The first time, a tutorial

I've gotten a little bit of feedback based on this blog. Nearly all of it has been positive. I've also had some people come to me who are also trying to start out their careers as Industrial Players. The common thread is, "I don't know what to do first." So, I'm writing this post as an answer to that question.

What are the first steps in manufacturing an item? Here is a step-by-step tutorial.

The very first thing you need is a Blueprint. I choose to use Blueprint Originals (BPO) as opposed to Blueprint Copies (BPC). I do this because the BPC has a limited number of runs on it, meaning if you buy a copy, you can only make a finite number of that product before the copy runs out. A BPO, on the other hand, has an infinite number of runs. You can make that product until the end of eternity if you want.

You can find BPOs on the market. However, these are generally from an NPC corp and are unresearched. Research is how you make a blueprint better. Material Efficiency (ME) and Production Efficiency (PE) both impact the profitability of a manufacturing project. ME reduces the number of materials you need to build. PE reduces the amount of time it takes to make the project. Ideally, you want a BPO with some level of ME research. This link allows you to see what a "perfect" BPO looks like. A perfect BPO can't be made any better, it represents the least amount of materials a person can use to make that product.

So, I head to Jita and look through Contracts instead of buying one on the market. Open up the contracts interface, and do some searching. In this picture, I limited the search to the current station (Jita 4-4), contract type "Want to Sell," Category "Blueprint Original," Item Group "All," (You can select specific groups, drones, for example) and I also set my upper price range at 15,000,000. I didn't want to spend any more than that on a BPO.

The first, Multiple Items contract was for a few different charge BPOs, which would have some value for me in Amarr space, because more people fly Amarr ships there (at least theoretically). But there was a major problem for me. Can you spot it?

The price was brilliant, but the ME and PE were all 0. Therefore, it wasn't what I was looking for. I continued looking until I found one that I thought would work.

According to my handy-dandy link above, this BPO isn't quite perfect, but would take some more serious time investment to perfect, and would only save me 7 Tritanium per 100 ammo. It's not worth the significant time investment in order to perfect the BPO. So, this was good enough. Next step is actually building the product. So, I brought it back to my homebase. Once you get to your manufacturing spot, open up the Science and Industry menu, and go to the Installations tab, select Manufacturing and choose an open slot. They are noted by the green "Now" You can see that here, there are a lot of open manufacturing slots.

Select a slot, select your blueprint, select where the materials will come from and where you want the product delivered and you'll see this screen:

I didn't have any of the materials I needed, so there is a bunch of red on the screen. Red is always an indicator that everything isn't alright and you need to go back. However, the "Total cost" is displayed here, and that figures into manufacturing. I always call that my "Manufacturing cost" in my posts. It's usually pretty small, but it definitely is a cost associated with manufacturing. Once you get everything going, by clicking the Accept Quote button, you have to wait for the manufacturing to finish. This happens in real time, even if you're not online at the time.

Once it's done, open the Science and Industry tab, click on jobs, and search the correct criteria. Here's what I had:

The Hobgoblins are still in progress, but the EMP ammo is done! So, it's green, and I select it then click on "Deliver." The EMP ammo was in my inventory and I was able to move it over to my trading location and sell them.

I hope this helps you if you're trying to get started. A step I forgot to mention is that I was checking the prices in my region while I was in Jita, using an alt. I wanted to make sure that whatever I bought was actually going to sell, not like I did when I bought that Veldspar Mining Crystal BPO (Yeah, I'm still mad about that, and still have 50 of those blasted crystals to sell. Anyone want them?)

I also was using Isk Per Hour which is a fantastic tool for checking the profitability of items.

If you still have questions, feel free to ask away here in the comments.

Also, as an added bonus. One of the images above shows the ship I was flying, first one to leave their character name (or even an NPC/Forum alt, I don't discriminate!), and the ship I was flying in the comments wins 10,000,000 ISK.

Until next time, Fly Safe!