Hard Left

I might be re-tooling my shipbuilding plans a bit.

No, I’m not talking about building different hulls for the market. That’s not going to change any time soon, although I actually anticipate some expansion past the current stable of Gallente hulls that I build for North Provi. I’m talking about the plans that I’ve got for my own personal ships. Right now, the largest ship that I’ve got for moving completed ships, modules, rigs and ammo from my manufacturing center to the trade hub is an Iteron V.

Feel free to laugh, I frequently chuckle at the huge discrepancy between Kym’s respectable ability to build stuff, and the anemic logistical capabilities that I’ve given her. There has been a plan in the works for a couple of months to build an Obelisk to haul stuff around with, but to be perfectly honest, I’ve never been completely ok with my plan, mostly because flying a 1B+ freighter around in nullsec is asking for trouble. Even though the plan was to only move stuff with it once or twice a week, and only through a jump bridge at that, it still didn’t quite sit well with me. Plus, I still didn’t get any highsec logistical gains with the freighter- moving it around through nullsec and out to highsec a lot pretty much guarantees a gank, so I planned to simply keep it in null 100% of the time. This plan left me with a very expensive hunk of metal that, in all honesty, wasn’t going to be used to its natural capacity.

Why the freighter in the first place? In a word: hulls. Even packaged, a cruiser is 10,000 m³. A battleship, which I occasionally build for special orders, is 50,000m³- more than an Iteron V can fit, not that I’d want to haul a battleship in an Iteron to begin with. Kym also can’t fly every ship in the game, and I don’t really feel like wasting the time and ISK to train all the subcaps at this point. Not to mention, I’m not building or moving ships one at a time anymore. So the idea for the Obelisk became a reality, and for the last couple of months I’ve been assembling capital parts.

Now that I’m approaching the point where it’s time to assemble the whole hull (capital ships are made from dozens of smaller, previously assembled components, which then get combined into the final ship), I find myself balking a little bit at the plan, and today decided to give it a bit of a revamp after checking out Eve University’s wiki. If you’ve never been, it is probably the best source of information out there for Eve. I find myself frequently going back to read stuff, and it’s taught me a lot about the game. Anyways, back to the post.

I still plan to build the Obelisk, but instead of using it to ferry hulls and whatnot in null, it’ll be flown out to highsec where it belongs and used for stuff out there. In its place, I’m going with an Orca for the nullsec logistics. Why I didn’t choose this plan initially is beyond me, but oh well. What’s done is done, and there isn’t any wasted time or ISK, just a jumbled order of completing things. The Orca’s got a few advantages over the Obelisk, anyways. Cost is the obvious one. I think the hull can be assembled for less than half of the cost of the freighter- and most of the parts for the Orca are already laying around, as they had been built for the Obelisk (there’s a lot of crossover between the hulls). So, it’d be easy to switch gears from that perspective. Training time is a lot less, too- maybe a week from this posting, Kym could be flying the ship. The Obelisk is still about a month away. The Orca can be fitted to have a cargo hold in excess of 100,000 m³ (the primary hold- not the specialized ones)- enough to haul 2 battleships at once, or a multitude of other hulls. 100,000 m3 would be enough cargo capacity for my logistical needs. The ore hold might be a plus once the summer expansion rolls around, too.

Lastly, the Orca is around 25% of the mass of the Obelisk- using the jump bridge shouldn’t  anger the owners nearly as much, since  a battleship’s mass is about half of the Orca’s, and those jump though all the time. Maybe I’ll even set up boosts with the Orca at some point- just not right now.

So I guess I went from building one capital ship to building a pair, it would seem. I'm not quite sure how long it’ll take to get both of them completed, but I think it’ll be exciting to be flying something bigger than that Iteron V  I’ve had for the last 6 months.

Where, oh Where, did my Yield Go?

