While not completely passive. Once you have it set up you can check in on it every day or even every other week. It also requires quite low skills to be in a decent setup. The only catch is it’s for Omega characters only.

Recommended Skills, Ship, And Starting Cash

Planetary Industry (PI) has its section in the skill catalog under planet management. While you could get started with just level 1 Command Center Upgrades and Interplanetary Consolidation. I highly recommend those be level 4 at the least.

Command Center Upgrades are how many planets you can have a command center on. With it being level 4. You can have 5 command centers. This allows you to have four raw materials farming planets that convert materials into tier 1. Along with 1 production planet for turning tier 1 materials into tier 2 and 3 if needed.

Having Interplanetary Consolidation to level four allows you to upgrade the command center to have enough CPU and power to have flexibility in your setups. From dealing with low yielding on a planet to needing a few refineries on a high resource-yielding planet.

You will also want to get level 3 in Planetology. This helps the scanning of planetology and the data you get to be a little better. If you want up things you could also get a couple of levels into Advanced Planetology. As you can see on the alt I am on I did not bother with that.

Finally, if you are doing PI in high sec, you might also want Customs Code Expertise it’s a skill found under trade. While it sounds amazing with its 10% reduction. That reduction is only applying to the 10% NPCs charge. There is usually another 10% charged by the corporation who owns the Player Owned Customs Offices. So sadly, it’s not reducing taxes as much as you wish it was.

Next up you will want to have the right ship for the job. There is a special ship for this kind of activity called an Epithal. While there are other ships as well that can carry PI items. This ship not only comes with a Planetary Commodities hold that is quite massive. It even has a Command Center that will hold six command centers.

The skills to get into this ship are also quite low. Just Gallente Hauler 1 or higher if you need more cargo space. Along with Spaceship Command III.

Beyond that, you will just need skills for whatever modules you end up fitting into this thing. You don’t need anything fancy. I have two different setups. Once has t1 modules my alts can use it. The other has t2 for my main since he already has the skills.

You don’t want anything to fancy here. In the lows, I have one warp core stab and three inertial stabs. The mid I just have a shield extender. The rigs are just some Hyperspatial velocity optimizers to increase how fast it travels through space. With all the stabs in the bottom friction nozzles are going to have a minor impact if that.

You will also want to have about 45 million ISK per character to start. This is to cover the command centers (they are cheap), upgrade each one to level 4 (not cheap), and leave you some ISK to pay taxes when you go to collect resources.

Location

Wherever you “live” in Eve Online tends to be where you will be doing PI out of as well. Under ideal conditions, you can do everything from the same solar system you spend most of your time in and have all your stuff at. That is great. If not try and keep everything within a couple of jumps.

The above advice will not apply to everyone. Since you can do PI in wormholes (WH) to Null. If you live in a WH you are stuck with whatever the one you live in has for planets. While in Null you might be limited by where you can go to collect what your setup has farmed over time.

Depending on the risk of the area you are setting up in will play a huge impact on how rich or poor an area is. Along with how many other players are using a particular arena on a planet draining those resources. With HS having the lowest yields and WH and Null having the highest.

To find what is on different planets around you open the Agency tab and go down to resource harvesting. From there you will want to click on planets and then Planetary Industry.

You are now looking at the PI window. You can even bookmark it to make it easier to find if you end up needing to access this window often.

From here you can filter out for different types of planets. You will need to know what rescues you are looking to harvest and the planet that contains them.

What To Farm

This is sadly not something I can just tell you to go farm and produce this or that for items. This is something you must work out for yourself. It also depends on what planets you have access to in the first place. Not every solar system has all the different types of planets.

For me personality. I need PI for both fuel block production and manufacturing parts. So, I have all the characters on my main account producing PI towards those goals.

What I can give you is a handy website that breaks down everything needed to produce an item. It will even show you everything needed to make tier 4 advanced commodities which requires quite a commitment to you to pull off and goes beyond this guide.

Once on the website. Make sure to click on all planets that are not in the solar system you are in. It will then remove anything you are unable to make. That should help narrow down a decent number of what items you will end up going for in the end.

The Basic Setup

Now that you hopefully know what you want to produce. It’s time to check the market for the command center type you need. These items are sold by NPCs and are every so many jumps away in HS.

