Planetary Interaction Revamped

Came across this nice tutorial for Planetary Interaction on youtube through the Eve-O forums. I tried to like p.i. and was quite enthusiastic when it was announced. Once I tested a very rough version on the test server, my enthusiasm was somewhat declining, but I figured the only way was up.

Is the new P.I. that came with incursion better ? Yes, I guess it is. But I had to redo all my planets and I think I gave up on the third or so. In highsec it’s barely worth it, I doubt it’s much better in losec. I guess in a wormhole or 0.0 it would be worth the effort. For those that still want to get into it, enjoy the video :).

The Primae

Here it is, in all it’s glory. Visiting a Customs Office near of a Lava planet.

primae2

It’s a wonderful detailed model. The part just under the ‘cockpit’ moves around. It would make a nice dedicated salvager or exploration ship !

As it is now, with 100 m3 cargohold, 1000 m3 for planetary commodities (which fills up fast when you use p1 parts) and 1600 m3 for command centers, it’s not all that useful. Maybe for new players who don’t have hauler/industrial ship skills yet. A simple badger will be better than this one, but you won’t look as industrial as this ship does !

Planetary Interaction Spreadsheet

By now if you’re interested in PI you probably got some planets up and running an wondering what to do with your toxic metals and bacteria ! Well there is a nice spreadsheet over at google docs that really helps.

http://tinyurl.com/34uyx6o

It’s pretty popular, while I type this 46 people are looking at it :). Also the Ivy-League wiki helps a lot at http://www.eve-ivy.com/wiki/.

Thanks to the nice people who have taken the effort to put these together !

Planetary Interaction III

Tyrannis has been delayed by a week, and planetary interaction even by three weeks. The new skills will be available and you will be able to scout for planets, but the command centers needed to actually start harvesting those planets will only be available two weeks after. Here is a list of the new skills and what they do.

Science Skills :
Remote Sensing (L1)  – The ability to gather and analyze remote sensing data from satellites in orbit around a planet and to produce proper calibrated surveys.

This skill allows you to survey for resources from bigger distances up to 9 light years.  Level 3 opens up the next two. Planetology skills increase the accuracy of scanning.
Planetology (L3) (The understanding of planet evolution and the fundamentals of resource extraction) This one is a prerequisite for
Advanced Planetology (L5) (Advanced understanding of planet evolution and the fundamentals of resource extraction)

Planet Management (charisma (!) / intel) :
No prerequisites needed for these.
Command center upgrades : Each rank in this skill improves the quality of command facility available to you, in turn allowing for a greater number of connected facilities on that planet.
Interplanetary consolidation: For each rank in this skill, you may install a command center on one additional planet, to a maximum of 6 planets.

My suggested skill plan would be to start out a few levels of Remote Sensing, it makes scanning for the right planet a bit easier (actually one level is needed to scan at all) so you can start scouting. It’s only a level 1 skill so it trains up fast. Also it’s needed at level 3 for some of the other planetology skills. Followed by Command center upgrades so you’re not stuck with just the basic command center, and then Interplanetary upgrades so you can build on multiple planets.

Although now that there are (at least) two weeks in between the skills being available and actually useable, the order doesn’t really matter that much. Try to get at least a standard command center and IC as high up as you can.

A lot more info can be found in the Planetary Interaction FAQ.

PI Landgrabbing

There is a nice thread on the Eve-O forums speculating on the landgrab that might come, once Planetary Interaction goes live: http://bit.ly/b6peyb.

According to that thread there are 194 players for each planet in hisec. But not everybody will try PI. And a lot of people will dabble in it at first and forget about it as it takes a bit of work and it might not be everybody’s cup of tea.

It will probably pay off to look for some juicy planets in low sec. I might have to dust off my blockade runner ;).

Planetary Interaction pt. II

This is my second post on PI here. The first one was when PI was first published in a very rudimentary form on the test server. This time I’ll just post some pointers for people who want to take a look at it on the testserver.

Network is busy, try again in 16secs.

The interface of the whole thing is cryptic, not very straightforward and sometimes downright annoying. But as usual with Eve’s interface, once you get the hang of it, it’s workable. Still it could be a lot better and a lot less of a click fest in my opinion. The feedback thread on the Eve-O forums has some nice suggestions, let’s hope CCP will take it seriously !

When you start out the most frustrating thing you have to do is link and route your goods to storage space and then from storage space to a factory. This is after you have put down your command center and scanned for some resources, which is all pretty straightforward.

Assuming you have an extractor and are extracting some resource you can click on the products button and this screen will come up. Also make sure you have a link to a storage facility.

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After clicking the create route, select the storage facility. And you’ll see this screen.

blog2

You are still in Edit mode. Once you have pressed submit the route will be there. You don’t have to click it every time it’s up, but don’t forget to click it before you leave the planetary view mode. It’s very frustrating to have set up several routes, only to find out next time you forgot to press submit :(.

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As you can see here, stuff if being moved from the extractors to the processor and back to storage again. In this case you could route things directly to the processor, as the extractors are no where near overproduction for the processor.

The problem I have at the moment is that I can hardly make anything else besides the bacteria in the above picture, I only have a bunch of raw materials.

UPDATE: I just found out you can click on the blueprint in the basic processor selection screen and pick other stuff like precious metals as well O.o.

Maybe I should move me to FD-MLJ and better stuff is seeded there ? I also took a peek in lowsec and there seemed to be more resources there, but I am not sure whether this was just a coincidence.

All in all PI is starting to look interesting, although it does feel a bit like an odd side game within a game, which doesn’t feel very much like a part of the rest of the universe. Also it’s quite a click fest when you’re going to setup six planets. And the command centers will need to be upgradeable. At the moment you need to remove everything and start over if you want to upgrade.

Planetary Interaction on Sisi

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As you can see in the above screenshot I have placed a command center on a planet and build some structures that extract isotopes and aluminum. No skill were needed or anything, I am not sure whether that will stay this way, but that’s how it is on the test server now. You just have to be in the same system as the planet and you can tinker with the plant stuff right off the bat.

The ui seems to be a bit clumsy at the moment, which was to be expected. And ofcourse we only have one devblog to go by, I hope a somewhat decent wiki page will be there once this goes live, since I didn’t have too much of a clue of what I was doing.

But after some trial and error I got some stuff setup. It seems to be rather passive at the moment, like moon mining on planets. And you can create NPC goods like nanite paste in a factory. All you need to do is put those structures down and link them up to the command center. There is no costs associated with the structures at the moment and they do appear out of thin air. No blue prints or anything needed.

One hint: you can click on the resources on the left side like Helium Isotopes and the planet turns blue with 3 striped spots (you’ll know what I mean when you see them) here and there. Those are the spots where you need to put the extractors in order to get the most of ‘em, I assume.

As you can see it’s all a bit rudimentary at the moment, a more flashed out version will be published on Sisi in three weeks, but so far it seems like a fun thing to play around with and earn you some isk. Once Dust 514, I am sure it will be even more interesting ;).