I think it's been about a week since the DevBlog "Reprocess all the Things" went up, and I've had some time to reflect on the proposed industry changes that are coming down the pipe with the summer expansion. As someone whose only character is a nullsec industrialist, I'm mostly a fan of the changes that CCP is implementing, and I see their reasoning behind it. The question now becomes, how does this affect how Kym does business in North Provi?

Let's start with the negative, just to get that out of the way: Scrapmetal Processing. That's a huge nerf, with the maximum yield for reprocessing loot going from 100% with everything trained perfectly, etc, down to, if I read the blog correctly, 55%. Wow. Suddenly all of that crappy loot is going to be worth about half of what it's currently worth. It's definitely time to clear out the hangars of anything remotely worth melting down. This affects salvagers immensely, and I imagine it'll affect ratters, too. I understand the logic behind such a huge kick in the teeth- CCP wants module compression to go. There is a lot of collateral damage to that decision, though. Folks who don't do, and oftentimes have no idea about, module compression are catching it in the shorts with no way out. I hope CCP revisits this in the future and lets these folks have some sort of option- perhaps the soon-to-be-pointless Rorqual could now reprocess all loot at high efficiency, and let it serve as something else besides a glorified booster and paltry jump freighter. Let it reprocess in siege mode, thereby keeping the fuel and time requirements. This won't impact the smaller salvagers much, but it'll keep the module compression folks bottlenecked.

So that's what i disliked. Everything else about the industry changes sounded good, though. I won't discuss them explicitly here, since that's being done elsewhere. Like I mentioned, the big question for me now is, what changes? Every character in Eve is unique, and the changes affect everyone a little differently. For Kym, doing the math leads to an interesting conclusion.

Kym's got decent refining skills. Everything that gets mined on a regular basis gets refined with zero waste at the Minmatar outpost that currently has its base yield at 40%. Her skills are at level IV for most ores that she mines, and a week of training could get the other ores there easily. She doesn't have every single last ore skill highly trained, though- there is ore that I hardly ever mine or place buy orders for, because there is something more useful or valuable instead. Also, Kym's not a miner- she's an industrialist, who's got mining and salvaging as a fallback career. So there was never a plan to maximize all of those skills to V. Anyways, Level IV, plus a 2% implant, gives a perfect yield of 97.5%, which is the highest possible yield (there's a 2.5% tax levied) at the outpost.

That all changes with the summer expansion. That Minmatar outpost is now going to (I believe) have a base refine yield of 57%, assuming it doesn't get one final upgrade to 60%. The "new 100%" is 86.8%- that's going to be the highest possible, with the upgraded outpost, level V skills, and a 4% implant. Kym doesn't have that right now, but I'm not going to focus too much on that in this post. Instead, I'm wondering if I should refine anything at all at the outpost, or whether I should just anchor an Intensive Reprocessing Array at a POS, and refine there. Here are the relevant numbers: The POS would refine at a base of 54%, and the array assumes Kym has perfect refine skills (scary POS code is the TL;DR on way that's the case). The outpost would refine at a base of 57%, and take into consideration Kym's skills, but also charge a 2.5% tax. In order for the outpost to be a better option, I'd need to train the relevant skills to V, which for the ores that I commonly mine means about a month of total training time, give or take. With that extra month of training, the outpost would give me an extra 0.5% yield, compared to the POS. If the summer expansion were released tomorrow, it would make more sense to refine at the POS. 

Follow all that? Essentially, because of the 2.5% tax, the outpost as it exists right now is only going to ever be 0.5% better than the POS. Upgrade the implant, you say? It applies to both the POS and the outpost. Is it worth it to me to spend a month of training to get that extra 0.5%? Right now, that is doubtful. The whole risk/reward also needs to be considered here, too. Warping to a station in Provi is nearly always more dangerous than warping to a POS. Reds go there first, and generally stay away from a POS (fleets aside, but I'm talking about the everyday roaming solo and gang pilots). The minerals also need to end up in the POS eventually, anyways, in order to build stuff. Taking ore to the station and then hauling, again, up to the POS just doesn't seem worth it for that extra 0.5% and month of training time. I can think of a million things I'd rather be training for a month than refining skills to get a 0.5% boost. 