For this first example, I'm using a barren planet. That will require a barren command center to place down on the planet to get started.

Once you have warped out to the planet you want to set up on. In the PI window in the Agency tab. Click on the planet in question and click “view planetary industry.” That will pop up the scanning window.

In the scanning window, you next select the raw resource you want to start with. In my case, it is noble metals. You will also notice it is the lowest of the resources on this planet. Sadly, for this area I'm in it’s quite a low level of this resource.

Next up you will want to push the control slider that shows the concentrated areas of the raw material you are looking for. I have outlined that slider in a red box. You then move it along the slider until you have some areas that are showing white as that is the highest concentration possible. Followed by red, yellow, green, and then nothing.

Once you have found a decent location. It’s time to click on the build button. Then in the command center. In my case, since I'm on a Barren planet it’s a Barren Command center. Up pops a pin that you just place on the planet itself.

You ideally want your command center pin to be out of your way. However, not too far away that you can’t find it. You will need to click on it to spend ISK upgrading it in a moment.

A common theme you will need to get used to when doing things in the PI UI is clicking on the submit button. With the command center down click on submit. Always click on submit when you change anything as well.

Next, click on the command center itself. The starting CPU and power amount are so low you can’t do anything at all. So, you need to click on the circle with a green plus in it that opens up the upgrade window (I've marked it in red) and fully upgrade this center to what your skill allows you to. Each level of upgrade costs you over a million ISK.

Outside of any long-term tax, you might end up needing to pay to move resources around. Upgrading the command center is the biggest single expense. Everything else from placing buildings is not as bad.

Once you have the command center pin placed. You can go dock out. The rest of setting up PI on a planet can be done while sitting safely in a station. You don’t need to undock again unless you need to put down another command center or move materials around later on.

Now with that out of the way. We need to set up a general area for most of our buildings. These buildings should not be right in the highest yield of the resource you want to farm. They however should not be that far away either.

You are first going to place down a launch pad (red arrow) by clicking on it as an option under the build menu. This is needed to bring resources down onto the planet and send it up into space.

For this first example to make things easy on us. We are also going to be needing a storage faculty (green arrow) to put our raw resources into. Make sure to place it right next to the launch pad as close as the game will allow you to.

The reason it needs to be so close. Is your next need to click on the create link button (yellow arrow) and click on it and then link it to the launch pad. The longer the distance is the more resources on your command center it will use.

The next step is going to be placing down an Extractor Control Unit next to your other buildings. This is what will be farming the raw resources you want. Once you have it open you will need to select the resource you want to pull up on the scan.

Once that is down click on each slot for installed extractors. Since you have level 4 Interplanetary Consolidation you can fully use all ten extractor heads. Once they pop up just click on each one and move them to a high-density area for the resource you want. Hopefully, that spot is white or at least red.

Make sure none of the extractor heads has a negative number next to it. If they overlap, they have a reduced production output.

Next up you need to work out how often you want to interact with your PI setup. The extractor heads only run for so long before you must manually reset them (thankfully this can be done remotely.)

While you might think why not set it on a week and forget about it. Here is the catch. The longer it is set the less per hour on average it will mine. The shorter you have it set the more it will deplete the area while giving you a higher output of the raw resource you want.

I can make a point to log in daily to go through all my PI setups and reset the extractor on all my planets that are farming raw resources. I have it set around a day and a half. Any shorter and I find I'm having to interact with PI far too often. I also can’t go any longer since this is in HS and the yield is already far too low.

Once that is all set. Click on the Start Extraction button. When you need to reset it later. Come back and hit stop extraction, then, start extraction. As always after starting it again you will need to hit the submit button as well.

Since this is the first time the extractor has been set up. It needs to be told where to put the outputted raw materials. Under the productions tab click on the type that shows it’s not routed. Next, click on the creature route button and then click on the storage facility

The good news is when something is missing or not done right in PI. It tends to put red flashing circles around the pins of the buildings. As a way of saying something is not right come take a look at this.

Now that you have a resource routing to the storage facility you need to do something with it. That will require setting up a Basic Industry Facility to produce a tier-one material.

