Living Next Door to Brave

We're finding out what it means to have a disgruntled former child star living next door. They visit, break your stuff and attract the attention of seriously well-equipped ne'er-do-wells.

Brave Newbies left nullsec a little while ago and some of them pitched camp in Heydieles. Over the past few days they put some of our POCOs into reinforce. Last night we showed up to repair one and they sent a few Tornados to harass us as we did so. Just as we were about to upship a cyno appeared and a Snuffbox fleet poured out: a lot of Proteuses plus a Phoenix.  We called for help from our friends in Rdraw but the most we could do was take out the small cormorant fleet that Brave had on-field and watch as our POCO went down and a new one was put up in its place. *sigh* I made a lot of money with that ol' POCO, she was a good'n.

We've had things our own way in Fliet for a long, long time. We moved in in December 2013 and haven't been seriously threatened since then. But this new combination of Brave plus Snuffbox is worrying; I guess we'll see what comes next and also if we have any friends with sufficiently big ships to push back.

Edit: Next day, the same thing happened. Another POCO came out of reinforce and we showed up to defend it...and Snuffbox's Proteii poured out of a cyno.

Billy Daniels' tweet sums it up pretty well.

I may be changing my PI setup anyway -- I've found that it's getting really difficult to buy the P3s I need to assemble into P4s.  I had set aside one planet for making P2s into P3s and that is going well enough that I am planning to expand that operation to other worlds. I think I can make more profit by having a P2-P3 operation running steadily, versus the occasional P3-P4 run.

Trading the Citadel announcement

Citadel Profits

I've signed up at evetrademaster so I can see my assets/transactions through a web site, you should do the same!

It's been a while, huh? The last two months have been almost entirely about trading and Planetary Interaction. The announcement of the coming Citadel expansion caused a nice spike in P4 PI prices, because CCP revealed what materials are needed to build these gargantuan space fortresses and it included a huge amount of P4 items. The spike lasted at least two weeks, and I was in the happy position of having a lot of P3 materials piled up -- I'd been acquiring them but hadn't been in a hurry to build them into P4s.

I pushed the P3s into the factories ASAP and built and sold them all! I have an Epithal in Jita that makes the trip to my factory planet nearby and, although I was carrying nearly a billion ISK of stuff sometimes, I never lost a ship, thanks to the cloak+mwd trick and insta-dock/undock bookmarks.

The prices of the Jump Freighters that I'd been buying (I think I had 9 or 10 in the hangar) ALL went up too, and I sold almost all of them, making 250-400M on each one.

Additionally, I've continued building several T1 rigs. I keep looking for more/different rigs to build, but I keep finding that the same small stable of products is the best. If you're looking to do T1 manufacturing, its worth building a spreadsheet, automated if you can manage that, and find them for yourself. You can easily buy the needed materials with buy orders; that stuff just floods in so quickly.  Look for rigs that sell at least 10M ISK worth of stuff per day; I've found that some items look good, but sell so slowly that its not worth it.

I was able to sell most of my datacore stockpile too, some nice profits there. I buy five types whose prices swing from under 100K to about 120-130K, sometimes hitting 150K+.

Going Forward

At my last post in October I had about 100B in cash/assets/escrow; that's now up to 145B! 45% increase in two months is a figure I'm very happy with. I had over 50B cash at one point, but I've invested that in plex (buying one a week now), and more Jump Freighters (7) and datacores; I'm down to about 20B cash plus 10B in escrow.

The PI activity is slowing down as it's become harder to acquire the input materials with buy orders. Both my characters have five planets set up, most of which do nothing now that I've cleared out my input materials. I've considered switching my setups to include some extraction so the planets will be productive, but the task is pretty daunting and I keep putting it off.

I've begun a couple of new activities: trading tags between regions (very nice, if you find the right combination!) and making Ascendancy implants. I had picked up an Ascendancy implant BPC from a Serpentis ghost site and did the math on building it. It turned out to be worth doing, so I expanded the spreadsheet to examine the profits on all levels of the Ascendancy range. I found a sweet spot, bought the BPCs from the contract market at Jita, changed one of my factories to build the P3 inputs needed and I now create one of those implants per day. I think I could expand this, as they sell pretty quickly.

I occasionally undock, run plexes, shoot dudes with my corpmates too.

My First Solo Kill!

from flickr user Stephanie Sicore

Fighting For Fliet

We have been defending Fliet from a quite determined push by the Caldari, wherein they got over 50% system control, mostly achieved during the AU/Russia prime time. It took us two to three days to get it back down to stable. During the effort I build ships for the corp, contacted galmil to ask for help (thanks Thanatos Marathon!) and joined in plexing fleets.

It was an odd fight in some ways. The actual Caldari militia pilots largely disappeared by the second day, leaving a pirate corp called Mad Pixel Collective to harass us as we deplexed. Had the Calmil left a couple of frigate pilots in system they could have actual plexed too, making our job a lot harder, but I'm glad they didn't. We tried to make the pirates lose interest by using cheap ships, mostly with warp core stabs in the lows, and running away, and I think that might have worked.

It was close to the end of this battle that I got my first kill, and its a doozy. I killed a Confessor (80M Tech 3 destroyer) in my Algos (13M, T1 beast, no links, implants or drugs)! The killmail shows another pilot on the kill, a corpmate of mine, but that was damage from an earlier fight. This fight was definitely just me and Iga Angel.  I had gone to a small plex and Iga landed right behind me. I assumed he would follow me in so I dropped my 2 Hammerhead II and 3 Hobgoblin II drones, pre-overheated and activated All The Things and as soon as he landed he was hit with my blasters, web, scram and neutralizer. I also had 400M armor, damage control II and a small armor repairer; a pretty standard solo Algos fit.

I started taking a lot of damage fast, as expected. I was orbiting him at 1500m. My friends were reshipping and my hope was to to stay alive long enough for them to arrive. To my surprise, though, once I got through his shields he dropped fast. My friends were surprised when I yelled "I'm winning! He's going down!" as I saw his structure going faster than mine, and he soon exploded. I'm very, very happy with that!

We talked about his fit on comms for a few minutes, concluding he was set up for kiting and just hadn't been able to get away from me in time because my scram shut off his MWD, and he'd perhaps forgotten to switch to defensive mode. I pulled 12.6M in loot from his hull, which is what my ship was worth; a nice symmetry there in this David and Goliath fight.

I really, really, really wish I had the video running for this fight, but it'll have to be a pleasant memory instead.

Trading

I had a huge score when someone, either drunk or with very specific needs, went on a Jump Freighter buying spree. I sold 4 JFs to them for a total of 28B ISK. The sales history for the four types of JFs show 15 of each sold that day, which must have been this guy.  I still have five left to sell, but this is a very nice start to my new investment plan of regularly buying plex instead of jump freighters. There's a principle called dollar cost averaging, investing gradually over time to "smooth out" lumps in the prices. I've started a bit heavily and bought 8 plex, but I plan to buy 3 or 4 a month.