Sounds like I've made up my mind, doesn't it? The outlier here is alliance command- if the outpost gets upgraded from 57% to 60%, then that's a difference of 3.5% compared to the POS- also known as seven times more than 0.5%. In that case, I think spending the month to train V's will be a better return on the time investment. I guess we'll see. For the time being, I think I'm going to hedge and buy that array. If others out there are doing the math, and are arriving at the same conclusion as me, maybe I should buy ten and wait for the price to increase as demand inevitably rises.

:-)

Just a Ho-Hum Week

It's been a fairly ho-hum week, with the market basically sitting still for most of Kym's items in North Provi, so it's been a fun time to catch up on some other stuff and go looking for deals in highsec- one of my favorite pastimes in the game. I scored some cheap minerals in the Devoid and Tash-Murkon regions and successfully got them back to Provi while eluding an Astero tail that Kym picked up somewhere along the Devoid/Tash-Murkon border. Thank goodness for the trio of Hypervelocity Optimizer rigs and the nanos on my Kryos; the Astero never could quite catch up before I hit the jump bridge.

A couple of updates on projects are in order, I think. The resetting of the Thorax hull price has been wildly successful; although the three hulls that I "anchored" at a high price haven't sold (which was expected), everyone else has realigned their prices as a result, and they are finally selling at a reasonable 20% margin. I think my next step is going to involve building another batch and selling them at a price that will compete with the now-reasonable sell orders. I'll still keep the first "anchor" sell order though so folks don't start crashing the market again. It's sort of an aggressive market move to have two sell orders out for the same thing at once, but since it's pretty clear that all of the current Provi Thorax builders are just chasing and pricing off of each other instead of their costs, this is pretty much the only move available to me. Oh well. 

The other project has been the t2 HAM missiles. This has been fun. Although the missiles aren't selling instantly, they are selling fast, and I'm not really able to stockpile them. So while it has been a slow week for other stuff, Kym's been churning out HAM ammo like crazy- and that Augmentation decryptor has definitely paid off in terms of faster build times. Since the missiles are occupying an entire Ammo Array for production, I went and anchored a second so other folks can still build stuff, too. I can see why folks don't like to build these things, though- lots of stuff goes into them. There's the standard assortment of asteroid minerals, but there's also some moon mat stuff like Phenolic Composites, some t2 components, and some PI materials. All for a t2 missile.

Speaking of PI, this week I've finally gotten back into the swing of doing Planetary Interaction (PI) in Eve. It's great, nearly passive ISK but I got really burned out on it about two months back when my corp needed a second tower and we figured we could build it. Most folks don't know this, but all POS structures are built from PI materials. A tower, for instance, requires some of each P4 material, usually a few dozen of each one. P4s are also a huge, royal pain to fabricate- look it up and you'll see why. Anyways, Kym doesn't have an alt, and I ended up building the majority of the tower myself (other corp members did help, I don't feel burned by them or anything. That's just how it turned out, so there's no drama here). The constant switch of resources and routing everything really taxed the limits of my patience for a video game, though, and once the tower was done I didn't even want to look at my planets any more, much less interact with them.

That changed with the t2 HAM though. I need Rocket Fuel (a P2 material) to build the t2 missiles, and that means buying it or building it. So I started building it on my storm planet again, and that let me creep back into PI without wanting to rage quit. I don't have any plans to build another tower, though. Ever.

That's all for now, folks. Enjoy the weekend.

At Mineral Cost

Kym gets requests to build all manner of things in Eve, and from time to time she's asked to build something "at mineral cost". What does this mean, exactly? The more I source, build, and sell things, the more I realize there are multiple ways to define exactly what "mineral cost" is. 

