Space Farming: Self sustained Planetary Interaction

I've almost completed my new PI setup, which is driven entirely from extraction. I got tired of the price swings I encountered in buying input materials from Jita and decided to see if I could make it work solo.  Eveplanets tells me that my home system of Fliet can build Recursive Computing Modules from scratch and since we have 0% taxes on our POCOs and I'd like to avoid going through stargates that's what I decided to make.

I'm using all three of my characters in this effort (five planets each), which I hope will only require me to pay attention for a few minutes a day. One lives in highsec, where planetary yields are lower than they are in low-sec, but by getting her to dig up the most common materials like Bacteria and Biofuels, my two lowsec characters can focus on the rarer stuff. My main has CCU V and the others CCU IV.

How Much Can I Make?

P4 items are worth an average of 2M a piece. I started with a minimalist setup that produced 1 every two hours; that's 12 a day which is worth 24M a day or 720M ISK a month...that's almost a plex right there! RCMs are selling for 2.2-2.5M right now.

This table shows the quantity you'll need to supply if you want to produce half a p4 per hour (see the QTY CALC 1 column).

Stage	Amt Per Hour In of each input	Amt Per Hour Out	Ratio	QTY CALC 1	QTY CALC 12	QTY CALC 24
p0		6,000.00		12000	288000	576000
p0-p1	6000	40.00	150	80	1920	3840
p1-p2	40	5.00	8	10	240	480
p2-p3	10	3.00	1.67	3	72	144
p3-p4	6	1.00	3	0.5	12	24

It's very common to see raw extraction rates of 8-10k per hour of a p0 so we're in the ballpark of the 12k per hour for each p0 material that we'll need. The 12 and 24 columns tell you how much material you need per day for for 1 RCM every two hours and 1 every hour, respectively. 

I'm going to expand my factories to be capable of spitting out 1 per hour, but I don't think I'll be able to maintain the materials to supply that steadily. My estimate is that I can produce somewhere between the two, right around 1B ISK per month.

What Materials Do I Need to Extract?

Look at the schematic for the final item on eveplanets - here's the RCM one. Note all the items at the bottom row of the tree - that's what you need to dig up.  Here's what RCM requires:

Raw Material (P0)	P1	P2	P3
Noble Gas	Oxygen	Supertensile Plastics (Oxy + Biomass)	Guidance Systems (Water CPU + Transmitter)
Planktic Col	Biomass	Test Cultures (Bact + Water)	Synthetic Synapses (Supertensile + Test)
Microorg (2)	Bacteria	Water CPU (Reactive + Water)	Transcranial Microcontrollers (Biocells + Nanites)
Aqueous (2)	Water	Transmitter (Plasmoids + Chiral)
Base Metals (2)	Reactive Metals	Biocells (Biofuels + Precious)
Plasma	Plasmoids	Nanites (Bact + Reactive)
Non-CS	Chiral Structures
Carbon Comp	Biofuels
Noble Metals	Precious Metals

I then compared that list to what was available at the planets I could use and assigned the work among my three characters.

I ended up with 15 planets of which 13 are doing extraction. Those planets also refine to p1 right there on the planet, a very common practice. 

Here's my final list of which alt did what work. I divided the p1-p2 step between the two Fliet characters. Each one picks up the p1 materials from their extraction worlds and sends the appropriate material to the other for refining. Vic's all use Bacteria, Reactive and Water, so that's quite tidy :) .

HS Alt	Vic in Fliet	LS Alt in Fliet
Bacteria 2	p1 to p2: Nanites, Water CPU, Test Cult. Fliet III	p1 to p2: Biocells, Transmitter,Supertensile Plastics Fliet III
Reactive Metals 2	p2 to p4 Fliet I (mixed in with Biofuels/Precious extraction)	Fliet I: Biofuels and Bacteria
Biofuels 2	Fliet II Plasmoids and Chiral	Fliet II Plasmoids and Chiral
Precious Metals 2	Fliet V: biomass and water	Fliet V: biomass and biomass
Other	Fliet IV: oxygen and reactive metals	Fliet IV: oxygen and reactive metals

My HS Alt is doing some extraction on one planet that isn't related to this schematic. She's doing two extractions of Bacteria, Reactive Metals, Biofuels and Precious Metals for this operation. The yield isn't great, but it's good enough. I pay 6% taxes, but it's cheap stuff so taxes aren't high. I do Project Discovery slides during the journey which more than makes the money back :)

The most surprising thing to me was the final half of the process, turning all the p2s into the RCMs themselves. I'd imagined setting aside a planet for it but as I came to the point of actually building it it occurred to me that it only required 4 factories which used a total of about 2500 MW of power....so I just turned off 5 extraction heads on one of my less-critical worlds and built the p2-p4 factories right there among the extractors!

How Is It Performing?

Pretty well! I'm not refining Planktic Colonies or Non-CS Crystals fast enough so I'm going to add more basic factories to pump out more. You often end up switching between 1, 2 or 3 basic factories for a raw material to match the volumes you're pulling out of the planet.

I ran it at the "1 per 2 hour" rate for a few days and just last night added another bank of p2-p3 factories so I can get up to 1 per hour. I'm seeing my p2 supplies pile up sufficiently to feed that, except for Supertensile Plastics, which is my bottleneck. I've switched one of my Ice planets to have BOTH extractors pull out planktic/biomass to try and address that imbalance. Vic is getting his sixth planet next week so I'll be able to add more extraction/processing if necessary.

So there it is, my new PI setup. For something that was supposed to be less work than the old one, it sure took a while to plan and set up! The clicking, oh gods, the clicking....