EVE Online Manufacturing Guide: Blueprints, Materials, and Production Chains

Manufacturing in EVE Online is where you turn raw ore plus a blueprint into the ships, modules, ammo, and structures that other pilots buy every single day. It's one of the biggest ISK makers in the game once the pieces click into place, and plenty of industrialists fund whole accounts off a handful of production lines. The catch is that the chain has a lot of moving parts. You've got blueprint research, mineral sourcing, moon goo reactions, facility bonuses, and cost math all tangled together, and skipping any one of them is a fast way to quietly build at a loss. So let's walk through the pipeline link by link, from a fresh blueprint on the market all the way up to capital hulls.

Researching and Copying Blueprint Originals

Every build starts with a blueprint, and EVE gives you two flavors to keep straight. A Blueprint Original (BPO) has infinite runs and can be researched to cut its material and time needs. A Blueprint Copy (BPC) has a fixed number of runs and can't be researched at all. For T1 gear you buy BPOs straight off the NPC-seeded market, with prices running from about 100,000 ISK for a chunk of ammo all the way up into the tens of billions for big ship and structure BPOs. A brand new BPO off the shelf sits at Material Efficiency 0% and Time Efficiency 0%, which is fine for a test run but rough on your margins when you scale up.

Material Efficiency research

Material Efficiency, or ME, is the one most worth your time. Each ME research level trims 1% off the materials the blueprint asks for, and you can push it 10 levels deep for a total of -10%. That 10% is the ceiling, and most serious builders get their main BPOs there eventually. The savings matter most on high-volume or mineral-heavy jobs, where 10% of a freighter's worth of ore is real money.

There's a wrinkle worth knowing. Material rounding happens per job, not per run, and it always rounds up with a floor of one unit per material type. So if you build one batch of ammo at ME 2%, the rounding eats your savings and you get nothing back. Run that same job 100 times in one go and the savings stack up across the whole batch. The "minimum one" rule also bites on T2 ships - your blueprint will always need the full stack of T1 hulls no matter how hard you researched it, because each run demands at least one.

Time Efficiency research

Time Efficiency (TE) is the other half. Each TE level shaves 2% off the build time, ten levels max, for -20% total. Faster builds mean your production lines free up sooner, which matters when you're running a bunch of jobs and your slot count is the bottleneck. TE is cheaper to grind than ME because the per-level payoff is bigger, so a lot of builders get TE to a useful level fast and chip away at ME over weeks.

Research takes time, and that time grows fast. For a rank-1 blueprint, the first ME or TE level finishes in about 1 minute 45 seconds, but by level 5 you're at roughly 56 minutes, and level 10 alone runs around 3 days. Bigger blueprints multiply all of that by their rank - fuel blocks are rank 3, capital T2 components are rank 4, and capital module BPOs climb much higher. A researched BPO takes a real investment, which is exactly why pre-researched BPOs change hands on the contracts market for a premium.

Copying and why you'd bother

Copying takes a BPO and stamps out BPCs from it, and the ME and TE you earned carry over to every copy. The Science skill speeds copying by 5% per level, up to 25% faster. So why copy at all? Two big reasons. First, safety - a BPC is disposable, so you can take copies into dangerous space without risking a multi-billion-ISK original. Second, parallelism - you can run a research BPO plus a pile of BPC copies across many manufacturing lines at once. And T2 production depends on copies, because invention eats T1 BPCs to spit out T2 ones.

The research and copying skill pile: Metallurgy cuts ME research time 5% per level, the Research skill does the same for TE, Laboratory Operation gives an extra research or copy slot per level (six at level V), and Advanced Laboratory Operation pushes slots even further. Advanced Industry trims 3% off every manufacturing and research job per level, and Scientific Networking lets you install jobs from a few jumps away. None of these are required to start, but a dedicated builder trains most of them.

Sourcing Minerals and Reaction Materials

Blueprints are the recipe, but you still need the groceries. T1 manufacturing runs almost entirely on the eight basic minerals, and the further up the tech tree you climb, the weirder the shopping list gets.

The eight basic minerals

The core eight are Tritanium, Pyerite, Mexallon, Isogen, Nocxium, Zydrine, Megacyte, and Morphite. Just about every T1 ship, module, and round is built from some mix of the first seven, while Morphite mostly shows up in T2 work. Tritanium is the volume king - cheap per unit but you need staggering amounts of it, so it's the bulk of what you haul. The high-end minerals like Megacyte and Zydrine cost more per unit and come out of the rarer ores you find in low security, null security, and wormhole space.