Mineral prices vary all over New Eden. I've seen Tritanium selling for anywhere from the high 3s to the mid 6s, and I've seen buy orders for less than that (which apparently are being filled by miners who don't know any better). Every other mineral has similar volatility. So how does someone calculate what "mineral cost" really is?

I'm sure the standard answer here is "use the Jita prices". Eve Central keeps the going rates for the seven main minerals pretty up to date in all of the major trade hubs, and accessing those prices is quite simple. Even using Jita prices presents a problem though: should I use the sell prices, or the lower buy prices? If I use the sell prices, that doesn't accurately reflect what I spent to acquire those minerals. But, if I were to use the buy prices, it would undervalue what I could sell those same minerals for, too- if I didn't build with them. I'm purposely not including the taxes here, because when something gets built "at mineral cost" it's either being station traded (if I really trust the person) or more often through private contracts. Realistically, the Jita prices don't even reflect what "mineral cost" is, though- because Kym is nowhere near Jita, and isn't hauling minerals halfway across New Eden to build something.

The local mineral market isn't the Jita mineral market. Tritanium sell orders are, at a minimum, 5 ISK. The other bulk minerals, Pyerite and Mexallon, are similarly inflated, while the "rare" minerals are often cheaper than highsec. This is because there are lots of "rare" ores in null and comparatively less common ores than the ratios in highsec (Welcome to null. There are lots of shiny things here.). So that's the first difference. The second difference is volume- If my buy orders for minerals don't fill fast enough, I have to either buy them, mine them, or fly around highsec and haul them. Or wait. All of these things add to the cost. See how complex this gets?

After mulling all of this over for quite some time, I've figured out what works for me. When I calculate my "mineral cost", I do it at the highest price that I would personally pay for the minerals- what is typically the reasonable sell order price in my local market. This means that my "mineral cost" is actually higher than what I paid for those minerals, in most cases. I always check my calculated cost against the local & Jita market prices, and in almost every case, it's still much less than what the item goes for on the market. The one exception I've noticed is in battleships- sometimes they're being sold at ridiculously low prices. To me, that means the seller is either looking to unload assets, or has access to really cheap Tritanium (most battleships use around 10 million trit for a single hull and trit's often the single biggest cost).

I feel this is a fair strategy, especially when I consider what the people would do if I didn't build for them. They could buy it on the market for more, try to find another builder (which they're free to do), or build it themselves. The last option is where skilling and investment come into play. Unless they have the "Production Efficiency" skill trained all the way to V (I think that skill might be named "Material Efficiency" now), they'll have at least 5% more in material costs than Kym, and maybe as much as 25% more in material costs if it's not trained at all. That's a lot, especially on larger hulls or if they want lots of one item. They'd also need a BPO or a BPC, and that costs ISK and time to find, buy, and research. 

Sometimes I feel a bit bad about calculating mineral cost like this, since there is a net gain in my wallet, but perhaps I should realize that if I calculated everything at my buy order prices, I'd risk taking a loss if the mineral price jumped and I had to buy the next round of minerals for my own production at a higher cost than I just paid. Then again, maybe I'm being selfish. Someone let me know!

But I want to actually make a profit off of this...

Research is a naturally complementary activity when it comes to manufacturing in Eve. I'd actually be surprised if there are builders in New Eden who don't also pursue research, since building from an unresearched BPO or constantly needing to buy BPCs off the contract market would really cut into someone's profit margins. BPOs are pretty reasonably priced at the cruiser level and below for hulls (80M or so is the NPC price for cruisers), and module BPOs are generally cheap, too. There are some exceptions, of course. The Prototype Cloaking Device is something like 100M, and the ORE mining barge BPOs are allover a billion at NPC price, but that's because they're used for invention for the extremely popular CovOps Cloaker and the Exhumers trawling about the asteroid belts. Otherwise, buying a BPO shouldn't seem like a scary proposition for anyone wanting to build.