If you have the order slots available it's worth leaving items up for sale at a fairly high price. You never know when a huge sale like this will come along. I've had some other items surprise me in the past.

I've sold most of the datacores that I'd accrued, as each flavor had a price spike that I was able to take advantage of. The latest was Gallentean Starship, which went to 150K for several days. If you're lucky you can shift maybe 5000 during a spike, so if you want to try this, maybe start with a 2-3 thousand. You can often buy them for about 100K at Jita.

Bits and Bobs, This and That

Narcotics Warehouse, India

Refuge --> Narcotics Warehouse

My main activity of late has been testing how quickly I can run Serpentis Refuges so I can find lots of Narcotics Warehouse escalations (difficulty 3 out of 10). I can then run those with corpmates or solo, or give bookmarks to corpmates if I'm unable to play.  I'm now running the Refuges with a Vexor Navy Issue; the five sentries with three Drone Damage Amplifiers make short work of them - about 2 minutes each. The escalations are up to 10 jumps away, so I take my railgun Algos there with 3 warp core stabilizers to give me a reasonable chance of avoiding gate camps. Once there I make a safe, deploy a mobile depot and put my fighting shoes on. I'll put both my fits at the bottom of this post.

Here's why I've chosen this combination of sites: Refuges are plentiful in highsec and often overlooked. They can be run quickly and seem to have about a 1 in 9 chance of escalating. The Narcotics Warehouse site has four rooms and the first can be bypassed by having a Traffic Management key in your cargo. That means anyone who probes me down and wants to chase me will have to clear the first room themselves, or know the site and go get a Traffic key too. That gives you a nice buffer of safety, unlike other sites where interlopers can reach you immediately. I think this will produce a really nice results, having a 10M isk ship producing 30-100M of loot per site.

So last night I ran two of these sites and it was a very interesting experience. I took a blaster-fit Algos Ane (a low sec island in the middle of Essence) and Aeschee. I thought Ane would go easily, but locals seemed to know and hate Aideron, naming our CEO, a present and a past pilot and insulting them. I figured this wasn't going to go well, and it didn't. They probed me down, so I refit my warp core stabs and left. They even tried to catch me on the other side of the out gate. Back in highsec I saw another Refuge so I ran it, got a nice, and quite rare, 70M Shadow Serpentis loot drop!

Here's where I had a brain fart. The route to Aeschee took me through the Genesis region; just before jumping into Villore, a know heavily gate-camped system in Essence, I decided that dropping my 70M of loot in Genesis was inconvenient (because I use public contracts to move loot around) so I'd just take it to Villore and drop it there. And I forgot or didn't care that I was not wearing my Warp Core Stabilizers. This was really quite stupid. I jumped into Villore and got caught by a Garmur and Legion. I'm just glad the 70M loot didn't survive - hah! If I'd had my stabs fitted I'd have slipped away. Next time, fit the stabs and avoid Villore if at all possible.

I was expecting Aeschee to go badly too: it's Shadow Cartel's home system and a Sisters of Eve mission hub; how could an Algos go undetected for 15 minutes or more?  Luckily my Narcotics site and my safe spot were both out of dscan range of everything in system. I ran the site (badly, as it turned out) for about 30 minutes and never saw anyone on dscan, let alone scanner probes. I picked up about 30M from this site.

Why did it take so long? The idea of putting blasters on the Algos didn't work - I had imagined the rats all swarming close my ship, but they stayed a little too far away, even with Null ammo. I had to leave at one point because I couldn't tank the incoming damage. I'll switch back to railguns for the next attempt, keep my distance and pick them off.

Fightin' 

I joined an RDraw fleet that was running Faction Warfare level 4 missions in stealth bombers, we had a slow start but eventually got rolling. Gallente pilots usually have problems running FW missions because the Caldari rats use jammers, but the jams were defeated by having large numbers in fleet. We accepted missions in a limited area of the war zone to minimize travel - five people requesting them, came up with about 20 missions total, yielding about 65k LP at the end, which I've already spent on high-grade spur implants that trade nicely at Jita if you're patient.

I also helped with RDraw attack on a Carpe Noctem Gila fleet, I derped and warped to 0 in my Griffin but got on 2 kills worth 1B isk :) We won the fight and the FC kindly directed dps ships to send 2M to each logi and 1M to each ewar, which was a nice way to do it. Next time, warp at range!

Trade

T1 rigs are making 200-300k per unit profit, up to 300% profit in other cases, and various datacores and PI items all had price spikes...I made a killing. I spent the 800K LP I earned running FW missions a while ago, and those items are all sold too. I'm pretty sure I've reached my 100B net worth target, so whee! for that. I have 8 Jump Freighters again, but 20B cash to go with it this time and the prices are healthier. I'm holding out for higher prices yet :) I also found some skillbooks to trade using eve-central trade finder - it's nice to have a trade where one of the prices is fixed in stone, since you buy them from NPCs.

I found a nice way to help new pilots: I created a buy order for tritanium in a starter system and I'm sending 5M to whomever sells to me. I figure only actual new players will be mining in the perpetual "Asteroid Remnant" anoms in those systems...though so far nobody has written back to me.

Speaking of writing to me, I got an email in-game from a pilot who moved some of my public contracts around. He wondered what the hell I was doing and was it some sort of scam?! I guess not many people use that technique :)

Fits Used

This is a very tight fit, and is the next variation I'll be trying. Downsize it by swapping the MWD for an Afterburner, 125s for 75s or removing the Salvager. Rig to taste.

[Algos, Narc Warehouse]

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Damage Control II

Small Armor Repairer II

Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I

X5 Prototype Engine Enervator

Sensor Booster II, Scan Resolution Script

125mm Railgun II, Spike S

125mm Railgun II, Spike S

125mm Railgun II, Spike S

125mm Railgun II, Spike S

125mm Railgun II, Spike S

Salvager I

Small Nanobot Accelerator I

[empty rig slot]

[empty rig slot]

Hobgoblin II x5

Hobgoblin II x5

Hammerhead II x1

--

This is the Vexor I used before getting a VNI for the job. It's almost as fast and will do fine. See my earlier posts for usage.

[Vexor, Highsec Anom Runner]

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Damage Control II

Medium Armor Repairer II

Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Tracking Computer II, Tracking Speed Script

Phased Weapon Navigation Array Generation Extron

Sensor Booster II, Targeting Range Script

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

Medium Hybrid Collision Accelerator II

Garde II x3

Hammerhead II x2

Hobgoblin II x3

Hobgoblin II x1

Hammerhead II x1

--

Here's m'new baby: 760 dps, leaning heavily away from tank and into gank. The VNI can only fit two guns and is NOT bonused for gun damage, so I went with 3 DDAs and only 1 Mag Stab.