Mining, buying, and reprocessing

You get minerals three ways. Mine ore and reprocess it, buy compressed ore or straight minerals off the market, or scrap-metal reprocess the loot and meta modules you pull from missions and wrecks. Reprocessing is a skill chain of its own - Reprocessing, Reprocessing Efficiency, and the ore-specific skills - and skilled reprocessing tops out around the 50% mark before structure rig bonuses, give or take. For most builders, buying compressed ore from a trade hub and reprocessing it in a bonused refinery is cheaper than mining it yourself, especially for the cheap-but-bulky minerals that eat freighter space.

Moon goo and reactions

T2 is where the supply chain gets interesting, because it stops being just minerals. Tech 2 builds also want moon materials (everyone calls it "moon goo"), planetary interaction goods, Morphite, R.A.M. assembly tools, and a T1 version of the item you're upgrading. The moon goo side is its own little industry.

The chain looks like this. A Refinery anchored at a moon pulls a chunk on a timer, which you shoot apart into a belt of moon ore. Reprocess that ore into raw moon materials. Then run composite reactions - on a Standup Composite Reactor - to turn those raws into the advanced materials T2 needs. Reactions only run in systems with a security rating of 0.4 or lower, so this is lowsec, nullsec, or wormhole territory, never highsec. The Athanor is the medium refinery, the Tatara is the large one, and both can be rigged for faster or cheaper reactions.

There are other reaction flavors too. Biochemical reactors turn harvested gas into booster ingredients, and hybrid reactors cook wormhole fullerite gases into the polymers that feed Tech 3 ships. Each reactor type needs its own module and its own rigs, and the reaction formulas themselves can't be researched, copied, or invented - you buy them seeded on the NPC market, except the biochemical ones that drop from sites.

Fuel blocks and planetary goods

Two more inputs show up all over the place. Fuel blocks - Helium, Nitrogen, Hydrogen, and Oxygen variants - are built from ice products plus planetary commodities, and they keep Upwell structures lit and feed several reactions. Planetary Interaction (PI) goods come from setting up extractors and factories on planets, and they slot into everything from fuel blocks to T2 components to sovereignty structures. A lot of builders run a few PI planets on the side just to feed their own production lines and dodge the market markup.

Setting Up an Industry Job in a Structure

With blueprint and materials in hand, the actual job is almost anticlimactic. Open the Industry window, pick your blueprint, set it as a manufacturing job, choose how many runs, and hit start. Set the input and output locations, which is usually just your item hangar. If the window complains you're missing inputs you know you have, that's almost always an input-output location mismatch, so double-check those dropdowns before panicking.

Picking where to build

Where you build matters a lot. NPC stations are free of fuel costs and always available, but Upwell Engineering Complexes give you real bonuses. The three sizes are the Raitaru (medium), Azbel (large), and Sotiyo (extra large). All three shave 1% off the materials a job needs, and they stack time savings on top.

| Structure | Size | Material savings | Time savings | Builds capitals | |-----------|------|------------------|--------------|-----------------| | Raitaru | Medium | 1% | 15% | No | | Azbel | Large | 1% | 20% | Yes | | Sotiyo | XL | 1% | 30% | Yes |

The 1% material cut is small but it's free margin on everything you touch, and the time savings add up fast across a busy production line. Each structure can also fit industry rigs - T1 or T2 - that pile on more material and time savings, and those rigs are stronger in lowsec, nullsec, and wormhole space than in highsec. With a T2 rig in nullsec, the maximum material savings on one of these structures tops out around 5.99%. Note the catch on capitals: the Raitaru physically can't build them. Capital hulls need an Azbel or a Sotiyo, full stop.

Job slots and range skills

You don't get unlimited lines. Every character starts with one manufacturing slot, Mass Production adds one per level up to six, and Advanced Mass Production pushes further. Around ten lines is plenty for most solo builders, and dedicated industrial alts chase more. Research and copying slots run on a separate counter - Laboratory Operation and its advanced cousin - and reaction slots have their own Mass Reactions chain. The Industry skill cuts manufacturing time 4% per level, Advanced Industry trims 3% off everything, and Supply Chain Management lets you start jobs from a few jumps away so you're not babysitting a structure in person.

Calculating Production Costs Versus Market Price

Here's where most new builders bleed ISK without noticing. The materials are only part of what a job costs. EVE charges you an installation fee on top, and it can be a surprisingly big number in the wrong system.

The job cost formula

The full install cost looks like this:

Total job cost = Estimated item value × ((System cost index × Structure bonus) + Facility tax + SCC surcharge + Alpha clone tax)

Estimated item value is the cost of the materials for an ME0 blueprint with no bonuses, summed up from each material's quantity times its adjusted price. You can pull those adjusted prices straight from the game's market data. The other terms are all multipliers on that value.