I'll leave alone the basic nuts and bolts of what's in a BPO since that's been covered a few dozen times by other guides and blogs scattered all over this great big series of pipes the late Sen. Ted Stevens so famously described. I would like to talk about exactly how much research to put into a BPO, though. So often I read guides and see contracts with hilariously high levels of Material Efficiency (ME) research that I have to pause and wonder, "why"? These folks will spend months or years researching a BPO, and to what end? If that's their game goal in and of itself, to have every one of their BPOs researched to ME 200, I can appreciate the dedication. If they're selling copies on the contracts market though, the difference for a copy at ME50 vs. ME200 is really, really small. Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself at https://zofu.no-ip.de/bpo - and I'll use a big hull, the Dominix, as an example. At ME50, the hull cost is (as of this posting with Jita prices) 178.2M ISK. At ME200, it's 178.1M. That's a savings of basically zilch compared to the overall hull cost. At ME10, by the way, that hull costs 178.7M. Now consider the length of time needed to research this BPO. ME10 needs roughly 4-5 weeks. ME50? Try six months. And ME200? More than two years. That's a huge waste of a research slot and yes, I have seen batttleship BPCs on the contracts market with that level of research. If someone is building battleship hulls and only making 600,000 profit per hull, they're doing it wrong. Branch out. Diversify. Spend the time in that research slot on a few dozen other BPOs rather than waste time on one ridiculously high ME level.

Perhaps that level of competition exists in highsec- I wouldn't know, quite honestly. It seems like a really good way to burn out, though. I think if that's really the case, folks should concentrate their efforts more on the supply side of things and look for cheaper sources of minerals instead of fretting about their sale price. Train up that Scrapmetal Processing skill and you'll find an enormous stockpile of minerals from every useless module you come across. Or, move somewhere else, like null.

There's a lot less competition in null, even in the busy Providence region. Go further out still, and you might be the only manufacturer. There are fewer buyers, too, but that works itself out. What that means for research is that a builder doesn't need to research a BPO to insane levels. ME5 is, quite honestly, just fine for most things. ME10 is my personal goal for a BPO before I'll switch to researching it for time efficiency instead, especially with hulls. ME10 gives 0.9% waste, and as another builder once told me, "anything under 1% waste is good", and he's been doing this for much longer than me. At that level you can price items close to Jita or Amarr prices, and folks will probably buy them.

Speaking of prices, the Providence region is a bit batty on some things at the moment. Augoror hulls, for example, are selling for way, way less than mineral price- unless these folks are ripping off the local miners something fierce, and that's not really a sustainable way to build in null, where your relationships with other players are usually more personal than in highsec. The Thorax hull is also selling at a very small margin right now- its mineral costs are about identical to the Vexor, but it's selling for 1-2M less than the Vexor. Probably because people are idiots and didn't calculate their costs before setting a price, which is their decision, but man, it's a pain to deal with. So I'm trying to fix that, going off of the hypothesis that they're just pricing off of the local competition's price and making sure they're just a bit lower, in a downward-chasing cycle. So i built a few and anchored them at a price 2M higher than everything else in Provi. I don't expect them to sell any time soon, but I do hope that the other folks see that price and decide to raise theirs as a result, and make it profitable to once again build those hulls. We'll see. It's definitely easier to crash the market than it is to bring it back up again.

That's all for now, fly safe.

Missiles and Markets

Whoo-hoo, Kym started trained Advanced Mass Production yesterday. Finally, I have more than 5 production lines available (although I'm -1 production line right now regardless since I did a corp mate a favor and built something for him in highsec and now Kym can't leave null because of wardeccs). So it'll be interesting to see what those extra lines get used for. I'm thinking of a dedicated T2 ammo line, since that stuff takes forever to build- with a standard -4/-4 BPC for HAM ammo, it'll take like 4 or 5 days to build 50,000 missiles.