[Vexor Navy Issue, High Anom Runner]

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Damage Control II

Medium Armor Repairer II

Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Tracking Computer II, Tracking Speed Script

Phased Weapon Navigation Array Generation Extron

Sensor Booster II, Targeting Range Script

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

[empty high slot]

[empty high slot]

Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I

Medium Drone Scope Chip I

Garde II x5

Ogre II x2

Hammerhead II x2

Hobgoblin II x1

Running High-sec anomalies for fun and profit

If you travel through high sec you've probably seen at least a few low-traffic systems that had a lot of cosmic anomalies in them, piled up and unloved. They seem too easy to be worth running and don't pay very well, so why bother? Well, I found a few good reasons; there's a lot of valuable loot connected with these anomalies and you can easily run them in 2-3 minutes a piece.

Escalations

Most high-sec anomalies have a chance, I'd say about 5%, to escalate to a more lucrative mission, the kind you'd usually have to probe down. For example a Serpentis Refuge can lead to a Serpentis Narcotics Warehouse (3/10) and a Serpentis Den can lead to a Serpentis Hydroponics site (5/10).  These have a good chance of dropping much better loot, and only you know the location!  The escalation will be between 2 and 10 jumps from the original anomaly and can be in ANY security space. If you're lucky it will be in high-sec and you can run your mission without the threat of being jumped by pirates (see Jonny Pew video on this subject).

You'll know you got the escalation when you kill the last rat if you see a pop up message with the name of the site you've got a lead to. Then you look in your Journal (Alt+J) under the Expeditions tab to see what system it's in.

I had a lucky streak a few nights ago; my favourite high-sec target systems (0.5 and 0.6 security level) were crammed with Refuge and Den anoms. I cleared them in a couple of hours and had SIX escalations for my troubles (including one in high-sec). With only 24 hours to run them, and not fancying the prospect of dragging a big ship through lowsec, I offered them to corp mates. Nobody wanted them either, so I turned to Tweetfleet, the Eve-wide slack chat. Two people contacted me and I contracted them bookmarks to the sites (I had to travel to each one first and make the bookmarks) in exchange for a total of 170M ISK. That's a great result for a couple of hours of high-sec ratting!

Faction Rats

There's a small chance, much smaller than the chance of escalation, that the anomaly's waves of targets will end with a special rat making an appearance. This would be a Shadow Serpentis or Dread Gurista or Sentient Drone, for example. They will not be hard to kill and will contain special loot -- no travel necessary for this payout! The loot will most likely be a cheap tag (<200k isk) and 1000 rounds of faction ammo (e.g Shadow Iron Charge S), or Drone goo which isn't worth much. BUT I've also had three shiny drops, so the odds are you can find them too - I got a Serpentis Warp Scrambler (100M), a Rogue Drone 46-X and 43-X chip, which can be turned into an Astero BPC and Stratios BPC respectively. Or, y'know, sold for 65M and 235M instead. These happened during, I'd estimate, about 70 anomalies over a couple of weeks.

Loot and Salvage

At first I was very thorough about cleaning up these sites, hoping for a chance for valuable loot from the regular rats, but it never happened. Each Refuge or Den is worth about 200-300K in salvage and loot. The best item was a BZ-5 Caldari jammer, of which I found a few, worth about 300K. Drone sites such as a Gathering (4/10) are worth about 500K in salvage. After a while it didn't seem worth the time, but the most efficient way to do this, if you must, is to bookmark one wreck in the middle of the wreck field as you fight through all the sites. Then switch into a salvaging frigate with a Mobile Tractor Unit, salvage drones and salvagers. Warp to each bookmark in turn, and use the MTU, drones and salvagers as quickly as you can. Pro-tip: press "F" with NO targets locked to let the drones repeatedly find their own targets. You can also lock the farthest-away wrecks and force them to go out there, leaving the wrecks closest to the MTU for you to salvage.  If you have multiple MTUs, just drop one at each site and loop back to the first one for salvage and pickup. I'd assumed the Medium wrecks would have a better chance of good loot than the Small wrecks but that doesn't seem to be the case.

What Ship Did I Use?

This is a railgun Vexor with sentry drones and a flight of light drones in case the rats get close. You warp to 30km on the anomaly, deploy sentry drones then start shooting and DON'T MOVE! The light/heavy missile batteries will hit you hard a couple of times but they're your first target and will die fast. The rats will be around 30km from you, plus or minus 10km. It's a matter of luck how far you'll be from them; most of the time it's around 30km, but if it's 20km that's a bit too close; try and move away to about 25-30km before stopping. When you're standing still your rail guns will do a lot more damage...I think it's double what I was doing when I was orbiting my sentry drones.

The italicized items should be tech 2 variants if you can use them - I used meta versions because that's what I had lying around in hangers. I've never actually EFT'd this fit; it just sort of grew and evolved; hence the mix of armor and shield tank :)

Honestly, the fit is probably still TOO defensive; one by one I'm changing it by removing defense modules (ENAM, armor repair) and adding offensive ones (tracking/damage enhancers). The rats in these anoms are weak and your best defense is a good offense; kill 'em quick. The guns will hit (for me) between 18-38km (antimatter) and 25-40km (Uranium). The Gardes will hit between 18 and 48 km. This covers 99% of what you'll need, and you have Iron ammo (55km optimal) for the long-range shots and the light/medium drones in case the waves of frigates get past your defenses.

You'll never be scrammed or webbed, and most of the time you won't reach armor damage. I've gone with tracking speed scripts instead of range increase. The sensor booster speeds up the process of locking targets, which is handy because you'll be chewing through them fast. I have the drones set to Aggressive and unchecked Focus Fire, so they can spread damage if they want to.

If a number of rats get closer than 18km or so, pull your sentry drones in (it will be instant since you're right next to them) and deploy your light/medium drones. Move away if you wish, and let the drones clear the threat. Once you're safe you should recall them, stop the ship and deploy the sentries again.

The rigs are what I had previously installed on this hull for a different fit. I think I still need the Overclocker, but the armor pumps would probably be better replaced with offensive rigs instead.

[Vexor, Vexor]

Damage Control II

Magnetic Vortex Stabilizer I

Medium Armor Repairer II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Tracking Computer II

Limited Adaptive Invulnerability Field I

Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Alumel-Wired Sensor Augmentation

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun

Medium Trimark Armor Pump I

Medium Trimark Armor Pump I

Medium Processor Overclocking Unit I

Hobgoblin II x4

Hammerhead II x3

Garde II x3

Uranium Charge M x3365

Antimatter Charge M x2398

Optimal Range Script x2

Tracking Speed Script x1

Iron Charge M x2000

You could experiment with variations; for example make it work at 50km with different sentry drone and ammo, then warp to 50km on the anomaly and see what happens.

