Welcome to my non-technical and outdated but probably still useful guide to boosters. There have been changes to how things are built in Eve. This was the old POS code before the introduction of new structures in 2016. This is just a walk through on my wobbling
path of booster production. It took me
half a dozen different documents to figure out what I needed to do to make
these mythical things. It is what I do. It may not be perfect but it works.
This is pirate focused industry.
This is pirate focused industry.
This guide brought to you by Lain asking me to write it after I tried to explain it in chat.
Why make boosters?
Because drugs are good.
Really they are performance enhancers and performance enhancers can give
someone that extra edge in PvP. It was also because my boys used them and when they
ran low they often ran out, I could be their supplier. They would no longer hoard their drugs due to the length of time it takes to get fresh product.. The thought
of being a drug kingpin was also very appealing. Plus, it meant I was building things. Lacking any business sense the payoff of ‘yay
I made it’ is so powerful for me that it negates all of those sensible things
like cost, profit, logistics, and sense.
I was told that few people stay with boosters by
someone. This automatically kicked in my
“Oh really?” stubborn mode and I went into over drive the next day to set up my
processes. I've had a few out of corporation sales but business has been slow for me. I'm terrible at selling myself that way.
What
are Boosters?
Boosters are Combat Improvement drugs. They come in several types.
From the Eve Online Wiki:Combat
Boosters
"Combat Boosters are specially designed drugs which allow the user to temporarily boost certain combat related abilities at the risk of more or less harsh penalties to other combat abilities.
Currently there exist eight different boosters, each of them affect a different attribute and each of them have different possible side effects. Each of the eight boosters come in four different flavors, each one more potent but also more dangerous regarding the side effects."
The
Law on Boosters
Synthetic Boosters are legal in high security space. The other boosters are not legal. The customs agents that inhabit each high
security gate have a chance of scanning your ship when you enter a system. If they find contraband in your ship they
will offer to let you confiscate it or pay a fine.
Or you can trigger an aggression flag and ignore them. They are only illegal at the gates. The stations do not have customs
offices. Also, Concord and the various
Faction Police Agencies do not do blood tests.
Consumed boosters are therefore legal.
What
are the types of Boosters?
Booster Effect
Blue
pill Shield
boosting amount
Exile Armor
repair amount
Mindflood Capacitor
capacity
X-Instinct Signature
radius
Drop Tracking
speed
Frentix Optimal
range
Sooth
Sayer Falloff range
Crash Missile
explosion radius
I have read that the modules cannot be anchored in 0.4 security space. I have not tried to confirm this. If so, it means 0.3 security space and down. High sec is not an option. Look to most(?) of low sec, all of null sec and all of wormhole space. They cannot be made in high sec empire space. They are considered illegal contraband in high sec.
Boosters are made with a POS. A POS is a Player Owned
Starbase. Often they are called
Structures but the wiki page calls them a Starbase.
They need to be made in the Drug Lab POS Module. However, there are several steps before the
end product of making a booster. How
many of these steps you want to complete are up to you. Technically, you can buy all of the end
materials off of the market and just make the end production booster. It's your finances after all.
How
are Boosters Made
The very basic explanation is that Boosters are made of
harvestable gas from gas clouds found in ladar sites. Ladar sites are cosmic signatures that are
found through the use of scanner probes.
Some of these signatures contain clouds of gas. They are then mixed with other things depending
on the type of booster you want.
The
Skills
Eve’s skillpoint trap is right here for more things for you
to learn. The nice part is that none of
the skills needed are time intensive.
You can have the skills to make your own boosters with one trip to a
station with NPC skill books and a quick market search.
- For the POS - Anchoring III. Because it will not be in high sec NPC standings are a nonissue.
- To make the Drugs - Drug Manufacturing
- To consume the Drugs - Biology, Science
- To negate some of the negative effects of the drugs - Neurotoxin Recovery, Nanite Control
- If you want the ability to remotely run blue prints from the safety of a station you need to learn…
- Scientific Networking - This skill runs the blue prints from the station. Its prerequisites are Science III and Laboratory Operation IV
Gas comes in two types.
Cytoserocin and Mykoserocin.