Speaking of that, I'm considering inventing future HAM BPCs with a decryptor- yep, you read that right. Decryptor with ammo. The logic is simple- the profit margin for the ammunition is large, and supposedly these things sell fast. If this current batch sells as fast as everyone says is does (and I'm naturally skeptical, so we'll see), then building time actually becomes a bigger factor than the profit margin. The decryptor is the Augmentation line, and for those of you unfamiliar with decryptors, they come in many flavors and modify the invented BPC, assuming the invention job is successful. 

The decryptors are usually expensive, but not in this case. Augmentation decryptors are dirt cheap, usually around 100K. Assuming I start inventing with a max-run BPC (always use a max-run for ammo folks, you'll get 10 T2 runs out of it), I'll get an invented BPC with 19 runs instead of 10, they'll build a bit faster, and have 20% more required materials. It also drops the chance of invention success by 40% (so if it was a 50% chance beforehand, now it's 30% --> not 10%). We'll see how it goes and whether it's worthwhile. If I can free up some time on a production line, then that's more room to build other stuff. This all assumes these missiles sell faster than I build them, though. Otherwise, forget it.

That's the strange (odd?) thing about the North Provi market. It's not highsec, and there is a definite ebb-and-flow to items. Folks who aren't patient would probably go nuts seeing 2 Brutixes sit for weeks on end without selling, and then suddenly watch as the entire region of Providence is emptied of Brutixes in one single afternoon. Fortunately, Kym builds all sorts of things in all shapes and sizes, and puts only a small number of any one thing up for sale at any given time. The ammo might be an exception to that rule, if it sells. 

One more thing about the North Provi market- after initially deciding to pull out of an item that someone was importing and selling for less than me, but in smaller quantities, I've decided to do a full 180 and go hard against the guy, selling at a loss to maintain control of that item. I figure the profits from everything else can subsidize the losses until he gives up and moves on. This is Kym's version of PvP, and it has the potential to be great fun. We'll see how it goes.

You, too, can build. It's all a question of why.

I hear a lot of folks in my pocket talk about how they really need to get their indy skills up so they can start building. And while I will nod my head to the realities of skill requirements for purely industrial toons like Kym, the truth of the matter is that folks who just want to build a little bit on the side don't really need much skilling at all. The real question casual builders should ask themselves is, "why do I want to build?"

There are generally two ways to answer that question, and I think addressing both answers here could be a good road to journey down. If the answer to that question is, "well, to make ISK", I think there are probably other ways to make more ISK faster. Let's be clear: if you build something and someone buys it, you will get paid. The only variables here are how long it'll take to sell, and how much your wallet will increase.

Notice I didn't say "profit". There are people in Eve obsessed with ISK/hour and profit margins. Good for them. I am not really one of them and have no intentions of becoming one. Do I track my costs via spreadsheet? Yes. I do that for two reasons: I don't have time to mine much any more, and I want to know how the market looks for an item. It wasn't always that way, though.

When I first started to build stuff in Eve (I believe my first BPO was for a Tristan, and it took a while for me to get around to researching it), I didn't buy the minerals. Kym was a small-time, low-SP toon and so I did what every Eve-expert says not to do: I mined and refined, and then I built and sold. You know what? Kym's wallet went up. ISK increased. Would it have increased more doing other things? Sure. If I really just wanted to maximize my ISK though, I'd go WH ratting and pray to not get blown up. The fundamental issue here is not making ISK at a particular rate. The issue is even more important: What do I want to get out of Eve? 

Eve, at the end of the day, is a video game. It's not real life (but how cool would it be if it were???). If it were, I'd care more about how much money I was making. But since there aren't those nagging worries of real-life constraints, I don't have to concern myself with them. Instead I can choose whatever path I want in the game that is most satisfying, and as long as the wallet is generally going up, I see no need to worry about how fast. As I mentioned in an earlier post (the only earlier post, actually), seeing someone else fly around in a ship that I built is pretty cool. Same goes with modules, rigs, and ammo. If you know who bought your stuff because you check your transaction history regularly, then seeing other players flying around in the game takes on a whole new level of curiosity: Did they put that trimark on that ship? Is that guy who's ratting still using the ammo he bought from me, or did he use it all up? Should I make more?

