This is the result of a thread I opened on F13 a while ago to ask the details about the crafting in Eve-Online, the guide is not written by me but here I archive the article slightly reorganizing it. The original posts are still in the original thread. Thanks to Yoru to have written it.

The crafting system in Eve is rather complex and not really accessible if you don’t read and learn about it somewhere. It’s one of those parts of the game with a lot of depth and complexity but that you have to discover all by yourself and without any help from the game. It’s completely missing from the tutorial and I don’t think you can build a character that can “craft” right out of the box. So it’s one of the advanced parts that you usually discover only when you have already invested a good amount of time in the game.

Basically everything you can use in the game is craftable. Ships, ammunition, modules. You can buy these right off the market already ready for the use or produce them yourself. In general the crafting is an highly specialized activity that also depends on other parts of the game, so it’s actually not really possible to build all you need directly without depending on anyone else. That’s one myth that doesn’t work in Eve and to be a good crafter you must be already deeply involved in the game on other levels, or have a player corporation supporting you.

There’s two big parts to crafting: manufacturing and research. For basic tech 1 stuff, these involve two components: minerals and blueprints.

BLUEPRINTS

Blueprints are recipes; they let you combine a given quantity of minerals and produce something. There’s two types of blueprints: blueprint originals (“BPOs“) and blueprint copies (“BPCs“).

The difference between the two isn’t about the final product (that is always the same) but about the process to create/craft it. BPOs can be “researched” to optimize the crafting process (time and resources consumed) and can be used an unlimited number of times. While the BPCs have a limited number of runs and cannot be used in research.

Blueprints have four basic stats:

* Number of runs – This dictates how many times you can use the blueprint. (only for BPCs, the BPOs are infinite)
* Base Production Time – How long manufacturing will take for one use of the blueprint.
* Mineral Efficiency (“ME”) – This dictates how much material will be wasted. Higher mineral efficiency means less waste, but the effect of higher mineral efficiency increases at a logarithmic rate (that is, as the level of mineral efficiency increases, each additional level eliminates less and less waste).
* Production Efficiency (“PE”) – This dictates how long manufacturing one run of the blueprint will take. Like mineral efficiency, the benefit has a logarithmic dropoff.

(Math: Both efficiencies are basically used to calculate waste by taking the base waste and multiplying by 1/(1+x), where x is the ME or PE rating. 1/(1+x) isn’t the exact formula, but it’s a close approximation.)

As already explained, only a BPO can be researched. So the last two stats are fixed in a BPC, while they can improve through research in a BPO. A brand new BPO is supposed to always start with both ME and PE at zero.

BPOs also have three additional stats:

* ME Research Time – How long the BPO will be sitting in a lab when researching 1 point of ME.
* PE Research Time – Same thing as above, but for PE.
* Copy time – Same as above, but how long it will take to create a BPC with 1 run from this BPO.

How to acquire BPs in the game:
– Tech 1 Blueprint Originals can be acquired either as a reward for running agent missions, purchased off the standardmarket from NPCs or (rarely) purchased off the escrow market from PCs.
– Blueprint Copies are acquired either as a reward for running agent missions or via trade with other players (either directly or via the escrow market). They can be created by players; a BPO is put into a ‘copying’ research slot and produces a BPC after a given amount of time. BPCs inherit the basic stats of their BPO parents if they’re manufactured; otherwise, the stats are determined by the mission system.

– Tech 2 BPO Lottery (note from Dave Rickey): You have to work up your standing with the companies that have R&D agents, and with the individual agents, and have high enough Sience skills yourself. Once you have, you can tell the R&D agents to start researching. They accumulate Research Points, which are basically tickets for a lottery. When you win the lottery for a BPO, you don’t have to take it, you can choose to hold your points and keep trying. Even a marginal T2 BPO is worth more than a billion, the really good ones (like those just coming out for Interdictors and Recon ships) are worth upwards of 20 billion isk. But it takes a lot of time and money to get into the running, you have to work up your Science skills, some of which are very expensive, as well as run all the missions to get your standing up with the agents and their NPC corporations.

But it takes a lot of time and money to get into the running, you have to work up your Science skills, some of which are very expensive, as well as run all the missions to get your standing up with the agents and their NPC corporations.

MINERALS

Raw materials that come from reprocessing items at the stations or mined ore. ‘Nuff said.

RESEARCH

Research is a time and money sink that slowly improves MP or PE values of the blueprint being researched. Only a BPO can be researched since a BPC has fixed values for MP and PE.