It comes in eight flavors: Amber, Azure, Celadon, Golden,
Lime Malachite, Vermillion, and Viridan.
Mykoserocin
is used in synthetic boosters. Cytoserocin is used in standard boosters. Improved boosters use two different types of
standard booster combined in a reaction.
Strong Boosters used two types of standard boosters in their reaction. It
is a stepping stone process that starts with the two base gases.
Reactions: Each
booster has a reaction for each strength (synth, standard, improved, strong). The reaction is the basic recipe that creates
a Pure form of the booster. This Pure
form is only a material and not something that you can use directly. It is what feeds either the blueprint copy
for the actual booster or feeds the next step of the reaction process for
Improved and Strong boosters.
Other stuff: Garbage
if you are making Synth boosters. Water
if you are making standard boosters.
Material
Acquisition
Megacyte can be mined in null or purchased off the market.
The POS - Buy it or build it from blue prints
What
size POS?
The smallest size POS is going to be a medium POS due to the
needs of the modules. The drug
manufacturing will consume the entirety of the POSs capabilities to
support. However, the fuel consumption
is pretty low. Thank CCP for giving
barges Ore holds. AFK ice mining has
caused fuel to plummet.
A large POS gives more options but consumes twice as much
fuel as a medium POS.
I personally run a large POS on a moon with minerals. Not a tech moon. It however has two minerals that I also
mine. This brings in enough to put a
dent in the fuel bill. Far from
spectacular but tending my POS is like puttering around a garden for me in
game.
I also have two labs running and researching blue
prints. To save myself some money if
someone decides to come destroy my tower, I’ve learned the skills to let me
remotely manage blue prints. This way I
keep as few assets in space as possible at any given time.
Each POS has bonuses and pros and cons. That isn't my discussion. There are lots of POS guides out there.
What
Modules?
- The Tower
- A Biochemical Silo
- Biochem Reactor Array (complex reactions, improved or strong boosters)
- Medium Biochemical Reactor Array (simple reactions, synth or standard boosters)
- Drug Lab
- Two General Storage Silos
- Hazardous Chemical Silo
You can now name your modules. I suggest this because it will make life
easier when you are trying to link everything together into a process. I named my silos silo one and silo two. The
labs are lab one and lab two. The naming
method can be as simple or as complex as you wish it to be but it will make
your life easier for each module to be its own, unique individual.
What
Permissions?
I suck at the corporation management stuff. This is why this is a non-technical
guide. Basically, you need to be able to
build things in labs and access silos and manage the production line. A lot of people set up an alt corporation for this because the materials involved are
expensive.
An alt corporation is one run by another character on your
main or secondary account. This
corporation often only contains that one character. This allows you to run the POS by yourself
with no interference. If the corporation
joins the alliance, alliance members can also access the POS. Due to the poor security capabilities of
current Eve Corporation Management, alternate corporations are a very secure
way to move forward with projects. This
also keeps primary corporation and alliance killboards empty of expensive structure
loses for those that care about such things.
Mixing
the Materials
The POS interface is terrible.
Anchoring a tower is terrible. It's one of those terrible mechanics that I
actually like while hating. The time
that your POS is vulnerable in space for the ganking or tanking is nerve
wracking. Every ship that enter the
system wants to come and kill you and your POS.
You are about to watch a few hundred million ISK evaporate while someone
cackles gleefully.
Then it anchors. You
rush to it to online it. Then you
discover that it will be another wait while it onlines.
More stress. That is
how eve should be.
But the managing of the actual process was enough to reduce
me to trembling tears of frustration.
What I could not find and did not learn until Razor logged
on and I tackled him was how to make my reactions connect to each other. It turns out that in the land of right
clicking the answer was drag and drop.
Not obvious at all.
You drag the ‘links’ onto what you want them to do. So, if you have your reactor needing gas and
water, you drag the gas from the left corner gas icon onto the reactors right
corner gas icon. You do the same for
water. You then drag the produced
booster from the icon to the right of the reactors line to the left of the
biohaz silo. You drag the excess water
from the right to the left of the second silo.
I’m adding pictures so that it makes more sense. It made absolutely none at first. The sheer patience people must have had to
have figured this stuff out when it was introduced boggles my mind.