First Experience with Wormhole Combat Sites

I had a great time with my Aideron Robotics corpmates last night! We run regular "Money Monday" fleets, where we look for PvE content and hope for sweet loot drops. It's a good formula and I'd encourage other corps to try it too.

You scan down all the signatures you can find and make corp bookmarks for the combat sites that are worth running. If you find a wormhole that doesn't have a recent history of activity (i.e ships getting blown up), probe down all the sigs inside it too. We even check where the exits go to in case there's good content there.

We used a Dominix battleships with remote armor reps, an Oneiros for more reps, Exeq Navy Issue and a couple of other ships. It was the first time I'd actually flown my Dominix, so the fit needed a little tweaking between sites. It was actually quite a juggling act to attend to the health of my drones, repping my fleet mates and dealing damage to the Sleepers...I was a bit awful at first and lost five drones pretty quickly. But I only lost another two through the rest of the night and got the hang of pre-locking them all, plus staying still in space so I could pick up my sentry drones as needed.

We only netted about 250M for the night, which wasn't great considering we did about ten sites in the wormholes and two Serpentis Phi Outposts (difficulty 4 of 10). The Outposts both let us down terribly: a meta 4 warp scrambler and an ordinary 200mm railgun! That was a surprise.

It was a nice way to spend a couple of hours, chatting with corpmates, and learning some new ship/drone management skills.

--

On the trading side, my Jita character is having a lot of success! I've sold two of the four Nomads I had, for 6.5 and 6.6B. There's been a nice spike in T1 rig and Planetary Interaction prices, so I've been cashing in on that.

Mixing It Up

From flickr user lintmachine

I tried some new solo activities in the last couple of weeks, including learning how to navigate wormholes, spending time in Nullsec (Venal region, Guristas NPC space) and trying to be a ninja-salvager in Osmon. Osmon is a mission running hotspot, where I never saw less than 70 people in local. They're mostly there running level 4 combat missions for the Sister of Eve and many of them don't bother salvaging or looting.

What these activities have in common, I've found, is that I like activities that have a small chance of a big reward, for very little risk. For some reason, at the moment, I like playing it safe!

Wormholes To Nullsec

It took at least eight wormholes before I found a connection to nullsec, so if you're going to try this method, be patient. I took a Helios out there into the ever-changing maze, and it was a weird feeling when I first logged off in one, knowing my route back to my home system of Fliet was gone.  But I pressed forward, using wormholes.es  as a reference. My nullsec exit was 20 jumps from Venal, but a look at the map revealed that the route there was, statistically, quiet. I made the trip there without incident (noticing, by the way, how many combat anomalies were around), found an NPC station, docked and jump cloned back to my main clone in Fliet.

Over the next week or so I jumped back to the Venal clone a couple of times, where the streets are paved with pirate relic sites...or so I thought. Despite combing through the backwaters with the least number of jumps I found only one site in about five hours of exploration. Clearly the few people in this area all have the same idea. What I saw the most of was combat sites, both in anomalies and signatures (the ones you have to use probes to find).  If you want to make money in Venal I would recommend taking a combat ship out there and running the anomalies.  I gave up on the area, though, taking my Helios into the first wormhole I found and getting back to Fliet.

My nullsec itch has been scratched and I don't see any reason to head back out there, not solo anyway.

Cosmic Anomalies

I've taken to running highsec anomalies on both my characters, mainly as a short, easy combat activity. They are 3/10 or 4/10 difficulty and you have a small chance of an escalation to things like a Guristas Scout Outpost or similar. The escalation may be in high-sec too, where they don't "naturally" occur, so it's a nice opportunity for a better reward. Johnny Pew just made a great video about this. The occasional Dread Gurista (or Shadow Serpentis) will appear in these ordinary anoms, and drop more valuable loot. 

If there's someone else in the site already, which can happen, I leave it to them. Other pilots are not so polite :) I'm not sure what the Eve-etiquette dictates here, but I'm fine with them staying; it's not a big deal to have some competition.

Osmon

In the spirit of looking for easy activities with a small chance of a big payoff, I turned to the Osmon system, six jumps from Jita and home to a Sisters of Eve level 4 combat agent. I'd seen it mentioned on reddit/r/eve as a good place to try ninja salvaging, wherein you invite yourself into someone's mission (via combat probes) and start salvaging their wrecks. If they are feeling generous, they may also abandon their wrecks and leave the loot in, so you can harvest the contents.

It occurred to me that asking permission was easy and risked only social embarrassment. With 150 people in local chat, I asked and got lucky right away! A Russian guy invited me to fleet and told me to warp to him. I entered the deadspace pocket as he was leaving, trusting his assurances that the rooms were clear and indeed they were. I picked up a couple of million in salvage and had a nice chat with him.

The next guy I had to find the old-fashioned way. I combat-probed a battleship down, one that was well-above the plane of the solar system, and warped to him. Surprisingly there was no acceleration gate. I tried to open a chat with the pilot who was there. He rejected the conversation...but all the wrecks turned blue! I thanked him in local chat and returned a few minutes later to pick up about 5 million in loot and salvage.

That was my last success, though. I was unable to find any other willing salvage donors, and the next three guys I scanned down salvaged their missions themselves. As I headed back to station to log off, though, I'd shot myself in the foot. I found one unlooted wreck at a site I'd bookmarked. It contained about 500K of loot, but I'd be suspect for stealing it. "I'm docking up anyway...it'll be fine." I thought. I looted the wreck and warped to the SoE station...where I saw a blue cargo container labelled "wreck location bookmarks" 10km off the undock! Unfortunately I was already docking, had 10M of cargo on me and really need to log off. Drat, a missed opportunity.

I did, however, have a lot of fun talking with the locals, and one guy sent me a nice donation, possibly for the entertainment value I'd offered. I ran a sales pitch from the "Space Litter Removal Service", which got some replies, but no offers, and we talked about web comics (xkcd and The Oatmeal).

The main thing I picked up, though, was some trade opportunities. I looked over the local market, figuring that with hundreds of mission runners there, they'd need some supplies. I found one good trade already and I'm looking for more. It's my first experience with trade between systems, and so far, so good.

Other Stuff

I finally sold a Nomad! I've written over the past few months about how I have an enormous sum tied up in 6 or 7 jump freighters, just as their prices went south. Well, the Nomad market is finally stirring and the price is close to 6.7B. I sold one and I'm holding on to the others, since there are very few sellers and there's potential for a 7B+ price to be reached. My three Arks, sadly, are still going for only 6B, which is less than I paid for them.  

My PI and datacore trades are doing well, and the wallet balance is now 23B. I'm aiming for a 100B isk total value before the end of the year...I'm around 85B isk now.

