Simply PI

So the show goes on, nothing shocking there really. As for the politics, e-peen and flame wars, who cares, back to EVE right? Well, minus the old guard....

So back to in game topics, how to do Planetary Interaction.

I have played with PI since its first mouse click obsessive implementation, and while it’s improved it still a pain in the butt to set up. This guide is to get you started in PI, making POS fuel and some simple installations.

So where to start? Pick what you want to do, is it POS fuel? Is it a commodity on the market that sells for a good price? Is it based on a corp policy towards nanite materials?

For sizeable projects it is really only feasible with a co-ordinated effort, corp based and lead by someone who knows what they are doing. So on this basis I am just going to consider and individual making POS fuel or something similar with small scale projects.

Step one get the skills:

·         Remote Sensing (rank 1, prereg = science I, 0.25 Million ISK)

·         Planetology (rank 3, prereq = science IV, remote sensing III, 1 Million ISK)

·         Advanced planetology (rank 5, prereq = Planetology IV, 7.5 Million ISK)

·         Command Centre Upgrades (rank 4, rereq = nil, 0.5 Million ISK)

·         Interplanetary consolidation (rank 4, rereq = nil, 0.5 Million ISK)

I would recommend all to level 4. Advanced Planetology is the most expensive and could be considered optional for a beginner, but if you want to do this seriously then it will pay off. So setup cost for the skills is 2.25 million ISK, or 9.75 Million ISK.

There are more costs which follow, which are detailed below.

Now you need to PLAN. What are you wanting to achieve? There are 8 types of planet:

1.      Storm

2.      Plasma

3.      Lava

4.      Gas

5.      Ice

6.      Temperate

7.      Barren

8.      Oceanic

Each planet has resources available that can be converted into products, referred to by the level of processing. So just pulling noble gas out of a gas planet you can get oxygen, referred to as a P1 material. There are 4 levels, each planet can make up to a P3 level material before it has to be shipped to another planet and combined to make a P4 material. P4 materials are mainly focused around POS manufacturing. So for an individual/beginner I would consider 3 options:

1.      Lots of P1 materials for resale, simple and effective returns

2.      Make your own POS fuel, fiddly but saves POS running costs and can resell well

3.      Make P3 materials for resale (one per planet), market dependant returns, easy

For options 1 and 3 choose the material you will be generating and buy the appropriate planetary command centre. More on option 2 below.

Then go and buy a standard industrial ship if you don’t have one handy already (Badger I or II, Iteron I-V, Hoarder, Mammoth, Wreathe, Bestower, Sigil) and collect up the PI Command Centres ready for deployment.

So what planets produce what P1 materials and what can be combined to make P2/P3/P4 materials can be found here:
PDF file by Korai
And:
EVE University

There was also an excellent resource here: http://fazenda.w-space.org/
But its currently offline, will see what I can find out about it and get it up again if I can.
The EVE University site has lots of nice details, great to rummage through, and the PDF diagrams by Korai are an excellent summary.

For those of you who want to make P3 materials for a single planet I put these 2 pictures together for my own reference:

(Early on when PI was just introduced I made P3 items in high sec, later I made POS fuel in null sec after I had learnt how to do it in empire).

Where is the stuff?
I use Dotlan maps to find which type of planet is around. I normally scribble it out over a piece of paper to try and find where the planets of interest are and to set it up with as few jumps as possible. I did grab this dump of planets as well to make it easy, it’s a CSV file, so will try and find a way to get this posted as a link.

How to:
So now you have a plan of what you want to make, where you are going to make it, an industrial and the relevant PI Command Centres (CC). So you warp out to the planet (you have to be near it to install the CC) and enter the planet mode:

·         Scan the planet for the resources you are interested in (the white bar indicates the overall resource available, go figure low sec is better than empire and null sec better again, in theory)

·         Adjust the rainbow coloured scanning bar to isolate hotspots where you will get the highest return (advanced planetology makes this more accurate)

·         Select the build tab and place your command centre. It will automatically be taken from your hold and placed where you select. You can only place ONE CC per planet.

·         Upgrade your CC to maximum, then next to this place a launch pad. Note, you often can’t do certain activities unless you SUBMIT your current changes. When you do this is makes a little burbling noise and flogs some ISK. This ISK is the cost of building the facilities.