The
Actual Booster
Each Booster comes in four strengths. Each strength creates a PURE form of the
booster.
- Improved – This is considered a complex biochemical reaction
- Standard – This is considered a simple biochemical reaction
- Strong – This is considered a complex biochemical reaction
- Synthetic – This is considered a simple biochemical reaction
The second step of the process is to use the blue print to
turn your pure booster material into the actual consumable booster that
everyone knows and loves.
Look at the blue print and see what it requires: #units of pure booster #units of Megacyte
This process is like any build process in Eve. Take the materials to the drug lab and drop
them in. The drug lab, interestingly
enough, has hanger divisions on it.
This, I assume, allows different booster to be made in different areas
by different people. It uses the corps
hanger decisions. I just drop all of my
materials in the first compartment.
This is where the POS interface sucks some more.
Right click on the blue print and go to manufacture. The selection will look just like the normal selection
when you build things in a station. This
is when you go to the tab that says "Owner" and under it it says "Me". This is a drop down box. Change it to "My Corporation." Now you should see the Drug Lab as an option to select the build slot from.
The
Numbers
I’m not
good at numbers. I don’t have pretty
spreadsheets with nice details that update constantly. Instead, I figured out the simple formal of
‘how many do I need.
BPC – 50 run
The average 50 run
BPC is what I pick up.
I need 250 Megacyte per 50 run BPC
It takes 1340
units of gas to make a 50 run BPC.
Even with improved drug skills, making a 50 run copy will
take about a day. The base time is just
under 30 minutes per booster. This
means all 50 runs take just under 24 hours to complete.
BPC – 1000 run: I’ve never used one.
The only difference between this and a 50 run copy is that it has 1000
copies. I’m sure if there was a large
demand this would be a better investment. These can be gotten
from the pirate factions
Selling
Boosters
- The Market: Boosters, amusingly enough, can be placed on the market.
- Contracts: Boosters can be purchased over contracts but not sold. The buyer places a “Want to Buy” contract for the booster they want. That booster is then delivered to that station and the contract accepted. The seller gets the ISK and the buyer gets the booster.
Profitability
For me it isn’t. I
make back what I put into it. I’m
terrible at business and my goal is to undercut anyone that might sell to my
boys and sell it to them myself.
Therefore I break even.
Without mining the gas myself, my profit area is very
small. The ingredients are expensive to
buy and a pain in the butt to move. If I
had my own jump freighter it would be a lot easier. The most expensive part of that process is getting
the drugs INTO low sec from high sec.
The size of gas means that it takes many, many trips in a blockade
runner to move an entire BPC run of gas.
Black Frog costs 50 million for the jump.
Things
You can Do to save ISK
- Mine your own gas
- Harvest your own blue print copies from ladar sites
- Pop your own drug manufacturing skill book from combat ladar sites
- Pop your own gas harvesters from combat ladar sites
- Make friends with the pirate factions to get 1000 run BPCs
- Build your own POS fuel
I wrote a two part on booster use and production back in 2008 for the Eve Tribune. Just re-posted to my blog today. DOn't know if they have any use for you, but here's the links:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ninveah.com/2012/12/boosters-part-1-eves-little-pick-me-ups.html
http://www.ninveah.com/2012/12/boosters-part-2-secrets-of-drug-cartels.html
Thank you. I never found it when I started, sadly. I was looking and looking and skimming forums and the web and bashing my head against the desk.
DeleteFirst violencing spaceships.
ReplyDeleteThen flashy red sec status.
Now drugs.
Your corruption is deepening.
Really well done sug. Love you
ReplyDeleteI may be a little late to the party, but..
ReplyDeleteWhile, by now, there is more information out there on the process as a whole, this is the best guide I've found for explaining everything that you need, start to finish, in an easily understandable way. Especially for those of us who have never seen the POS or manufacturing UI before getting into booster production.
Thanks for the time spent, and good luck on CSM. o7
Thank you for the guide!! I'm now cooking space meth for my corp. o7
ReplyDeleteSafari Customer Service AMAZING
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing the post! Glad to hear the news.
ReplyDeletehtml color codes