Reading each piece

The System Cost Index (SCI) is the big swing. It's based on how many industry work-hours get done in that system versus the whole universe over the last 28 days, so crowded manufacturing hubs carry a fat index and quiet backwaters carry a thin one. CCP tweaked the formula to make it more volatile, so a hot system can suddenly get expensive and push your margins negative even when the materials haven't moved. Facility tax is a flat 0.25% at NPC stations, set by the owner at player structures (capped at 10%). The SCC surcharge is a fixed 4%. And there's a 0.25% Alpha clone tax, but only if you're on a free Alpha account - Omega accounts skip it.

Running the margin

To know if a build is worth it, add up your materials at current market prices, add the install cost from the formula above, spread any blueprint cost across its runs, and compare that total to what the finished item sells for. A reasonable floor is around 10% margin, and you want to look at both the percentage and the raw ISK - a 200% margin on something that sells twice a month is worse than a 15% margin on ammo that moves every hour.

Two traps catch people here. First, a whole lot of T1 modules sell for less than their build cost, because mission loot floods the market and undercuts manufacturing. Check before you build, or you're just destroying value. Second, volume is king. A thinner-margin item that sells daily usually beats a fat-margin item that rots on a sell order for weeks. Don't do this math by hand either - tools like EVE Tycoon, Fuzzwork, eve-cookbook, eve-industry.org, and EVEFORGE plug in live market data and the full cost formula so you can see real margins before you commit a single mineral.

Scaling Into T2 and Capital Component Production

Once T1 production feels routine, T2 and capital work is the next step up. Both add serious complexity and serious skill requirements, and both reward builders who treat the cost math as a filter rather than an afterthought.

T2 starts with invention

You can't just buy a T2 BPO off the market. T2 hulls and modules come from invented BPCs, and invention is a gamble. You take a T1 BPC, feed it datacores plus an optional decryptor, and roll the dice. Succeed and you get a T2 BPC. Fail and you lose the datacores (and one run off the input BPC), with nothing to show for it. Invented BPCs come out of the oven at ME -4 and TE -4, which is worse than zero, so a fresh T2 build is materially heavier than a fully researched T1 one.

Decryptors shape the result

The decryptor is where the strategy lives. There are nine of them, and each one trades off success chance, the number of runs on the finished BPC, and the ME/TE of the result in a different combination. Some pump your success odds, some add runs, some improve the material efficiency and eat into your margins less. The right call depends on what you're inventing. T2 ship and rig BPCs tend to be single-run, so a decryptor that adds runs or success is usually the play there. Module BPCs come out with more runs, so the math shifts. Cost it out per finished item - inventing is cheap to start but easy to overpay on if you pick decryptors blindly.

The T2 material stack

A T2 build needs a much wider shopping list than its T1 cousin. You'll need a T1 version of the item as a base (a T2 nanofiber takes a T1 nanofiber, a Jaguar takes Rifter hulls), R.A.M. assembly tools, Morphite, planetary goods, and the T2 construction components that trace all the way back to moon goo and the reactions from earlier. The skill list balloons too - Mechanical Engineering, the relevant starship engineering and physics skills, and the advanced ship construction skills for T2 hulls, most of them five-times-multiplier trains. Plenty of T2 builders skip invention entirely and just buy T2 BPC packs from dedicated inventors so they can focus on the building.

One footnote on T2 BPOs: a small number of them do exist in the game, handed out years ago through an old lottery. They're vanishingly rare and priced accordingly, often tens or hundreds of billions. For basically everyone, invented BPCs are the path, and the original BPOs are a curiosity.

Capital components

Capital ships don't let you pour minerals straight into a hull. They use a two-step component system. You take minerals and build Capital Construction Parts, then turn those into Standard Capital Ship Components like capital armor plates and capital capacitor batteries, then feed the whole stack of components into the final hull blueprint. Advanced capital components are the extra layer for Tech 2 capitals such as force auxiliaries. This component approach is why capital production is really an assembly operation - you're building dozens of intermediate parts in parallel and stitching them together.

The capital reality check

The hard part of capital work isn't the mechanics, it's the capital (both kinds). Capital BPOs cost billions each and you need a stack of them - the hull plus every component - before you can build anything, and that's before you research them. That upfront cost is why capital production is usually an alliance-scale effort with shared BPO libraries rather than a solo project. You'll need an Azbel or Sotiyo since the Raitaru can't fit the jobs, and the sheer number of parallel component builds means your slot skills and a good facility bonus both pay off heavily here.

The same job-cost formula from the last section still runs the show, but apply it to every link in the component chain, not just the final hull. A capital hull eats dozens of batches of components, and it's easy to lose ISK on the parts even when the finished ship looks profitable on paper. Build the components, price every step in the chain, and treat that cost formula as the filter on every build - that's the real difference between an industry line that prints ISK and one that quietly eats your wallet.