My Eve Weekend

My wife and son went out of town for a few days, which gave me two evenings and a weekend to play a lot of Eve. I had planned in advance what activities I wanted to focus on: PvE in combat sites, with the hope of getting an expensive loot drop at the end, pirate relic sites in wormholes or nullsec, and level 4 faction warfare missions, since my militia was in tier 3 and the loyalty point payouts came with a nice 75% bonus.  I also wanted to join my corps regular fleets and go out and shoot spaceships!

tl;dr I ran some sites with corpmates, flew with our fleets, did three rounds of FW missions, lost a 500M ISK Proteus and spent some time in wormholes.  I found very few pirate relic sites and the constant possibility of getting jumped by someone (which happened once, though I escaped) was a bit too much to want to repeat.

Vacation in dark places

Ace Rimmer - what a guy!

I'm on vacation with my family this week, so I thought it was a good time to get one of my main's clone into an exploration adventure. I put a couple of cheap probing implants in his head, jumped in a Helios and found a wormhole. I'm torn between running pirate relic sites in C1, C2 and C3 wormholes vs the same thing but in nullsec. I think I'd prefer nullsec, since I'll definitively know if anyone is in the system with me, thanks to the local channel.

It took me a couple of days (just a couple of hours of play time though) to get out of the first wormhole, since all the exits closed while I was out with my family.  The locals were very helpful, letting me what system their lowsec static had re-opened upon, but I was already in the next wormhole, searching for that elusive nullsec exit. I did actually start to run a relic site in this hole, but warped away when an uncloaked stratios warped in.

I've scanned five wormholes so far and found no exits to nullsec. This may not be as easy a way to get there as I'd hoped. I believe CCP recently reduced the number of wormhole-to-nullsec connections, to prevent their fleets from easily using them as shortcuts.

Being stuck in chains of wormholes means I also can't jumpclone back into my "main body", which is sitting in Fliet. If I can't get to nullsec soon I'll take the first exit that lets me find a station at which I can dock, then jump clone back to Fliet.

I found one wormhole today with three pirate relic sites: exactly what I'd been looking for! Sadly, my risk aversion told me that, with the killboards showing explorer ships being ganked there today, and a high-sec static exit, this probably wasn't a safe place to risk running relic sites.

--

August 5th

Success! I made the 21 jump trip across nullsec to the Venal region, docked up and jump-cloned back to Fliet. I had looked at the system map and it said there was almost zero activity along the route, so I took my chances and jumped. Only one system had anyone else in local, so it was an easy trip. Later I plan to jump clone back out there at probe/run relic sites.

It was kind of awesome to see new (to me) anomaly names, and find that they included maximum difficulty combat sites such as "Drone Horde", just sitting there un-run. I guess its true nobody runs drone sites.

* I tried to find a picture of Arnold Rimmer on vacation, touring the diesel engines on Red Dwarf, but couldn't find one :( Internet, you have failed me!

Asset Rich, ISK poor

From flickr user NoHodamon

Hi everyone, I'm back! I wasn't doing enough of interest to warrant posting, but that's changed and Ima start posting again. I have a long video of a fun and busy 3 days of Eve I played a few weeks ago. It's edited but needs a voiceover.

Trading

I seem to have found a small flaw in my trading plans: I'm doing a lot of "buy low" but opportunities to "sell high" are few and far between. As the price of Jump Freighters drifted downwards I acquired them for 6.3B or less. I assumed that the price of each would drift back up to around 7B, as they have all done regularly over the past six months.

Sadly no.  The prices just continued to drop (except on the Rhea, which I wasn't able to acquire)...and I now own eight white elephants. 4 Nomads, 3 Ark and an Anshar, which I picked up last night for just 6.1B.  When I checked the fuzzworks manufacturing calculator it says these ships cost 9-10B to make....how are they selling for 6B?!

My liquid cash is less than 300M, but I have an enormous amount of goods that I could sell: Eve estimates the JFs are worth 51B, my trade hangar stands at 19B...that's the bulk of it.

I got into this predicament by having a high resistance to selling something for a low price...I'd rather hold it and wait for the price to go back up. This was ok when I had more ISK to invest than I could easily spend, but that time is past.  I spent my last chunk of ISK on some cheap PI material and now I'm in danger of missing other bargains if I keep my stock. I now need to be aggressive in selling off what I have, starting with the items that will sell fastest and still make a profit.

I'm hoping that Fozziesov will spark something in the market that pushes the JF prices back up, and quickly. Changes in the Caldari-Gallente faction warfare system might help push datacores back up to 125-150k, where I'd see a tidy profit.

Update on 7/20/2015 - Good news! I sold my Anshar for 6.37B, amid fierce competition. In addition the price of several datacores spiked to 150K and higher and I was able to sell several thousand of them. The wallet is now fat and happy at almost 10B, the trade hanger is around 16B and I plexed my account.  I also asked a question about the cost of building jump freighters. The answer was about 7.3 - 7.4B ISK, which leads to the question "why are they almost always sold for far less than that?"

Exploration

I've dipped a toe into wormhole exploration, looking for relic sites - no luck yet, but I have completed Archaeology V and thus I'm able to use a tech II relic analyzer. This should make relic site running a lot easier. My plan is to get a clone out to deep nullsec, via wormholes, and see what I can find out there.  I've run a few low-sec combat sites with corp mates and the rewards can be great, plus you get to socialize which is always a reward in itself.

Life Speeds Up

Life Speeds Up...then it goes away

Faction Warfare Missions

I've had a productive couple of weeks lately and I think there's enough material to tell a story or two. I have been out with friends and run Level 4 faction warfare missions, earning about 360K lp in two sessions, totalling about 5 hours. The second set of missions we run seemed to be cursed from the start: my friend undocked his Proteus and the Eve server crashed. When he logged back in he found himself on the station undock, but luckily nobody had attacked him. We set off on our route and suffered two more disconnects. Most of the first missions were mine and we happily blasted through them, noting how quiet the systems were. "I've probably jinxed it now!" said my buddy.

Yes. Yes he had.

When we warped to his mission in Asakai he found a Succubus on the gate, waiting for him. He got scrammed...I landed just behind him and jumped into the mission. I wondered if he could use the acceleration gate too, but it seemed that being scrammed prevented him jumping in with me. I pressed ahead, getting into the field of rats, wondering if I should bounce out and go help my friend.

As in many engagements, the question arises, "whose friends will get here first?"...presumably our attacker had allies coming and we had nobody...but wait! Who just jumped into system?! X Gallentius, a well-known Galmil FC. I quickly convo'd him and asked if he could help. He said yes and we waited...my friend's armor was going down and a Pilgrim had landed to help the Succubus. He was being neuted too, and it was starting to look bleak.  Still no sign of our blue buddies landing.

Into structure and a couple of galmil began to arrive, but it was too late. The Proteus turned to wreckage, but the Succubus and his friend were scrammed and destroyed. The gal-bros were kind enough to send some ISK to my friend to help pay for his next ship.

My luck held and I completed my sixth and final mission on my own and headed back home, where we turned in our missions and collected our reward.

