Industry in EVE from zero: building to sell

A beginner’s intro: what industry in EVE is, what a build is made of (blueprint, materials, a slot), where the profit comes from and why the system matters more than the structure. No formulas — plain terms, to see whether it is for you at all and where to start.

What industry is and how it makes money

Industry in EVE is turning raw materials into finished items from a blueprint: ships, modules, ammo, fuel, structure components. The money is in the gap: assembling an item from materials is cheaper than buying it ready on the market. You buy minerals and components, run a job, get a ship, sell it in Jita — the difference minus fees is yours.

In spirit it is close to trading: you put in capital and earn on a price gap rather than hours of farming. The difference is that you make the goods yourself, and the job time sits between buying materials and selling the product. So industry favours those with capital and patience, and rewards them because most people cannot be bothered to compute the build cost.

What a build is made of: a blueprint, materials, a slot

Three things. First, the blueprint. An original (BPO) can be used forever and researched; a copy (BPC) is good for a limited number of runs. A blueprint has two stats: ME (Material Efficiency) cuts material use, TE (Time Efficiency) cuts time. For T1 the max is ME 10 / TE 20; people usually buy a ready max-research BPC rather than research one themselves.

Second, materials: minerals, components, fuel. You buy them off the market — instantly off the book or, cheaper, with your own buy order. Third, a slot in a structure where the job runs: an NPC station or your own/someone’s citadel (Raitaru, Azbel, Sotiyo). Slots are limited, and their number grows with industry skills. One key detail: since the Crius patch skills do not affect material use — the build cost is the same for a newcomer and a veteran, and only the sale fees and time differ.

Three floors: raw materials, components and reactions

A complex item is not built straight from minerals but from components that themselves must be built, and those from reaction materials that must be reacted out of moon ores and gas. The result is a tree several floors deep: product → components → reactions → raw. On each floor there is a choice: build/react it yourself or buy it ready off the market. This is called build-or-buy.

The deeper you build the vertical yourself, the lower the cost, but the more hassle and logistics. A newcomer does well to start simple: T1 modules and ships, where the tree is shallow and the materials are ordinary minerals. Reactions and deep components are the next step, when you want to squeeze the margin.

Where profit comes from: build cost minus fees

Profit is the product’s market price minus the build cost minus fees. The build cost is materials, the job install fee, and — if you bought materials by buy order — the sourcing broker. Sale fees: the seller always pays tax, and the broker is for placing an order. You can sell two ways: with your own sell order (higher price, but broker + tax and you wait) or by dumping into someone’s buy order instantly (tax only, no broker).

Hence a concept that matters for a newcomer — break-even, the lowest sale price at which you come out flat after all fees. That, not the bare build cost, is what you compare against the market: if the market price is below break-even, the build loses money even when “materials are cheaper than the product.” Doing this by hand for a tree of a hundred nodes is impossible — which is what the calculator is for.

How to read the build-cost calculator →

Where to build: the system matters more than the structure

The job install fee depends on the system “index” — the cost index, which rises when everyone in a system builds the same thing. In Jita it is high (~19%); in a quiet system nearby it is a fraction of a percent. The gap is tens of times, and this is the main lever of saving. The structure type (Raitaru / Azbel / Sotiyo) affects the fee itself little — it mostly sets the maximum job size (sub-caps, capitals, supers). Materials, though, are cut by the structure’s rigs, and the lower the system’s security the more they cut — that is an advanced lever; for a start, choosing a quiet system is enough.

Hence the classic pattern the whole station industry rests on: buy materials in Jita, haul them to a quiet system nearby, build there cheaply, haul the product back to Jita and sell. Logistics is part of the job, and it too must go into the calculation.

Next: where to build — rigs, security and all 7 placement options →

Reactions, low-sec and risk

Reactions are cooking reaction materials from moon ores and gas, needed for T2 and capital components. They run only in systems at 0.4 security and below — low-sec, null, wormholes; in high-sec a reactor does not work. This adds a second logistics leg (hauling inputs to the reaction system) and risk: moving cargo through low-sec can get you ganked.

A newcomer is in no rush with reactions: they add margin but require low-sec/null access and careful logistics. It is easier to start with pure high-sec manufacturing and add reactions once you are comfortable and want to build T2.

Where to start

A newcomer’s practical route. Build a small starting stake, pick a simple T1 item with live demand, buy a max BPC (ME 10 / TE 20). Open the manufacturing calculator, enter the item, set the structure and system — and it shows the build cost, profit on both sale sides, break-even and a ready shopping list for multibuy. Copy the materials, buy them, build, sell in Jita.

A walkthrough of every button is in a separate guide, “What it costs to build”: the build-or-buy tree, install fee, fees and shopping lists on one worked example, and at the end the “Plan” mode for a batch of several items with shared factories and net-merged purchasing. For what sells at what price and whether trading the built goods is worth it at all, see Market and the guide “How to make ISK”.

Paper profit and actual profit are different things. Once you build regularly, the actual result on what you have already built and sold is computed by “My Trading”: it reads your industry jobs via ESI and assembles each batch’s cost from the real material purchase prices and the install fee you paid. For that, link your characters on the Account page. If you install jobs from corporation blueprints (a corp hangar), link the corporation there as well, with a character holding the Factory Manager and Director roles: jobs by every corp member are tracked at once, no need to link each building alt.

My Trading: actuals on what you built →