EVE Online is based around two things: war and industry, which fuels the war machine. The first is creating the demand, while the latter is providing the supply. Almost all items in the game are built by players (with the exception of meta 1-4 and deadspace/officer gear which only drops from NPCs).
All items in the game have a Meta level, which corresponds to the Tech level and the quality of the item.
| Tech level | Meta levels | Products | Tasks | Materials |
| 1 | 0-4 | Ships, Modules, Ammo, Rigs | Mining, Manufacturing, Salvaging | ore & minerals, wrecks |
| – | – | Boosters | Gas mining | gas clouds |
| – | – | Structures, Fuel, Parts | Planetary Interaction | planetary materials |
| 2 | 5 | Ships, Modules, Ammo, Rigs | Invention, Manufacturing, Salvaging, Hacking, Planetary Interaction | morphite, moon minerals, wrecks |
| 3 | – | Item groups | Reverse Engineering, Gas mining, Manufacturing, Hacking, Salvaging | sleeper loot & wrecks |
Blueprints
To manufacture an item in EVE Online, one needs a Blueprint. Blueprint is a recipe, which takes a specific amount of ingredients and after a specific time outputs a specific item. Blueprints are available in two flavours: originals and copies. The former can be bought from NPCs, and the latter are created from originals by performing a copy operation on them. Original blueprints can be used indefinitely, while copies have a specific number of uses.
Some blueprints only exist as copies. These includes blueprints for tech III ships, some tech II items and faction items. Tech II blueprints used to come as originals in a lottery system, until CCP decided to introduce Invention, which basically allows everyone to get involved in tech II items manufacturing. Invention however only creates tech II blueprint copies. It is also worth mentioning, that NPCs sometimes award blueprint copies for various items for completing missions.
A new original blueprint will come unresearched, which means its Mineral Efficiency and Production Efficiency levels will equal zero. In order to manufacture items using such blueprint, one requires 10% more minerals than the item is actually made of, and it takes 10% more time than the perfect manufacturing time. Research is necessary in order to improve these values – each level of ME makes the waste factor lower:
wastage factor = (10% / (1 + ME) )
| ME level | Waste factor |
| 0 | 10% |
| 1 | 5.0% |
| 2 | 3.3% |
| 5 | 1.6% |
| 10 | 0.9% |
| 20 | 0.5% |
| 50 | 0.2% |
The formula is a bit different for Drones:
wastage factor = (5% / (1 + ME ) )
Unfortunately the amount of ME research slots on NPC stations is far lower than the demand, so if you don’t own a Player Owned Starbase with its own Laboratories, you have to wait in a long queue.
To make the reasearch happen, you have to do the following:
- Right click the Blueprint, choose Material Research or Time Efficiency Research.
- Click “Pick Installation”, sort by the Next Free Time column, choose a free slot, or if there is none, the one with shortest waiting time (your job will queue up)
- Enter how many levels you want to research
- Click “OK”
- Click “Accept Quote”
Done! Your job will now be listed under the “Jobs” panel in the “Science and Industry” window. Once the research is complete, you will be able to finish it by clicking the “Deliver” button.
Warning: if you cancel a job, you will get your blueprint back, but the laboratory slot will remain used.
Tech 1 Manufacturing
Just one skill is required to create a tech I manufacturing job: Industry. But don’t jump to the production line just yet, young padawan: inexperienced characters will waste a lot of materials (25% by default in addition to the blueprint waste mentioned above), so the Production Efficiency skill should be trained to level 5 as soon as possible. It doesn’t take very long to train, and each level lowers this huge waste by 5%. As you have alredy guessed it, at level 5 the only waste is the blueprint (ME) based waste.
- Right click the Blueprint, choose Manufacturing
- Click “Pick Installation”, sort by the Next Free Time column, choose a free slot, or if there is none, the one with shortest waiting time (your job will queue up)
- Enter how many items you want to make (please mind: some blueprints, for example ammunition, make more than one item per batch)
- Click “OK”
- Click “Accept Quote”
Done! When the job is finished, go to “Jobs” page in the “Science and Industry” window and click on “Deliver”. By default the items will be placed in your hangar.
Very interesting! Well written, easy to understand as a new player. Many thanks