Almost everything you can buy in Eve Online is manufactured by players. Thus, manufacturing is a huge part of the game. If you want to make a career out of manufacturing modules, ships, construction parts and other items you need a clear understanding of the mechanics of manufacturing. In this Eve Online manufacturing guide, I will go over all the important aspects of manufacturing and show some examples.
Blueprints and How They Work
The most important aspect of manufacturing is your blueprint collection. For every item that is manufactured in Eve Online, a blueprint exists.
Blueprints are divided into two categories: Original blueprints or BPO’s and blueprint copies or BPC’s. The difference between these two is that BPO’s can be used forever while BPC’s have a limited number of runs. BPO’s can be bought from the marketplace while BPC’s can only be bought from the contracts system.
BPC’s can also be made from every BPO that is in the game. There are also a few special BPC’s can be part of ship loot and/or rewards. Finally, BPC’s can be turned into tech 2 versions of themselves through invention. Below are examples of three different types of blueprints that you can manufacture from. Together they show all the important parts of blueprints.
Blueprints ME and TE Values
The most important part of any blueprint is its ME and TE value.
When you buy a brand new BPO from the market its ME and TE values are both 0. To increase the ME and TE values of the BPO you need to research the BPO. The highest value of ME is 10, resulting in a 10% reduction of material need from its ME 0 counterpart and the highest value of TE is 20, resulting in a 20% reduction to production time from its TE 0 counterpart.
Time per run
In this line, you can see the time needed for a single run of the blueprint. Note that this is an unmodified run-time. Your skills will push the time down.
Blueprint Outcome
Here you see what the blueprint will manufacture. Most often it is a single unit of whatever the blueprint shows, but in some cases a blueprint will give two, four and in the case of ammo 5000 items per run. So when you are doing your profit calculations be sure to take this number into account.
Required Skills
Here are listed the skills required to produce from the blueprint. For most T1 modules, ships, and ammo this will only have “Industry 1” as a requirement. But when you start to make more complex items you will also start needing more skills as you can see from the blueprints shown.
Required Input Materials
Finally, here are listed the materials you need to manufacture a single run of the blueprint. There is one important thing about this list. It always shows a number that is rounded up from the actual value. So if you are making 1000 runs of some item, you will notice that in many cases you need fewer materials than you would expect from this list. You can also see from the image above that the material needs of items vary from the simple to highly complex.
For example, the minerals needed to build a Megatron can simply be gotten by mining ore and then reprocessing the ore into these minerals, easy enough. On the more complex scale, the T2 800mm armor plate needs a mixture of a null-sec only mineral, an NPC item, a completed T1 module and a component manufactured from moon materials, and there are even more complex modules, ships, and even station parts.
Skills That Affect All Manufacturing
While these skills are those that affect every part of manufacturing, there are other skills that may be necessary to have for specific blueprints as discussed above.
How to Install a Manufacturing Job
In Eve Online, manufacturing is done from the industry interface. To open it you need to press the industry tab, which is usually located on the sidebar at the left side of your screen. If it is not there, then you need to find it in the Neocon or you can just press alt-s to open it up. When you press it you should get a screen that looks a bit like the one below on the left.
From here you can select the blueprints you want to use by right-clicking them in the list below and select “Use Blueprint”. You can use the yellowish bars to change your selections to narrow the blueprints that are shown. If you play with them for a bit it should become quite clear what they do. Once you have selected a blueprint it the interface will change to something like the image to the right above.
Now you can see the amount of time you need to complete a single manufacturing job, the minerals needed for the entire job, the total cost of the job and so forth. To change the number of runs you want to perform in a single job you just need to change the number that is underneath the blueprint in the interface. Note that you won’t get anything from the blueprint until the job is finished so select a reasonable value. The highest you can select is the number that takes just over 1 month to complete (but always at least one run).
Starting and Completing Manufacturing Jobs
To start a job you need to have all the necessary materials in the hangar at the location of the blueprint. If some are missing they will show up as red in the interface. When you have selected the number of runs you want and made sure that you have all the skills and materials for the job you just need to press the start button. Once started you then need to wait for it to complete, which can take anything from a few minutes to over 200 days.
Once the job has completed you need to deliver the job. To do that you first need to open the “jobs” tab. There you can see all the jobs you have running. If any job is completed you need to press the blinking deliver button that appears next to the blueprint listing. This will move the outcome of the blueprint into your hangar.
How to Calculate Profit From Manufacturing
If you are manufacturing items you intend to sell you should make sure that you don’t get more from the materials needed if you would just sell them directly. There are a few ways to do this and it can be argued which one makes the most sense. The one I use is to compare the total sale value of the materials needed to the sale value of the item produced.
For example, lets say I wanted to make a Megathron to sell on the market. I can easily find the price for all the minerals needed, calculate the total cost of each mineral and then add those numbers together. If I find that the minerals would sell for a higher price than the Megathron I should rather just sell the minerals or try to find something else to make. This also applies if you mined the minerals yourself. Why would you sell your minerals for 100 million ISK in the form of a ship rather than sell them directly for 110 million ISK.
To do these calculations you need a spreadsheet program, which gives rise to the joke that Eve is, “spreadsheets in space”. If you want to make your own spreadsheet you can watch the video below to see one way of doing it. There are much more professional ways, but this way is simple. You can find the item id’s mentioned in the video here.
Cybernetic Implants That Help With Manufacturing in Eve Online
There is one cybernetic implant that helps with manufacturing
Upwell Structures
This is the last thing of note regarding Eve Online manufacturing. Certain Upwell structures (engineering complexes) can have a benefit to manufacturing if the correct service modules are active. This benefit is in the form of reduced material cost and reduced manufacturing time, which depend on the service module used and the system security where the engineering complex is located.
While tempting to use, you should know that if the service module goes offline while you have a job running, the jobs will be paused until you the service module goes online again. And if the service module should be removed, then you lose the job and all the materials for that job. So be careful of manufacturing in engineering complexes.
So that’s it for this Eve Online Manufacturing guide. If you found this guide useful then please share it with your friend and allies in Eve Online. Also feel free to check out my other Eve Online Guides.