Planetary Commodities in EVE

EVE online is a strategic game with so many options, that I am constantly reminded that I hardly know anything at all about the game. When I first started playing EVE, I was shown an image of the learning curve of EVE Online compared to most other MMORPG games. In the image, I saw a gradual learning curve for games such as World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, and Pirates of the Burning Sea steadily climbing as the gaming skill increased. As a joke, EVE’s learning curve was more of a steep cliff with people hanging off the edge while those that threw themselves off the edge landed on friendly pointed stakes sticking up from the ground. As skill progressed, a bull dozer was seen gathering up all the dead bodies in a neat little pile.

Come next month, I’ll have been playing EVE for about a year. It’s a hard game to get your head around. When you first start, you quickly find out that there is a ton of stuff that you’ll need (or you think you need) to master. With all the skills available to learn for your avatar, you could spend more than 20 years training your account to master everything. The latest addition to EVE is the planetary interaction. With all of the planets in the game, you can now build up little mining outposts on the planets to extract resources and process them into much needed materials.

I’ve torn down and rebuilt my structures several times, trying different strategies to get the most out of them. My latest strategy is just to mine one material from the planet and process it into a level 1 commodity. I’m usually able to do this with an improved command center, launch pad, 4 processors, and 13 extractors. Sometimes I have just 3 processors and add an extra extractor if I can’t get that many resources to keep the four processors busy.

Getting so many structures setup is a bit tricky, as it isn’t easy to figure out how much CPU or Power a link will take up. It seems that links take less power, if they are in a long chain. I used to keep items in a storage facility until I found a spaceport worked the same way and could hold twice as much material. I didn’t even need to worry about expediting commodities to the space port in order to launch to the customs office since everything is always sitting in the space port. At first, I even tried feeding extractors directly into processors, but that caused a lost of many materials when the processor started it’s work.

Just the other day, I was only extracting raw materials without any processing. There were so many materials that were produced in a single day, that I had to take the orca out just to pick up everything from all the planets that I had. This was the main reason I started to process them into level 1 resources. Things like water and oxygen take up less volume, so I am able to harvest resources for a few days before I have to pick anything up. This goes for everything except for Oxygen.

My corp has a player-owned structure (POS), so naturally we need to keep it fueled. In the past, we could only purchase supplies from NPC’s on the market. With the planetary interaction, I can now harvest my own fuel. So for now, launch a few tanks of oxygen to the customs station and take the drake out to pick them up. Afterwards, I set a course for the POS. There are many other types of fuel that the POS needs, but this one was the only one that I was already producing. It may be that I’ll have to change what my other planets are producing so that I can contribute more fuel. However, I still need to make a little ISK off of this as well.

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