PI – Planetary Interaction and my thoughts on it…
Crazy Kinux posted a link to a video done by the Eve Uni guys on PI. Planetary Interaction is being introduced to the next Eve expansion, and will finally allow us to play more with our environment in our sandbox. No pun intended. Previously you could only play with the moons, via moon mining.
I did my stint with moon mining, and I can tell you, unless you have all the infrastructure etc in place, it is a ball-ache of note. I was lucky, I had two large Caldari towers in one system, and just needed to bring Chromium from another system 2 jumps away for a full Sylramic Fibres reaction. I did this for about three months before I had enough and took down the towers and sold off the equipment. Every day, log in, empty the silos, move some raw materials from the one POS to the other. Make no mistake, if you are lucky enough to have a good reaction, or a few corp mates that can help, it’s not a bad way for positive income. I only had a Rorqual and some Badgers to move the fuel around, so once a week I had to jump to empire, load up with fuel, offload the end-product and ship it to Jita (I did have a freighter alt). If I had to do it all over again, I suspect I might just use a Jump Freighter, but for the little isk I made (around 700m nett profit a month) it was just not worth it. I can do that while having more fun.
Which brings me to the point of this post. The interface seems slick, (and I loved the look of the new Scorpion in the video). I just can’t help but feel that it might end up the same as moon mining, only to a lesser extent. Grab the most valuable spots, defend it, and then make money from it. The planets in normal safe (1.0 to 0.5) space will obviously be grabbed and over farmed (unlike moon mining where systems have to be 0.3 or lower sec to mine). Low sec will also be used to a large extent, same as Black Rise when they released it. Within the minute BR was available, the hordes were seen moon probing for the more valuable moon goo’s to make isk from.
This is where I would like to see the 0.0 alliances benefit again. Face it, living in 0.0 is tough but the spoils are great. Before ore prices went for a ball of shit I could easily make 600mill isk on a weekend mining away at Arkonor / Bistot. Now, it’s maybe worth half of that? The new Sov system makes it difficult for alliances to hold large regions of space with only a tower or two to fuel. If you don’t pay the bills, you suffer the fate of Goonies.
Ideally if a system in the butt end of space has a planet with some worthy ores, it would be great to be able to profit more from it than the high-sec Veldspar miner or lvl 4 mission runner. Here I also hope that the planetary assets are distributed more equal than moon goo. A region like Great Wildlands had something like two Mercury moons, and nothing more valuable, while a region like Delve had more valuable moon-goo than you could shake a stick at.
Alas I think we will have to see where it goes and how successful it is in the end. One thing seems sure, I might have to finally invest in a jump freighter….
