On Twitter,
@dettol_eve asked
#tweetfleet what the perfect skill plan is for a Planetary Interaction (PI)Alt. I, in my inebriated state, basically said, “I GOT THIS!” Aaaand, here I am. I apologize to Dettol for taking a few days to get this up but I hadn't planned a PI Alt write up until my response to his tweet.
I am laying the skill plan out first so you can skip my rambling located later in this post. This skill plan may include starter skills that your character may be born with, but are still listed as a matter of prudence. Below that section you will find my explanations regarding PI and the skill plan.
The PI Alt Skill Plan (no remaps):
Spaceship Command III (for the Industrial ship)
(Racial) Industrial III
Science III
Remote Sensing I
Command Center Upgrades I
Interplanetary Consolidation I
(From here you can set up your first planet with these skills trained, and begin to understand how the PI system works while waiting for the rest of your training queues to finish – or you can just wait until the training is completed.)
Command Center Upgrades IV
Interplanetary Consolidation IV
Remote Sensing III
Science IV (for Planetology)
Planetology III
(If you are training your main, or a PI-only alt that you don’t want to waste too much time training, you can stop here and have an effective and very profitable toon. However, I would still highly recommend doing the next set of skills as you will see a large difference in the ease of use of your new PI character, and larger profits.)
Continued Training for an Advanced PI Character
Interplanetary Consolidation V
Command Center Upgrades V
Planetology IV
Advanced Planetology III
Other Recommended Basic Skills
Mechanics I
Hull Upgrades III
Engineering III
Shield Management III
Shield Upgrades IV
Navigation II
Warp Drive Operation IV
Evasive Maneuvering III
Afterburner II
Retail III*
Broker Relations III*
* Train if you plan on having your alt sell the goods instead of trading them to your main/market alt.
The Rambling
Planetary Interaction is one of my favorite subjects. This is why I felt the need to respond to my fellow player with promises of advice as I feel that too few players engage PI as a means of income as much as they should. I understand why many don’t – if you are a High-seccer, the high tax rate may appear to negate any potential profit (a 10% tax makes some PI products to be left with slim of margins, however, there are still many products that are very, very worth the tax rate). If you are a Null-seccer in unsafe territories, the constant threat of a gank or the constant destruction of POCOs (Player Owned
Customs Office) makes it seem to be too troublesome.
However, if you fall into the rare category of the “lucky three”, you are foolish not to conduct PI as a means of semi-passive income. What are the “lucky three”? Well, they are: 1) The member of a Corporation/Alliance who has control of a region of Lowsec or Nullsec where the Corp’s POCOs are controlled at a low tax rate (generally 5% or less); 2) a Wormholer with the same as #1, but generally enjoy 1%-3% or even 0% tax; or, 3) a player who is enjoying low tax rates, covertly, by using another corporation’s low-tax POCOs. Let me stress this – if you can get access to a Lowsec, Nullsec or Wormhole with 5% or lower tax rate, you have no excuse not to be doing PI. A person can easily buy a PLEX each month with their PI side business, alone.
So, how can you enjoy the status in the realm of the “lucky three”? Well, outside of joining Coffee’s
Thrall Industrial who loves shooting other POCO’s and setting up 0% tax POCOs for their fellow Alliance members and 2% for Blues (*cough*shamelessplug*cough*), you can find and exploit a low tax POCO of your own. But to really make big ISK doing this, your main, a trained alt, or (ideally) a combination of your main and several alts, need to have the preceding skills trained.
For the first set I’ve listed them in order of importance. The reason you need the Industrial trained is that the Command Centers you must purchase from the market are 1000m3 each and the PI goods you will be taking off the planet stack up quickly, making the need for a hauler important for each PI character. Remote Sensing will need to be trained next as you won’t know where the resources are on the planet without it. Interplanetary Consolidation (IC) expands how many planets you can conduct PI from (IC IV lets you run 5 planets), and Command Center Upgrades gives you more valuable CPU in order to set up more structures. It is worth mentioning at this point that once a Command Center is established on your planet you can manage the colony from anywhere in the game (even docked).
Planetology and Advanced Planetology are often overlooked but are valuable to your success. These skills affect the margin of error there is between the projected resource per cycle in a location, and how much the extractor actually brings in. Without these skills trained, you will find that your installed jobs will typically pull in a very different amount of resources than projected. Remote Sensing skill also reduces any additional error based on your range to the planet (yes, this matters, too, but not as much in my experience). NOTE: Planetology and Advanced Planetology do not increase the resources in an area. They only reduce the margin of error in the reporting of what is actually there when moving the extractor heads around.
I also do recommend you train the alt to use Expanded Cargohold II’s in the low slots, if nothing else. The PI goods you will be picking up on 5 different planets will fill your hold quickly.
One last thought since this post focuses more on alts than a main character: have you thought of making use of this alt in other ways? The skills above will take anywhere from 1-3 weeks of training time. If you are using the new PLEX system to train an alt on the same account, you do not want to waste that other training time. Why not also train this toon to also use a Cyno? Or maybe a Protoype Cloaking Device I? Just my 2 cents as I close this out.
Good luck, and feel free to bug me anytime you want advice (or to argue that my own is rubbish).
o7
Coffee Rocks