·         Got it wrong but hit submit? Right click and disable the structure, it will confirm you wish to so this. If you remove a CC it will remove everything

·         Then place the relevant facility (basic or advanced) for the resources to be harvested and a launch pad (the launch pad saves costs versus launching a container and is easier to manage and serves as a storage area as well, so no need to worry about a storage facility).

·         For P1 you will need a basic industry facility, for P2 and above you will need an advanced facility.

·         So the mucky part: submit your factories, create routes (right click, create route, then select destination), then select a factory schematic (click on the facility, choose the product you want to be made), submit, then place a processor (it’s a must to have the relevant scan window as the background), add your extractor heads, launch the program (to extract the resources), ROUTE your mined resources. Submit...

·         Now check all your products are being extracted and routed correctly and end up at the launch pad.

·         For P3 setups for routing start at the top and work down, so set you schematic for the advanced facility, then your basic, then route the products (basic to advanced to launch pad), then submit.

So it should look like:

Collecting stuffs:

When setting up the extractor heads for the processor you have some options. You can place a number of extractor head units based on the CPU available. Don’t use it all for one processor! You can slide a bar along which sets how long the processor will run for before you have to come back and reapply the program running it. The crunch is the longer the time the slower the resource return. It’s just a case of how often you want to be coming back to collect the harvest resources. So shorter is better, but more inconvenient to manage. A fudge factor comes in here as well. Some of the extraction heads impinge on other extractor heads, and a little red percentage sign comes up showing you the reduce resource extraction based on overlapping extractors. So try to spread them around for minimal impact. Now, check the numbers for fudge factor number 2. If you have say a Plasma planet extracting base metals and noble metals for making mechanical parts they resources extracted will be at different amounts. It may be a rich deposit of base metals and a poor deposit of noble metals. So for arguments sake the rich resource with 5 extractor heads gives you 500 resources, and the poor deposit only gives you 250 for 5 extractor heads. So you need 10 drilling heads for the poor resource and only 5 for the rich resource. Yep, time to reach for the calculator and see how the resources balance to make sure you have the right number of dill heads.

So now you have product, fly to the customs station, open planet view, open the launch pad, export your goods, pay the ISK automatically for the export duties, then collect them from the customs can in orbit. Take your new treasure home, hoard it, sell it, feed that POS...

Now with the captain’s quarters you can click on the planet icon on the RHS an go into planet view, from in station, nice....

That POS fuel:

You need a number of planets to make POS fuels (you still need the ice products to be sourced separately):

·         Gas/Ice/storm to make P1 oxygen

·         Storm/gas to make P2 coolant

·         Plasma to make P2 enriched Uranium

·         Plasma/Barren to make P2 mechanical parts

·         Lava/Plasma to make P2 consumer electronics (required for P3)

·         Mechanical parts + consumer electronics to make P3 robotics

As you need mechanical parts both for the POS fuel and to make robotics try to get 2 planets making mechanical parts and one making consumer electronics.

But hey, that’s 6 planets! Yes, you need Interplanetary Consolidation (IC) to V for have the full suite. So a storm planet can make both coolant and oxygen fairly easily on the one planet if you are prepared to mess around and juggle them. Otherwise time for the 18 odd days to reach IC V....

To make the P2/P3 materials you will need an advanced industry facility. Place it between your basic industry facility and the launch pad and connect up the links. Then pick the schematic for the right materials and route them as required.

Trying to source different resources for P2/P3 materials can mean you end up with some very long routes (note the basic then advanced industry facilities). Like so:

Cool, got it now how about the fancy stuff?

You can also make:

·         Nanite repair paste

·         POS star base structures

·         Outpost components

·         T2 components (non-moon sourced)

·         Sovereignty structures

So just like above, get out your PDF, plan what you want, source it with your Dotlan maps (scribble on a bit of paper), then go and configure it up....
Best done in conjunction with others really.

Notes:
Plan, plan, plan. Then it will be much easier and rewarding. Just reset the harvesters at a time frame that suits you and sell the goodies (or use them). It’s fairly easy to make good ISK and the investment pays off in under a month (if not faster).
Keith Neilson did some excellent posts (under the original system, so the extractor heads are a little different, but still well worth a read if you want to get serious), here they are:
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
epilogue