Roughly two months ago, I rekindled my love for Eve. It had been the most exciting thing when I started to play in 2005. I renewed my membership and kept playing when I moved to Toronto in 2008 from Istanbul. After another 3 years, I stopped my Capsuleer experience in 2011 November. So, my character has been in a Cryo pod for almost 4 years. I think I have a better control of my life now so I can afford some free time without feeling guilty but this is not the essence of this article.

4 years is a long time and a lot has changed in Eve. I always liked Manufacturing and other side businesses in this game and I’m now investigating newer ways of making money with more advanced blueprints. One thing I did not have back when I left is that I now know Python so I can utilize it to do the heavy lifting in certain areas. Like finding all the blueprints that use the same raw materials! If I have excess quantity of a certain commodity what other blueprints can be used to spend what I have?

Could this question also be formulated as : If a company has commodity A,B and C; find all the people who have purchased these items and the quantity they did so we can figure out clients’ spending behavior, frequency or whatever. I know people are not blueprints but putting the problem in a familiar context sometimes helps. However, we are going to shop not even online today but offworld. Up we go!

Planetary Interaction

Since I don’t want to spend too much time with the game and I’d like to focus on a few lucrative operations, it’s really important for me to find the best blueprints. I’m currently focusing on Planetary Interaction and using byproducts to make more advanced commodities. I’ve nailed it down to three components I can produce : Nano-factory, Organic Mortar Applicators and Sterile Conduits.

If you follow the links above you’ll see a list of items under Item Usage. This is a list of items you can make using each one of these components. You’ll need other components of course to finalize the production but here was my dilemma. Each component can be used in roughly 100 other items’ production. It also seems that for each item, Item Usage list contains so many similar entries. Therefore, what are the entries in all lists where I can use either one of these planetary components? The answer to this question would give me a list of blueprints I can investigate so when my planetary components are ready to use I can pipe them to the next line in the production chain.

I used RegExr website to transform the item list in Item Usage so it became comma separated. Then, I fed each comma separated value into its own set. The rest is just to find the intersection between three different sets. The code is actually simple enough but I’m confident that I can use this system to figure other combinations of blueprints for different commodities. Before I forget, here is the code:

#For brevity, I provided a short list for this article
organic = set(["'Magpie' Mobile Tractor Unit Blueprint","'Packrat' Mobile Tractor Unit Blueprint","Advanced Large Ship Assembly Array Blueprint","Advanced Logistics Network Blueprint","Advanced Medium Ship Assembly Array Blueprint","Advanced Small Ship Assembly Array Blueprint","Amarr Control Tower Blueprint","Amarr Control Tower Medium Blueprint","Amarr Control Tower Small Blueprint",...])
sterile = set(["6x2500mm Heavy Gallium I Repeating Cannon Blueprint","Advanced Large Ship Assembly Array Blueprint","Advanced Logistics Network Blueprint","Advanced Medium Ship Assembly Array Blueprint","Advanced Small Ship Assembly Array Blueprint","Amarr Control Tower Blueprint","Amarr Control Tower Medium Blueprint","Amarr Control Tower Small Blueprint","Caldari Control Tower Blueprint","Caldari Control Tower Medium Blueprint",...])
nano = set(["'Limos' Citadel Cruise Launcher I Blueprint","Advanced Large Ship Assembly Array Blueprint","Advanced Logistics Network Blueprint","Advanced Medium Ship Assembly Array Blueprint","Advanced Small Ship Assembly Array Blueprint","Amarr Control Tower Blueprint","Amarr Control Tower Medium Blueprint","Amarr Control Tower Small Blueprint","Ammunition Assembly Array Blueprint","Ballistic Deflection Array Blueprint",...])

inter = organic.intersection(sterile).intersection(nano)

for item in sorted(inter):
  print(item)

After all the matching and excluding thanks to intersection, I ended up with 72 items. These 72 will be my focus area and I’ll see if I can narrow it down later because some need a bunch more ingredients. The extra ingredients might be as simple as some minerals but it might also but other advanced components similar to the ones I’m planning to exploit from planets. I can’t clearly reckon at this point if there would be an automatic way to refine this process so given a bunch of ingredients, an algorithm can find a list of blueprints that will use your input elements. This might actually turn into a desktop or, even better, to an online tool. Eve Online players have shown solid dedication and hard work throughout the years to come up with really useful tools. We’ll see if a proposed tool such as mine will find its place among others’.