Jita Trading and PI

My Jita alt has added some Planetary Interaction skills so I could take advantage of a low-ish tax rate on a good set of POCOs I found near Jita. I did a little math and found a setup that I think will work. I screwed up my first batch and sold them for one-tenth the cost I was looking for, but I'll make that back shortly. I'm using the Customs Code Expertise to lower that tax rate even further. I'm sticking with the same setup I have in Fliet, buying level 3 PI materials and producing level 4s. I could have tried going from level 2 to level 4 but that's frankly more logistics that I care to deal with. Three-to-four will make me about 80-100K profit per unit produced, which I'm perfectly happy with.

The jump freighters I bought are on the verge of returning to higher prices so I can finally sell them. It was an interesting experiment, but too slow to be worth it. I'm going to return to the quick flip, even if the profits are lower.  Some of the other items I've been stockpiling have just had a nice price spike so I'm trying to offload them now.  I've also written a piece of software that will be capable of watching that information for me, when I get around to writing that part of it.

Undocked

Suit Up! From flickr user Tom

The stars aligned and I spent three glorious hours zipping around Oto, helping pew-pew 51 Templis CALSF ships into dust before losing my Catalyst (3M isk ship with 16M loot in the hold...smrt!). Our fellow Gal Mil corp "Rapid Withdrawl" put together a sizeable fleet of cheap but effective Catalysts and we cut through their even cheaper Cormorant/Kestrel/Merlin fleets, with the odd

We close a few plexes and kept our eyes several pirate Snuffbox capsuleers that harassed both sides. They dropped fighters on us a few times, giving us the chance to kill a couple of these super-drones. They were using the soon-to-be-history "Skynet" technique, which I'd never seen in action before. Unfortunately our fleet booster lost his 400M links ship, a Loki, but in fairness Snuff also kill the CalMil booster ship too, a few minutes later.

I tried repeatedly to get my video software to record but it was in flaky mode and insisted that it couldn't. Dang it.

I'm starting to tire of industry a bit, but I've begun writing a program to help me find the juiciest opportunities. Eve Online has an extensive API that allows programmers to access price data, so I'm doing what hundreds of people have already done: write a glorified spreadsheet that will identify stuff selling cheap/expensive etc. I'm using Delphi XE7, a language for which no shared libraries exist (AFAIK), but it's been easy to write my own after having watched several videos on REST/XML support in Delphi.

Final February Profit Report

Meh. Not so hot. With all my knees-bent, running-about-advancing behaviour I didn't do much trade at all. Eve Mentat says I made 1.8B ISK profit. 650M in Jump freighters, 470M in rigs, 300M in datacores and the rest spread across other categories. My financial picture is bit muddied by increased item swapping between characters, but its small scale enough not to chase up...just a quiet month for trading.

Jump Freighter prices have been less profitable, but they're cheaper, on average, than they were in the last couple of months. So I'm trying something new; I'm buying them for 6.3 to 6.4B and waiting for the sell price to drift up towards 7B, which they all do over time. It's a bit riskier since my isk is tied up for longer, but I think that low price is a good point to get in. At the moment I own 4 (I sold two of the ones I bought earlier this month, but bought more.) And there's still 13B of stuff sitting in the hanger. A lot of the apparel I bought has dropped in value, so I'm waiting for spikes to get rid of it...that's not a great idea, actually. If I sold it for what I could get for it now, I'd be able to buy another couple of jump freighters.

But I had fun running chained distribution missions to increase my Caldari standings. My broker fees at Jita went from 0.54% to 0.34%. When I buy and sell a 6.5B Jump Freighter, that's 100M instead of 130M...I'm still paying 0.9% taxes, which I can't reduce without a 13 day train to Accounting V.

I also bought some new ships for my main to pootle around in. A blaster fit Proteus, for running level 4 faction warfare missions, and Asteros for running relic and combat sites. I took my first short dip in a wormhole in a Helios and survived a gate camp, and learned how to use the cloak/mwd trick. Oh, and I helped in the final push to recapture Heydieles for the Gallente.

Level 4 Agents Unlocked

Finally unlocked all level 4 Caldari agents

Missions

I reached another milestone, completing the last storyline mission I needed to push my Caldari State standings over 5 (5.18 to be exact), thus making all Caldari level 4 agents available to me. I ran a few level 4 distribution missions just to get a feel for it: they pay about 500 LP and 200-300K ISK each, and require up to 7000 m3 of cargo space. I've found a loop of systems around Hirtamon, 2 jumps from Jita, and doing all the level 3 and 4 distribution agents there will be a nice sideline. The level 4 agents tend to want to send you further away, though, so remember to ask twice if the first offer's destination is too far away. If the second offer is bad too, just click the Delay button and wait four hours - no standings hit :)

You can see from the picture that the storyline missions came pretty quickly; I did six of them on Feb 15th alone. Those include level 2 and 3 missions...remember, you get a storyline mission for every 15 regular missions at each difficulty level, regardless of which corp you run them for.

Jump Freighters

The jump freighters are all tradeable again, with a 300-400M gap between the buy and sell orders. With my broker fees reduced from 0.54% to 0.36% (thanks missions!) I'm saving about 20M in fees on each flip. So I currently own four, one of each model! They're all listed for sale, but the sale is usually slower than the buy.

First Wormhole Visit

I finally made a trip into a wormhole - there was a class 2 entrance in Fliet so I got my exploration Helios and went a-scanning. I'd always wanted to try the nullsec relic and data sites and since CCP added them to wormholes a few months back I'd be able to do so more easily. I'd read a couple of guides to handling wormholes, so I knew to d-scan a lot and also bookmark the entrance and any exits I used. I checked who owned the POCOs in the system and looked up their corporate zkillboard, and did the same for the wormhole itself. Not much activity in either place, so I was probably safe.

I found and started a data site, but quit halfway through: the loot was worth very little...about 500K from 3 cans. I kept probing the system and found a relic site...15M ISK, that's better! I'm going to follow the advice I've read recently and remove the data analyzer, replacing it with a rangefinding midslot module to make the probing go faster.

On the way back to my home station I flew through what I heard described on corp comms as "an instalocking gatecamp" - my Helios wasn't caught, thanks Cov Ops Cloaking Device!

Boosting Standings Through Distribution Missions

• The Jump Freighter trade that has been so lucrative for me has dried to a trickle; I haven't successfully bought, let alone sold, one this month.
• Planetary Interaction is also minimal this month.
• I've added Small Energy rigs to my manufacturing rotation, make for ~15K, sell for 60-100K.
• I skilled up to running 9 production lines at once.
• I've bought a Proteus and some Asteros and can, time allowing, go run some level 4 faction warfare missions and small exploration combat sites.

My Distribution Mission Layout (approximately)

Why Run Distribution Missions?

