I was not expecting to be making such regular updates about my manufacturing plans. I, however, ended up hitting a major goal I had outlined in manufacturing in Eve Online. It has opened a lot more doors, and things are only going to get crazier from here.
Between the Crimson Harvest craziness and my preparations for the Catalyst expansion. I made out like a bandit.
Yes, you read that right, that's over 20 billion ISK. That is also not all of everything or the full story either. While I've had billions before. I've never had anything like that. Anytime I've had a “decent” amount of ISK, it was always when I was selling off a lot of stuff I wish I did not to afford to go do something like the times I've moved to wormhole space or null sec.
This time, however, I've kept all my main assets. If the risk I end up taking fails. I still have a lot of ships and abilities to make ISK. For once, I'm not limiting myself by deciding to take advantage of an opportunity.
You can now also see that I've exceeded that total amount in my monthly spending. While the amount of spending I've now done has depleted most of what one might call a war chest. I still had a few billion left over in liquidity.
What I ended up doing was spending the bulk of that ISK on Plex. Now, in the past, I've played Eve Online for years by exchanging ISK for Plex and then using that for game time. In the past, I've also done so month to month. That means I was never getting a nice, fat monthly discount. This also meant many months, I'd struggle to make much profit. I, however, enjoyed the activities I was doing in Eve Online, so not having to pay a monthly sub for the game was worth it for me. However, I wish I had done things a bit differently back in the day. I’d have had a lot more ISK when I returned instead of being quite broke like I was.
A little while ago, Omega time ended up going on sale in-game for Plex. On top of that, there were a lot of Plex sales going on in the Eve Online store. This put Plex at quite a low cost compared to what it was running at cost to buy with ISK. It also seems to have leveled off a bit. So, I took a bit of a gamble.
Six months of Omega paying month by month would cost you 3,000 Plex. If you buy the longer time amounts, they end up being discounted. The six months alone end up being normally 2,100, saving you 900 Plex. While that might not sound like a lot. That alone is about 4.6 billion ISK in savings.
Now, with a sale, there was another savings of 210 plex and around a billion ISK in savings. While not massive, this almost puts the six months of Omega at the same cost per month as a discount if you could get a full year at a time (in terms of ISK per 30 days of game time). While I could have gotten the year, there was no further discount. Also, that would not have allowed me to do what I did next.
I did not just get six months for my main account. I also activated one of my alt accounts. Sadly, my alt accounts never did have much Omega time played on them, so they don’t have a lot of skills. The one I picked, however, had some manufacturing, planetary interaction, mining, exploration, and a little bit of combat skills. Making it quite ideal for what I wanted to do with it, with those three extra characters, another account added into the mix gives me.
Out of pocket, 3,780 plex at the time ran about 19.2 billion ISK. Thankfully, I did not need that entire amount. I had around 600 plex from doing events and some other stuff on my main. That alone saved me around 3 billion ISK.
On top of that, since I had the alt account Omega before the expansion rolled out. He ended up getting 10 free plex along with my main as part of the expansion rollout. Both then used their free Plex to take advantage of an expansion deal where for only 10 Plex you get 7 days of Omega. That's quite a great deal, and while an extra week, along with my six months, is not a huge discount. It just lowers even further the amount of ISK per day getting Omega time using Plex ended up costing me out of pocket.
Along with all of that, while I did pay market rates for the Plex. I was able to buy about half of it from my corporation's CEO, who had a lot of spare Plex sitting around. So that ISK ends up staying in our corporation. I'd expect it to end up benefiting a decent chunk of the corporation itself.
Now that I have three more characters, that means I have a lot more research and manufacturing slots and opportunities. While those three toons on the alt account don’t have great skills.
There are some ways to fix that. I was able to run daily missions to get the monthly reward of Skill Points (SP). Along with Air Career missions that also reward SP. That got most of them having 9 science job slots and 5 manufacturing job slots.
