I have mentioned once or twice that I have a love/hate relationship with Planetary Interaction. More specifically, I love theorizing about PI and figuring out “optimum” setups, but I hate actually bringing up my planets and refreshing extractors and moving heads and hauling goods to market and selling them. From the time I extract something to the time I sell it could easily be 3-4 months.
My lowsec planets were all set up to manufacture P2 goods with 3 day cycles of extraction. But I haven’t exported goods for about 3 months and it has been several weeks since I ran my extractors. Everything has just been sitting there. When I ran everything regularly, I think I made about 300M ISK per month on 5 planets. Not bad, not great. With my new mobility and lack of regular base, I have been looking for a new PI plan.
This new plan is not necessarily more profitable for the work. It is short term and mixes well with my exploration and mobile playstyle. It basically revolves around setting up planets every so often (or returning to already set up planets) to manufacture goods specifically for making Ascendancy implants for BPC’s that I find at Ghost Sites.
Right now, I have 1 HG-Delta, 2 MG-Deltas, 3 MG-Epsilons, and 1 MG-Gamma BPC. I have about 300 Shattered Villard Wheels (should be just enough). The value of these components is about 350M ISk.
To manufacture all of the above implants, I need about 150,000,000 P0 products (spread unevenly across 11 commodities). If I run 5 planets extracting and converting an average of 4000 units per hour, then I can complete this in a month. The idea is to use my main to run the extraction and P1 conversion and use my low skill alt to have 2 planets with P1->P3 conversion. The value of the 7 manufactured implants is approximately 1B ISK. The final size is only 7m3 so it can be transported in anything (no hauler or Epithal runs required). After I take out my setup and manufacturing costs my PI setup should make about 600-650M isk in 1 month.
So I set up my planets (needed about 1 hour of training on my alt) and got them started on 23 hour cycles. I am not sure I can keep up daily cycles for a month, but I am averaging about 5500 units per hour extraction so I have some fluff. About half of the 150M P0 units required are Micro Organisms, Aqueous Liquids, and Carbon Compounds which are fairly easy to find. The only tricky part is finding the right combination of planets to get an even distribution of extraction of the 11 different commodities. Since I will have to extract 2-3 different materials from some planets, I will have to move my extraction/factories to different locations to make the most of the hotspots. This will help me to keep from exhausting materials from the planet and keep my overall extraction rates high though.
Anyway, I had fun setting up the spreadsheets and I enjoy manufacturing the BPC’s that I find out in space. The ISK gain is really secondary. And it gives me something to do that doesn’t require longer or uninterrupted sessions. The downside is that it ties me to 1 area for 30 days, but with the LS-LS wormholes about I can frequently go to a new area and still come back in the same session should I decide I want to do some exploration. The other upside is that this is temporary. I can leave it set up and come back to it when I have more BPC’s – or I can completely shut it down and start up new planets somewhere else if desired. I was kind of looking for the “perfect setup” that I would keep returning to, but after not finding it (and getting tired of looking), I settled on “good enough”.
Pilgrim in Exile 