Those are the bullet points for what's happened in the last couple of weeks, but the area that's been the most fun is running Level 2, then Level 3 distribution missions in order to raise my standings with the Caldari State, which I'm doing to try and cut my tax/fees bill, currently running at 2-3B ISK per month! Prior to doing these missions, my broker fee was 0.54% (it's now 0.46% after maybe 8 hours of missions). The Caldari Navy corporation, which owns Jita, already loves me lots (7+), so boosting my Caldari State standings (it was 2.7) is the most obvious improvement I can now make.

Faction standings are more than twice as important (says Eve Uni wiki) as corporate standings when it comes to determining your broker fees, so you want the Caldari State to think you're the bees knees. You can most easily raise this by running 15 missions of one type and level (i.e 16 level 2 security, or 15 level 3 distribution) for agents of ANY (ANY!) Caldari company. The company doesn't matter, do 'em all.  When the 15th is completed, a Storyline Agent will contact you and offer you a "mission which will greatly impact your faction standings." This is the juice!

The missions are easy; so far I've seen "Clear The Path", killing three easy waves of Gallente ships (done in a Rapid Light Missile Caracal), Materials of War (buy and deliver 10,000 Omber). I've done each of these several times and my faction standing is now 3.8.

Many people will advise you to track how many missions you've done, and make sure the last mission is near a Storyline Agent, because their missions give a big boost to your standings for the Storyline Agent's corporation too. I was less interested in that, so I didn't bother tracking; I just chewed through as many missions as I could.

So I bought a Nereus hull, equipped cargo optimization rigs and Expanded Cargohold IIs, learned the MWD+Cloak trick and brought up the Agent Finder. I set the Faction filter to Caldari, mission type to distribution, and went to the nearest cluster and picked up missions.

Backtracking a little: I've already done some security missions, but its been a slog. Each one takes a while, and though you can accept more than one at a time, you can only been in one mission site at a time, shooting one set of rats.  The nice thing about distribution missions is that after accepting three, four, five missions and setting off on the journey, you're working on all of them at the same time! And when you dock to deliver one cargo, you can often pick up another at the very same station! Put simply, you can do a lot of these missions, and quickly. In four hours of play, I received and ran THREE storyline missions. This raised my faction standing from 2.7 to 3.1, which unlocked all the Level 3 Caldari Agents.

Shaping The Cloud

You want to avoid accepting missions that send you too far out of the way, and I also prefer to avoid low-sec deliveries, which carry greater risk but offer no higher reward. My Nereus carries about 15km3 of cargo (soon to be more), and Level 3 missions require cargo between 1800 and 4000m3 each, so I'm usually working five or six missions at the same time. In my experience (hah!) a Level 3 Caldari distribution agent is never more than 1 or 2 jumps away.

When you talk to an agent, look at the delivery point. If its on your current route, take it: easy decision there. If not, make a note of current length of your route. Then right-click the deliver system and Add Waypoint. Then click Optimize (you're going to be using this button a lot!) If the length of your route changes by more than 2 or 3...meh...if it changes by 4 or more..that's a long way to go for just one guy.  Are there more agents along the way, and do you have the cargo space to pick up more? The more full you are, the more you want the delivery system to be very close to where you're already going. You ain't got no time to go wandering off your route for a single delivery.

With each agent you get two bites of the cherry; you can decline their first offer. Here's the new trick I just learned. You can talk to them again AND "Delay" the second offer if you don't like it. I used to never Request Mission a second time because I thought I'd be obliged to take it or have to Decline, thus taking a standings penalty. But you can safely ask again, then click "Delay" if you don't like it. The mission offer will eventually (a week later) expire and you'll get an email from the agent expressing disappointment, but you'll not be penalized. Or you can wait four hours and safely decline the mission.

The Agent Finder (I've mapped Shift-Alt-F to it) won't indicate if you're carrying cargo for an agent, so keep the journal handy (Alt-J) and make sure, before fly to talk to an agent, that you're not already working for them!

Ignore the fact that you'll miss out on most of the bonus payments; you're probably doing this for standings, not for the ISK or even the loyalty points.

Safety and Mistakes You Might Make

The stuff you're carrying is mostly worthless, but gankers sometimes kill industrial ships for the lolz. You should learn the Cloak+MWD trick, and use it if you see any combat ships at the gate when you arrive on the other side..I saw a surprising number of Tengus that just sat on the gate. Most of the time, however, I've seen mostly industrial ships or nobody at all.

Mistakes in the missions mainly means you're flying less efficiently; try not to get sent really far out of the way, especially if you're close to full already. You'd like to be making a pickup or delivery every 2 or 3 jumps.  Just last night I flew an extra five jumps to a station, just to talk to an agent. And my ship was already full, d'oh! I couldn't have accepted his mission even if I wanted to! Don't add too many agent's stations to your route just because you'd like to get missions from them. Three or four agents can fill you up.

It can be hard to remember, after a lot of adding/deleting waypoints, why a particular waypoint is on your route. The "Agents and Places" screen (Alt-E) will help a little, but you have to look at each set of places yourself. If you don't see a delivery to that system listed, you had planned to talk to an agent there, but maybe you've already picked up all the cargo you can handle.

Helping Out The Little Guys

You can, of course, work for Level 2 and Level 1 agents as well. They have, remember, their own counter to 15 missions and will generate storyline missions for you, albeit less lucrative ones. Their cargoes are much smaller and they tend to send you to closer systems, which can be a nice easy gain. I won't fly to a system JUST to talk to them, though, I pretty much only use them if they happen to be in the same station I'm already in.

I don't accept these cheaper missions if they require me to go somewhere else, pickup a thing, and bring it back to this agent. "They, Robots" comes to mind.

UI Improvements

It's easy to lose track of why a particular station or system is on your route: am I delivering there, or is there an agent I wanted to talk to? Looking at the agent finder, do I already have a mission from that particular agent? Which of these agents are along the route I'm flying?

The information to answer these questions is available, but its in several windows. One easy improvement I see is for the agents in the Agent Finder to have their names colored green if you already have accepted a mission from them. Their system name, or agent name perhaps, could be in a different color (yellow?) if it lies on your current route, just like the Market window already does.

It would be nice if the "System" list on the agent finder was restricted to the current region you were in. If I choose "The Forge", that's where I'm interested in looking.

Extra Benefit

You can run these missions easily while doing other real life tasks, such as cleaning the kitchen, and earn spouse LP :) I put the laptop on the stove and click the "jump" button every 45 seconds or so.

January 2015 Profit Report - 9.3B

I haven't had much chance to undock and shoot spaceships, so once again my activity has been trading and manufacturing. Here's my trading profit report for the month of January, showing only my Jita trading character's work in categories that made more than 100M ISK during the month. The categories I didn't include added up to almost 600M ISK as a group. All this data comes out of Eve Mentat.

