Industry in Eve can be extremely profitable. It is a very scalable career, what this means is there isn't a huge bottleneck in how much profit you are able to make with it whereas there are bottlenecks present in other activities such as mission running.
You can scale industry up as large as you are able to manage it - whether you are producing simple ammunition or multi billions of isk in capital ships.
You can however lose money in industry, this guide seeks to prevent you from doing this.
Lets first take a basic look at the fundamentals of industry. Industry is the process of taking blueprints such as this Hobgoblin I Blueprint, and producing the item by using ores and potentially other materials.
If you search the blueprint in-game and head to the "Manufacturing" tab, you will be able to see what skills you need to use this blueprint as well as what materials you will need.
It's not recommended however to do industry with an unresearched blueprint. If you look underneath the name of that blueprint in the top left of the window, you will see two tabs with 0% next to them. Hovering over these tabs you realise these are the Material Efficiency (ME) and Time Efficiency (TE) research tabs.
ME can go up to 10% meaning you can reduce the material cost to produce the blueprint by 10%, TE goes up to 20% meaning you can reduce the time it takes to produce the blueprint by up to 20%.
So before you begin actually using a blueprint, you first want to research it. You can do this by going to the industry tab.
Click/drag the blueprint from your hanger into the industry slot, then underneath the blueprint there are 6 icons, you want the icons second from the left and third from the left for ME and TE research respectively.
Once you've researched your blueprint, its useful to know the difference between a Blueprint Original (BPO) and a Blueprint Copy (BPC). Originals such as that Hobgoblin I Blueprint can be distinguished from copies such as Hobgoblin I Blueprint by its darker blue colour (and the fact it says original underneath its name in the blueprint window).
You are able to make copies from original blueprints, and the copies will carry on the same research of the BPO. You can take advantage of this by producing for example 5 BPCs from your BPO and then use each of the 5 BPCs to run industrial lines producing the item faster.
BPCs have limited numbers of runs however, whereas BPOs are unlimited, so you will need to keep copying from your BPO to keep the industrial chains going.
Now that you have your researched blueprint, the next task is to find the minerals required to produce it. If you choose to mine the ore and reprocess it yourself, you would be advised to train your reprocessing skills (already mentioned in SG-5).
For a breakdown of what minerals are found in each ore, you can look at https://ore.cerlestes.de/ore.
You may have some blueprints such as Drake Blueprint which requires minerals such as Megacyte which are not possible to find in highsec ores (you can click on a Mineral, head to its "Description" tab to see what ores it is found in and what space the ores are in).
If you don't want to go into these areas of space, which I would advise you to do so until you are more experienced, you will need to purchase these rarer kind of minerals from the market and then mine the other minerals.
For a rough, basic glance at whether or not you will be able to make a profit on producing a blueprint, you can use https://evepraisal.com/.
For example, the Drake Blueprint.
If I copy/paste the Outcome into evepraisal, I find a drake is worth (as of 25/06/2020) 58,210,000 ISK - https://evepraisal.com/a/toeon.
If I copy/paste the Required Input Materials into evepraisal, I find it will cost me 57,339,943 ISK worth of minerals to produce it - https://evepraisal.com/a/toeu8.
This doesn't account for industry taxes, refining inefficiency from smelting the ore down and market taxes for selling it. If you factor all of those in you will find you actually lose money taking your ore, reprocessing it, building the drake and selling it than if you were to just sell your ore raw to the market.
It makes more sense to sell raw ore and earn 20 million isk for example, than it does to produce something and sell it and you only sold it for 19 million isk then minus taxes and industry costs.
For a more advanced look into industry, you would be highly recommended to download "Eve Isk Per Hour" found at https://eveiph.github.io/.
After you download this tool, for your first time setup you want to head to the "Update Prices" tab, here is a screenshot of my settings https://i.imgur.com/SQHgMWa.png.
I dont tick any regions, and only tick "Jita" under Trade Hub systems as I want all my prices to based from Jita price. Since we live in Amarr space, you can if you wish change it to the "Amarr" trade hub, however I recommend sticking with Jita.
You always want to use Percentile Buy and Percentile Sell to protect yourself from basing your industry on weird outliers that occur in the market such as someone selling an item one-off for way cheaper than its actually worth.
Once you set this up, click "Save Settings" then "Download Prices". It will take a while to download all of the data, this is normal.
Now that you have your Isk Per Hour (IPH) tool configured, head back to the "Blueprints" tab.
Lets take our Hobgoblin I Blueprint again. Under "Selected Blueprint or Reaction", tab in this blueprint.
Change the ME and TE values to 10 and 20 (max research blueprint) and change the "Total Runs" to 50.
For the location I've entered "The Bleak Lands" and "Ronne" in a "Raitaru" to mark that I'm producing in Ronne - SiCO Industry Tower (Strategic Holding - 3rd Division).
You can see from my screenshot here https://i.imgur.com/Tb88e0M.png that I actually will end up losing isk trying to produce these hobgoblins than if I were to just sell my ore to the market.
You will find that for most of the low cost, cheaper blueprints such as these light drones, small ammo etc that you will mostly break even or perhaps lose profit. This is because the market is flooded with these items as they are very easy to produce and don't require much skill or materials to make, and many big players are able to source cheaper ore from buyback programs and use very expensive, 0% tax structures you won't have access to.
To make a good profit in industry, you need to have your reprocessing skills maxed out, a fully researched blueprint and access to a nice industrial structure such as our Ronne - SiCO Industry Tower (Strategic Holding - 3rd Division).
Fly safe