This also created some new issues for me. First, I don’t have that kind of research needing to be done. Second, while I did resolve my short-term transportation issues, that is an issue yet again or will be at some point. Third, I was getting quite low on ISK to maintain this kind of operation.
This ends up being both good issues to have. As I'll admit, I've been a bit lazy about going out and getting a truckload more blueprints to research. I was also not the only one being a bit lazy. So I went out and got whatever random blueprints I did not have yet that I could find while wandering around like I was lost. I picked up extras for anyone in my corporation to have, as long as they refund me the cost of the blueprint. While that did not help with my depleted amount of ISK, it at least resolved an issue.
As far as the second issue. For anyone who is not in the know in Eve Online, on each account, you can only have one character with training skills at a time, unless you buy extra monthly slots to have further characters training. That also means that my alt account also has a “main,” and while he did not have an insane amount of SP. He is close enough to resolve things.
You see why having just one account means hauling goods back and forth. When you can have two accounts doing it at the same time. Boxing two accounts would only add a little extra time to a very long trip in either direction to the trade hubs I buy and sell at.
Now that the alt account can't quite fly the ship and the modules for it just yet. The good news is he still has his 1 million SP he got for free for using my friend invite. He also did the dailies, which will net him around 500 SP for the month. There is also an event going on where there are over 500k SP from daily login rewards. He is also the character I'm training skills on for that account.
There are also a couple of other skills I'll more than likely be adding that he is lacking before I spend 250 million to get him the ship and fitting I'm going to use. He has just enough unallocated SP at the time of writing this to learn all the skills in the training queue. Since I don’t need to go get supplies, I might as well hold off for the moment.
This also, as it turns out, resolves a whole lot of other issues for me. A lot of stuff would not have high enough profit margins by the time I'd get them made and to market. So, I just never made them. After all, my time is worth something, and it’s not exactly a short trip to Jita, the main trading hub. I get mostly the best prices on raw goods. Having two accounts hauling at the same time fixes that.
The other issue is that it’s just a long trip to Jita. By the time I get there, hit up other trade hubs along the way. Along with listing and buying stuff. I don’t always have the time to then fly back home.
In the past, if needed, I have jumped clones between where I mostly play out of and Jita. So if I needed to quickly get back home, I'd just leave my stuff in Jita and jump clone home. The issue is that there is a cooldown before I can jump clone back to Jita to then fly the ship back. With two accounts, if I know I need my main for something, I'll just send the alt account up, and it’s not like he needs to be back home right away unless I really need a certain crafting material.
Now, all of these things increase the pressure on the final issue. The being low on ISK part. The good news is, before all of this, I had quite the buildup of materials and manufacturing going on. Things like my Tech 2 production have been moving along greatly.
So while I am getting quite liquidity poor. I now have around 10 billion ISK in goods on the market. Along with a couple of billion in raw materials to manufacture. My being broke due to liquidity should resolve itself over time. On a really slow day of the month, I might sell 200 million in goods a day. During the busier times of the month, I could have 1.5 to 2 billion in sales in a single day. While that's not pure profit. You can start to see that while it feels like having 10 billion in goods on the market feels like a lot for the scale, I'm at. If the markets move up a lot, most of that could be sold in a week.
While having two accounts certainly came at quite a heavy price. The position it puts me in, along with what I already have, will allow me to leverage it like crazy. All of this is also not taking into account the use of that second account outside of just manufacturing. Where other activities I'm involved in, I can now earn more in a shorter amount of time.
Having this second account now also finishes off that goal I had of wanting a second account for manufacturing and other stuff. On top of that, both now use in-game ISK to cover Omega (sub) time, which was also something I wanted to do. I was not expecting to be doing this so early, but the past month or so really pushed things forward in hitting some goals I had.
New to Eve Online or a returning player? Use my recruit a friend referral link and get 1 million skill points on signing up or logging into your Eve Online account (can only be claimed once per account). Disclosure: I might receive in-game rewards.
Screenshots were taken, and content was written by @Enjar about Eve Online.