Overall Status

9.3B profit this month, 22B liquid isk, 10.7B in escrow, 16.5B of stuff in my trading hangar.

Trading Commentary

1. Jump Freighter $4,081,628,255.16 
2. Advanced Commodities $1,785,510,360.20 
3. Rig Armor $442,954,331.40 
4. Miscellaneous $368,094,098.98 
5. Capacitor Booster $330,191,965.23 
6. Rig Hybrid Weapon $274,777,660.61 
7. Mining Upgrade $246,659,592.89 
8. Outer $232,421,766.74 
9. Remote Armor Repairer $225,203,779.80 
10. Tattoos $221,325,396.59 
11. Datacores $192,406,120.04 
12. Hybrid Charge $131,253,168.81 
13. ECM $129,453,489.49 
14. Shield Hardener Blueprint $106,243,188.39 

Jump Freighters: 4B profit was less than the 6.6B I pulled in last month, flipping 9 ships. The margins just got too close, for too long, and at one point I was holding three ships which took a long time to sell. Best trade was a Rhea for 800M profit (after taxes/fees), worst was a Nomad that I lost 20M on after taxes/fees. I still consider this trade easy money, though, especially if you buy the ships in the low 6B range. The prices swings often enough that, if you're patient, you'll be able to sell for a nice profit. I wait for a 300M gap, which nets me 170M profit after taxes/fees.

Advanced Commodities: I got my PI operations into action again, selling a total of 4680 Self-Harmonizing Power Cores, Sterile Conduits and Broadcast Nodes. I'm pretty sure my cost figures are close to correct on these, but the cost of the P3 inputs to these items varies widely. I try and buy as much as I can when costs are low, but if I just need one of the three inputs to get the factory started, I'll buy it from sellers, just to get things moving.

One example: for the Power Cores (avg sell price 1.53M), I paid 45.5K for the camera drones, 76.7K for the hermetic membranes and 73.5 for the nuclear reactors. 6 of each comes to a total input cost of 1.17M. So that's about 350K profit on each Power Core, of which I sold 1453, for a profit of 605M. 

Imma keep doin' PI, which, I will state once again is utterly dependent on the juicy 0% tax rate I enjoy at our Aideron Robotics POCOs.

I have three factories in our home system and have also set up a fourth Advanced Commodity factory next door. I get to that one less often though.

Capacitor Booster: This little thing is amazing, though I'm running out of stock. Early this month I got 38 Micro Capacitor Booster Is (a pretty useless item) from just two transactions, plus several smaller deals, for about 6.8M each and they sell steadily for over 15M each. It adds up, especially when the price spike to 40-60M and sales actually increased!

Rig Armor: The Small Tranverse Bulkhead I rig is a license to print money. Cost 60K to build and I built and sold 3600 of them. The sell price stayed high this month, almost 200K, though its slipped in the last couple of days.

Mining Upgrade: Sadly, the Aoede Mining Laser Upgrade market totally dried up. A ton of buyers arrived, and though the price didn't move up much, the sales just stopped happening. I managed to buy and sell one, but took it off my list and actually haven't checked in again for a week or two. I'll check again, though, because this one has been very good to me.

Miscellaneous: The Gallente Beta Nexus chip is a quiet performer. Buy for ~2.7M, sell for ~3.5.  I bought and sold about 500 of these this month. Trades are "chunky"; they move slowly in small amounts until someone comes along and trades a huge amount at once. I put up orders for at least 100 at a time, so I don't miss out on those Big Trades.

Rig Hybrid Weapon: I manufacture and sell these at Jita; they're the Small Hybrid Locus/Burst/Collision/Ambit rigs. Cost 25K to make, sell for 50K-80K most of the time. I'm actually training my Jita alt to be able to run more manufacturing lines so I can make more of these (and similar rigs) as I often find myself looking at a great sell price with no stock available to sell. More lines needed!

Outer and Tattoos: Various apparel items. This is where I started trading expensive items but honestly its getting a lot harder than it used to be. I have a ton of orders that hardly ever get filled, and the items take a long time to sell. I think I'm going to phase out of the apparel market. It's nice to make 100-200M profit on an item that cost about the same amount, but it now takes so long that I could've probably made the same amount faster with other items.

Remote Armor Repairer: Small Remote Armor Repairer IIs can be bought for under 1M and, if you're patient, sold for 2M-4M. There was such a spike this month and I sold a good amount into that, but actually the "non-spike" sell price of 1.25M is attractive too; it's very steady and I'm selling my remaining stock at those prices, since the spikes are pretty infrequent.

Datacores: I'm buying/selling datacores at Jita plus I've set up cheap buy orders at Federal Defense Union stations in Essence. A lot of these sales were from stocks I've held for months, waiting for spikes. They're too infrequent, so I'm lower my expectations from a 150K sale to 130K, and buying around 100K or less.

Hybrid Charges: Gallente Federal Navy small ammo sells slowly at Jita, but with excellent profit margins. I buy at 250 ISK and sell at 800-1000 ISK, when the volumes dry up enough to push the prices. Honestly, I think I'm benefiting from pilot's following their fits too closely: "It says 1000 Fed Navy iron, so that's what I'll buy!" when Caldari Navy ammo is IDENTICAL and costs half that.

ECM: I noticed that meta 4 jammers sell in high volumes at Jita and with good profit margins. The Minmatar "Enfeebling" did most of the work here, buying at 100K and selling around 180K. For fun, I included the Caldari BZ-5 in my region-wide buy orders in Essence when nobody wanted them, buying for just 2000 ISK. I'd round them up with the other valuable stuff and sell for 250K at Jita.

Shield Hardener BPO: This trade is on hold because the price dropped too far, but it's probably going to come back soon; it always does. I buy it a few jumps away from Jita and sell for double the cost.

Closing Comments

Overall it's been another good month of trading; nothing unusual really happened. Oh, except the one poor bastard who picked up my 800M collateral courier contract and tried to deliver it to Jita in an Iteron Mk V. It was his first ship loss...not sure where a noob would get 800M to drop on a single freight run, or why they'd start with such a big, expensive cargo?!

I did learn a new trick this month, though. I bought a Bowhead (which Eve Mentat doesn't detect yet) for 1.7B when I saw that the cheapest sellers, at 1.8B were very few in number. I figured, correctly, that within a day or two, the sell price would go up to the high 1.9B range, where the next batch of sellers were positioned. I bought and sold the ship within a few days; a nice 200M profit.

However I tried the same thing with Jump Freighters and basically got stuck holding a white elephant. A new wave of sellers came in when Rheas were listed at 7.8B and quite quickly pushed the price down. It took a while to wait that one out and get a good price. The same opportunity came up again towards the end of the month and I deliberately avoided it.

I've looked at Eve ISK Per Hour to try and find new items to make and sell. There's some good candidates and I've started making/selling those. We'll see next month if it pans out.