Go ahead and place down for the time being three Basic Industry Facilities. Keep in mind they should be close to your other buildings. As each one needs to be linked to another building. With there being at least one linked route back to one of your other buildings it has a path to move the resources out of storage. As you can see with the dotted lines.

Then you will simply select what you want it to produce. You then just click to create a link from that production and have it route to the launch pad. That way all produced final goods for this planet are sitting on the launch pad ready for you to collect at a later point in time

Next up you need to do the part that can get a bit confusing. You need to go to where you have your input for raw materials going. In this case, it’s in the storage facility. Then click on the routes tabs and select Incoming and the material you are getting from the extractors. In my case, it’s Base Metals.

From there you need to click on Create Route. Then in one of the basic industry facilities. You then need to repeat this process for each Basic Industry Facility you have.

If everything works out, you have no flashing circles around any of the pins. Your raw material goes from storage into the industry. Finally, a final good is then moved to the launch pad.

Now you need to repeat this process on three other planets. Keep in mind that every tier-two product requires two tier-one goods. That is why you have four raw material farming planets. This lets you make one tier three good or at least two tier two.

At some point, you will want to go collect your resources. I like to have them stack up for about a week if I can. This will involve opening up the PI window in the industry tab.

From there select to warp to the Customs Office. You must be in range to loot the Customs Office. You then drop and drag any resource you want to move off the planet from the launchpad and place it into the Customs office. Paying any tax required when you click on the transfer button. From there just take it out and move it into your Epithal’s Planetary Commodities hold.

Optimizing Your Setup

At some point, you might realize your first setups are not that great. You might be overproducing raw materials to the point your storage is overflowing. On the other hand, you might have a bunch of industry facilities that are doing nothing.

To try and optimize things. You should work out how many raw materials you are bringing in an hour. Then compare that to how much you can process in the industry facilities you have built.

You can see in my case I don’t have that many industrial facilities buildings. That is because I don’t produce enough raw materials on this planet to have any more than I have set up.

You will also notice I have not one but two Extractor Control Units. These things cost a lot of the command center resources to place down. To the point, the second Extractor Control Unit only has a couple of extractor heads running as they consume a lot of resources. Ideally, if I had level 5 Interplanetary Consolidation that would go a long way to solving my issues.

You might also notice there is no Storage Facility in this setup. Thankfully the launchpad itself can serve as one saving me power load for elsewhere. Since I don’t produce enough in a week to fill it up a separate Storage Facility was not needed.

The biggest thing to remember when optimizing your setup is to get the most out of it. Do you want to be using the average raw materials being produced per hour for how long it has been set up to run. As remember the longer it runs the less it produces until the timer runs out.

So, at the start, you be producing more raw resources than your Industry Facilities can handle. However, at some point, that number will drop off. After some trial and error, you will find that sweet spot where you are getting as many raw materials as possible while keeping up with the supply of it.

Each of your planets will also be a little different. As you are not getting the same number of resources out of all of them. Thankfully the buildings you need to replace to test things out are very cheap.

Production Planet

Once you have a bunch of tiers one resources it's time to take things to the next step. On your 5th planet, you will be creating a production planet. I prefer using the two-launch pad method. If you are however someone who likes to move things only once a month you might prefer to have a single launch pad and a few storage faculties to hold everything.

With the two-launch pad method. I have one set up for placing materials onto the planet. Those materials then get routed to the different Advanced Industry Facilities. Afterward, those goods then are moved onto a second Advanced Industry facility if I'm turning tier two into tier three. Regardless I have the final produce routed to the second launch pad.

This allows me to fully load the planet up with resources. It makes it easy to keep the routing of materials simplified. I also then don’t need to pull anything off this planet until I want it. As there is lots of space.

If you wanted to. You could have just a single production planet for your three characters. That however I felt required way too much work. Unless all your characters are producing the same resources. You will have to manually go in and configure each facility for the new setup. I just find that to be way too much work for the outcome.

Final Thoughts

The nice thing about PI is once you have it all set up. You just need to reset the extractors and move resources around occasionally. Even in high sec depending on what you're making it might not even take a month to recover your costs. From there it’s all profit.

Information

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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Eve Online.