rootninja

Goodbye Tyrannis…

If you were making T3 products from T1 resources in the old PI, you should notice there’s just not enough power do to this anymore. But that’s not so bad because it wasn’t anywhere near as profitable as importing your own mid grade materials and running nothing but processors to refine the highest tiers anyway.

But if you’re like me, that’s just too much manual labor moving stuff around. Every minute spent hauling junk from one planet to another was time wasted not having fun in a PVP ship or faction fit toy, so I just fired off the cycles and let my planets churn all the way up to T3.

Hello Incursion…

The new system is a major step forward in Planetary Interaction. If you missed out on the first stab at this new time sink, check out my original guide for some history:

http://www.rootninja.com/eve-online-planetary-interaction-maximize-your-profit/

The biggest change to PI is instead of restarting multiple extractors that all do the same thing, you only need to restart one thing for each type of resource. If you have a planet making Oxygen and Bacteria, that’s only two extractors you need to worry about since each extractor now operates up to eight heads.

So lets skip all the basics and get right to it… Most of the stuff is pretty simple and intuitive, but here’s a few tips to maximize your link bandwidth and extract the largest amount of resources you can.

Take a look at the global view on this planet. Notice the large dark circles – these show the range at which I can place the extractor heads for each extractor.

Extractor Location

You don’t need to put your extractor in the hot spot where you want to extract. Instead, you can place it as close to your storage/processors as possible while still overlapping the juicy white/red spot with the circle. This allows for cheap links and cheaper link upgrades. Keep in mind the resources do move around slightly. So next week you may find the peak production area has shifted slightly.

If you want to sit around and push the extractors into overdrive every few hours, you’ll need to upgrade some of your links multiple times, especially at junctions and routes where multiple trips are made. Here’s a closeup view:

Hourly yield varies

If you’re running short cycles and tending to your planet-herd daily or even multiple times a day, you’ll get an excellent yield, but if you prefer a longer duration, say 6 days for example, then take a look at the hour by hour extraction amount on the graph.

On average, the longer you run your extractor, the less resources you’ll gather per cycle. But check out the graph to see which cycles fall off the worst and work around that. If they’re not sitting around idle, you might want to avoid ending on a bad hour and run them an hour or two longer where the yield perks up a bit.

The biggest problem in varying the program length is the size of the extraction bubble grows with longer programs. If the heads were close together with shorter durations, they may begin to overlap and lose efficiency as you expand them. However, overlapping doesn’t always mean lower yields.

Instead of looking at the numbers next to each extractor head trying to optimize them without overlap, look at the bottom right Output “per hour” and “total” in the program window. I have found the highest yields occur either with a slight overlap of the heads or by spreading them apart so the resource regeneration makes up for the efficiency loss.

Just keep in mind, if you run a longer program you will be penalized if the heads were placed next to each other previously in a shorter program. If you can place an extractor between two hot spots, the penalty can be avoided altogether by utilizing both hot spots at the same time. When you’re dealing with an abundant resource, this shouldn’t be hard to do.

Multiple processors

In your quest for harvest efficiency, don’t forget that your extractors can easily overload your processors. Send everything to storage and then route from storage to processors to avoid any waste. You’ll fill your storage up pretty fast with low level materials, leaving no room for higher tier products in no time, so it pays to have two or more processors working the same product. Of course, you can still import all your materials and run all the processors you can fit, extracting nothing.

Extras

When you place a processor, you can create a route for its product immediately. However, you don’t actually get the first 20 units immediately.

Just because a planet has high deposits doesn’t mean its automatically better than a planet with lower deposits. Check out the detailed scan of a planet before you decide to work there.

If you don’t want to visit a planet often, try building a planet with this setup:
* 1 extractor (ex. Carbon Compounds)
* 2 basic processors (ex. Biofuels)
* 1 extractor (ex. Noble Metals)
* 2 basic processors (ex. Precious Metals)
* 1 advanced processor (ex. Biocells)
If you don’t have the grid for this setup, try a total of 3 basic processors and just switch the oddball back and forth between products. This way you’ll build up a surplus in your storage of one, then when you switch, the advanced processor will continue to work 24/7 from the surplus.

Cultivate a few planets of different types in the same system. Products produced from ingredients that come from the same planet are easier to produce, but everyone’s doing it. You may find a niche market in producing something that requires more than one planet type to create.