources from any Planet.  Think of PI as Mining and Manufacturing but on a Planet.

Many claim that PI is "passive income" - mainly because you can set up facilities on a planet to automatically extract resources + combine them to make P1 products + combine them to make P2 products all on the same planet and all this occurs when you are offline, much like manufacturing.  This can be set up to happen over a week and all the player needs to do is adjust the extractors once a week (need not even undock to do that) and turn up to the planet once a month to take the finished products to the market for sale.  Sort of like mining AFK.

Therefore, the way i look at Planetary Interation is in two parts.

Firstly, there is the extraction of Resources to be combined to make the P1 products.  This is best done outside of Highsec given Highsec planets don't tend to have a high concentration of some of the desired Resources.  This is like mining, afk.

Secondly, there is the combination of Products to make higher level products.  This can be done in Highsec and indeed this is there i am focusing with my "Factory Planets".  This is like Manufacturing.

My entire aim with Planetary Interaction is to combine P2 products i bought on the market into P3 products to be sold or to combine P3 products i bought on the market into P4 products to be sold.

In my first month at trying this (having skilled up) i made 681m ISK and in January to date i have made 555m ISK with just one alt operating 5 planets.  I greatly suspect this will achieve my golden rules of being low time usage + earn at least a Plex a month + high margin.

I will be going more into what i am doing in later posts but i note that the likes of Foo who blogs at foo-eve.blogspot makes part of his living with Planetary Interaction in Wormhole space.

The most useful videos i have found are:

The 8 minute CCP Planetary Interaction guide is a good place to start.

Two 40 minute videos by Gorthour Decievers on Planetary Interactions.  The first video deals with setting up an extraction Planet.  The second video deals with setting up a factory planet.  Excellent starting videos for Planetary Interaction.

They are included on my useful video page.

6 comments:

  1. What investment did it take in ISK to earn that? One thing I found with buying materials from the market and using factory planets was the rather large "startup" cost compared to resource extraction PI.

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    1. Three parts to the initial investment. Firstly the time taken to get to Command Center Upgrade 5 and Planetary Consolidation 4. Secondly, ISK to actually build the Command Centers, Processing Planets and Launch Pads (which is quite small). Thirdly the ISK to buy the items from the market + import / export tax.

      For the third point, the costs in December were 2.3bn ISK leading to sales of 3.0bn and therefore profits of 681m ISK. The costs in January so far are 3.4bn ISK leading to sales of 4.0bn ISK and therefore profits of 552m ISK. Decent profit margins in December of 22.8% and ok in January of 13.9%. December was mainly P3 to P4 manufacturing, January has been P2 to P3, hence, i suspect the lower margin.

      So, yes, to make decent ISK you need a good amount around to invest with if you go down the Factory Planet route.

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    2. Why not P2 to P4 factories ?

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    3. I am not too sure it would be efficient to go from P2 to P4 on one planet - though i have not carefully looked into it. Also, I have not looked into having four planets producing P2 to P3 and then a final planet taking the P3 to convert into P4 - certainly worth looking into.

      So far, i am finding that the profits of P2 to P3 are more certain than the profits of P3 to P4 which are quite volatile.

      I part, i suspect that is because of the volume of P3 required and manufacturers of P4 are willing to stock up on P3 items.

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  2. PI is a great way to make ISK without having to spend much time doing it. I spent a while making P2/P3 in high sec by buying P1 stuff on the market, the amount of ISK I made from this was pretty big.

    You could even try grabbing a few POCO's (buy them/kill them) in your hi-sec system in order to pay a lower tax rate and get a passive income from other people's taxes too.

    The one POCO I had (sold it now that I no longer do PI in high sec) paid for itself after 2 months or so. Sold it for too good a price to say no to it though.

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    1. yep - doing something with a POCO is on the "to do" list. Just on about page 5 of the "to do" list . . . . . .

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