Research is meant to help you improve your BPO before using it in production, since a ‘raw’ BPO off the market is generally quite slow and wasteful. Research is performed at stations (NPC-owned stations, PC outpost stations; I believe the POS research arrays are currently bugged). Any given research-capable station will have a fixed number of slots, usually 20. You can search for research-capable stations by clicking on the ‘science & industry’ button on your UI, going to the last tab (‘Installations’), and setting the filters to search for whatever you’re looking for.

When you have a BPO you want to research, you first look for a station with open slots for the research type you want to perform. For manufacturing, PE research and Blueprint Copying, you should be fine – in empire, I rarely see a shortage of these. Mineral Efficiency research slots are almost always clogged up in the main regions, so you may have to travel around to find an open slot.

Once you’ve found a station with an open slot, you physically take your blueprint to that station and drop it in your hangar (or your corp’s hangar). Next, you install your blueprint, either by rightclicking on the blueprint and choosing the type of research you want, or by navigating through the science & industry UI. You’ll be asked where you want the blueprint to be taken from and placed into, as well as asked for a number of runs through the research facility. Punch in your info and hit OK, you’ll be presented with a price quote. Generally, only ME research is particularly expensive. Hit OK and your BPO will get sucked into the system. Your science & industry UI’s ‘jobs’ tab will now show your job as ‘In Progress’ for a while.

As an aside, when doing research, it’s usually worth it to specify multiple batches at a time. This allows you to keep your slot for multiple runs and avoid having to run around looking for a slot each time you want to research the BPO. For low-end stuff, like ammo and frigates, a ME of 10 is probably enough. Generally, as the item’s expense increases, the more valuable higher ME will be.

Wait a while. Your research will probably take hours, days or even weeks. Go do other stuff. Once your job is done, it’ll be shown as ‘completed’. You then have to go back to the station where the completed job is and hit ‘deliver’ in the science & industry UI. The blueprint, now improved as you’ve specified, will pop out into your (or your corp’s) hangar, ready to be researched again or used in production.

In order to do research, you will need the skill Laboratory Operation, at least at level 1. This will require the skill Science at level 3. There are skills that can be used to speed up the research process (Metallurgy for ME; for larger blueprints, having a good Metallurgy is recommended), but they’re optional, especially for low-end BPOs.

Research generally has no material requirements and tends to not cost too much; the exception is ME research. (Research is priced by the hour. Most research costs a few hundred isk per hour, whereas ME research can cost upwards of 2,000 isk per hour.)

MANUFACTURING

Okay, so you’ve got your nice, researched-up BPO, or your shiny freshly-acquired BPC and now you want to make stuff.

Manufacturing is just like research in that you take your blueprint to a station with the proper facilities; in fact, it uses the same UI, as you’ve probably noticed by now. Instead of Laboratory Operation, you need the Industry skill to run manufacturing jobs.

The main difference is that, for manufacturing, you also need minerals. Rightclicking on your blueprint and opening the ‘show info’ window will reveal that there’s a second tab on the blueprint’s info, containing the materials required to run the blueprint once.

Two numbers will be displayed, an ‘ideal’ number and ‘your cost’. Your cost is primarily determined by your skills, in particular the ‘production efficiency’ skill (this is different from the stats of a BP), which requires an Industry skill of level 3. It’s a very good idea to get your own PE up at 3 or 4 before you start manufacturing anything more expensive than ammo, as you’ll save a lot of expensive materials. If you want to focus on industry, PE 5 is almost mandatory in the long run; start worrying about PE 5 around the time you want to manufacture stuff larger than cruisers.

Anyway, once you’ve found a free manufacturing slot (shouldn’t be hard), take ‘your cost’ in minerals and the blueprint to that station, and dump them either in your hangar or your corp’s hangar. Set up a manufacturing job in the same way you set up a research job. Select the installation, set your input/output hangars and choose a number of runs.

You’ll be given a quote for the material and ISK cost for the job you’ve submitted; annoyingly, they only give you an itemized list broken out by materials-used-for-production and materials-used-for-waste, with no aggregate total. Hit OK and the minerals and blueprint will disappear from your hangar. Note that the material costs listed on a blueprint are usually a little bit of an overestimate, so don’t panic when you have stuff left in your hangar.

Manufacturing takes much less time than research, usually on the order of minutes or hours. Once it’s done, hit the deliver button on the science & industry UI. Your finished items will be deposited in the appropriate hangar. If you were using a BPO or didn’t use all of a BPC’s runs, it will reappear in the hangar it was taken from.

Congratulations, you’re now a basic crafter in Eve. There’s a lot more skills you can add on beyond the four I’ve mentioned; most of them let you run multiple jobs, let you run jobs remotely, or speed jobs up. They’re beyond the scope of a noobler’s guide to crafting, though. Browse the market and read the skill descriptions, they’re mostly self-explanatory.