Manufacturing opens up all of those questions to players, and more. On more than one occasion, a new-ish red player was able to dock in a station (NRDS and Provi aren't perfect, but that's not the focus right now). Guess what? He bought one of my ships and some of my rigs. I watched the transactions pile up and I called out that vital information to the PvPers. When he undocked, I made sure I was safe and cloaked, and watched the ship that I built go boom. Similarly, sometimes an unknown neut enters the system and everybody gets jittery. Then he buys a Venture. Or a Retriever (why a retriever in null-sec, I'll never know, but if someone wants to buy it, I'll build it). And I generally stop worrying at that point and let folks know what he bought.

Anyways, back to the original question that has been meandering through all of this: What do you want to get out of Eve? If it's ISK, go forth and rat those wormholes. If you want to experience a whole different side of Eve that is deeper and richer than a PvE experience, and you like the sound of seeing the digital fruits of your labor flying around in beautifully rendered outer space, then some casual building might be a good thing to try. Don't worry about skills, or profits, or any of that- you can always mine, salvage, or rat at the same time something's building or waiting to sell. Just be patient and eventually you'll be rewarded with seeing that ship you built flying around Eve with you.

Obligatory First Post

The hardest part is always the beginning. There, now that's done. I can feel the writer's block ebb away slowly, and hopefully the rest will go smoothly. If you've found the site and are still reading, I think that's a good thing. Continuing to follow the blog will earn you stories and perspectives of manufacturing and building all things Eve-related, and probably the occasional post about whatever else comes to mind. I hope you visit often.

A bit about my Eve character is in order, I suppose. Kym Sorenson started her life at the tail-end of July, 2013. I guess that makes her a little more than seven months old, and aside from roughly the first month of time spent in Gallente highsec, she's dwelled in North Provi, where she's developed into a semi-competent industrialist and remains absolutely horrible at basically everything else. That's ok though, since I've always enjoyed building things more than blowing them up. Since things need to blow up in Eve to keep the wheel of the universe turning, I took that as the inspiration for the blog's title, The Burning Prairie.

For the uninitiated masses, here's the brief rundown on prairies. Tallgrass prairie is something I'm passionate about in real life, and these ecosystems are dominated by perennial grasses and wildflowers that emerge from the ground and grow to great heights in a single growing season before dying back to their root base during the harsh Midwestern winter. In order for these matrices of plants to succeed in cycle after yearly cycle, last year's growth has to be burned away in spectacular fashion, much like most of the things in Eve. Hence, The Burning Prairie. 

Anyways, back to Eve. Not much else to talk about in this first post, except to say that Kym's corp is not an industrial corp by any means, but then again it's not focused on anything, really. And that's what makes the corp special. Since I've joined we've only had two people leave the corp; one person stopped playing Eve altogether shortly thereafter, and another joined a WH corp. Otherwise, it's grown slowly but surely and shows what happens when a corp has good leadership. It's very tight-knit, and everyone does something different. There are miners, ratters, PvPers of various stripes, a market guy, some haulers, explorers, and more. And then there's Kym, the builder. 

What I like most about the manufacturing in Eve is the readily visible results. The things that exist in the game are nearly entirely player-created, and nullsec is the extreme example of that. If there is something on the market, it was either built or hauled in by somebody. Someone spent the time to do that. Ships are no different, but are probably the most visible example. When I see a Talos sitting at the jumpbridge waiting to warp to the PvP fight, or hear that the defense fleet won at the gate because of the logi pilots, I'm able to think to myself, "hey, I built those ships." And that is a very rewarding feeling for me. 

That's all for now, I'll probably post something tomorrow a bit more focused. Good night.