Adjusting your colony to the changes made in EVE Incursion 1.1

Decommissioning your old extractors

The first course of action you need to take to adopt the new system is to use the “Decommission” button on your old extractors as soon as they have completed any ongoing extraction. When you decommission you will be reimbursed the same amount the extractor cost you when you first built it.

Placing your Extractor Control Unit

When the old extractors are gone you need to build an Extractor Control Unit (ECU). You will be able to extract one resource per ECU using multiple (maximum 10) Extractor Heads in the vicinity of the parent ECU so you will want to make sure you place your ECU in such a fashion that its range covers the relevant resource hotspot. You see the ECU’s range when you have bought it from the build menu and are deciding where to place it.

When you have placed the ECU so that the relevant resource is in range you move on to configuring the ECU. Click on the ECU and then on the “Survey” button, or simply double click on the ECU.

The survey window is drastically different than the previous extractors. The first line of action should be to set the resource for the ECU. You do this by clicking the corresponding resource in the top right of the survey window. The resource view will load as soon as you select a resource in the ECU, this will allow you to move on to the next step of configuring your ECU – placing the extractor heads.

When the resource is set you should add as many extractor heads as you intend to use, remember that they cost Power and CPU. You add extractor heads by clicking the empty slots in the left pane of the survey window. It does not matter which sot you choose. The extractor heads appear close by your ECU and you may move them on to the resource hot spot as long as the ECU is idling.

Adjusting program length and avoiding overlap

The ECU has an automation feature called “Program length”. This will allow you to tell the ECU how long you want the extraction to run for. As a consequence of increasing the length of the extraction program your extractor heads will expand their uptake area. The uptake area represents the area the extractor head is affecting. Having uptake areas overlap will cause the extractor heads to extract from the same area and thereby lessen their individual yield. This effect is visualized both on the extractor heads themselves as a noise on the uptake area, and as a red % number in your list of extractor heads.

The ECU graph

The most visible difference in the Incursion 1.1 version of Planetary Interaction is the ECU graph. It replaces the deposits that were previously visible on the Survey window.

The Graph provides information on the resource yield per cycle over the entire length of the extraction program. It’s worth noting that the cycle’s length increases in longer programs. To get more information you can hover your mouse over every individual cycle in the graph.

A summary of the total extraction program is available in the bottom right corner of the window. Make sure to keep an eye on this as you move your extractor heads to their optimal position.

Submitting a program

Once you have selected a resource to extract, the desired amount of extractor heads, the correct program length you may submit the program to the ECU. The ECU won’t extract anything until you submit the program (and remember to submit your changes above the build menu).

When a program is running you will be unable to make any changes to the ECU, in order to make changes you need to stop the program. Don’t hesitate to stop a program in order to submit a new one, this is a perfectly viable strategy to optimize your extraction output. Be careful not to stop too often as this will set the ECU in cooldown mode which will prevent you from stopping the program for a period of time.

As a program is running, you can see a line indicating where in the program the ECU is currently. An ample time to stop and re-submit a program is when the progress line has moved past the main spikes in the graph, the main yield is often located in the first days of a program.

Routing from the ECU

Routing and the way you interact with it is not significantly changed. It’s worth noting that the links from the extractor heads to the ECU are free of power and CPU cost and automatically route so you only need to handle routing from the ECU itself. The links from the extractor heads cannot be overloaded or make any sort of trouble.

A word on depletion and nuggets

As a part of the Incursion 1.1 Planetary Interaction we have kicked depletion into gear as well as added something we call “nuggets”.

Depletion works pretty much as you would expect but here are some important facts.

• A short extractor program that is constantly re-submitted on the same hot spot depletes more aggressively than a long program with the same amount of extractor heads
• Depleted resources re-generate over time
• You can achieve equilibrium by pulling out the same amount of resources that the planet re-generates. It’s a balance act.

Nuggets are temporary hotspots that sometimes appear on planets. You will not necessary be able to identify them but if you compared the resource map on a planet over days you would see that the hot spots sometimes appear and move around a little. To capitalize on the nuggets, make sure you look for hotspots before submitting a program, since they might have moved.

EDIT: A note on depletion: Most ECUs have a range sufficient to cover various resource extraction points. As noted, depletion occurs rapidly when an ECU is reset rapidly. What is not mentioned is that an ECU which is reset rapidly produces, in general, more resources over the same period of time as an ECU that is not reset rapidly. Also not noted is that ECUs with shorter program lengths *tend* to extract more resources over the same period of time as ECUs with longer program lengths.

Example 1: An ECU with a program length of 14 days (updated every 14 days) produces 500,000 units of Aqueous Liquids. That same ECU with a program length of 1 day, updated every day for 14 days may produce 750,000 units (over the course of 14 days).

Example 2: An ECU with a program length of 14 days (updated every 14 days) produces 500,000 units of Aqueous Liquids. That same ECU with a program length of 14 days, updated every day for 14 days may produce 750,000 units (over the course of 14 days).

Combination Example: An ECU with a program length of 14 days, updated every 14 days produces 500,000 units of Aqueous Liquids. That same ECU with a program length of 1 day, updated every day, may produce as much as 1,000,000 (over the course of 14 days).

New PI on Youtube

Planetary Interaction 101 (not up to date)

Planetary Interaction (PI) allows you to produce NPC trade goods from Raw Materials you extract from a planet by building a colony on that planet. These Raw Materials can be processed in the colony into various NPC trade goods. These trade goods were originally only provided by NPC market orders, but the production of these items is now completely in the hands of the players, and prices and availability are now at the mercy of the player market.
Among the NPC trade goods are components to manufacture Starbase & Sovereignty Structures, T2 components, non-ice related POS fuel, Nanite Repair Paste and other products.
Planetary Interaction marks the first step in connecting EVE to the upcoming game Dust 514.

The basics of Planetary Interaction are very simple: Just as when they engage in the manufacturing of modules or ships, players gather Raw Materials which are then made into products. These products are in turn made into more advanced products, and so forth. Every solar system of the Eve Universe contains planets. Players purchase Command Centers from the market to place on these planets. Once a player installs a Command Center on a planet, he or she can construct raw material extractors to harvest different types of Raw Materials. These materials can either be shipped off-planet, either by launching into orbit or shipped to the planetary Customs Office (Cargo Link) at the player's command, or be used in the production of basic and advanced goods on-planet. From this point it may be stockpiled, re-shipped, or sold, as the player requires for his personal goals.

You can make ever more valuable products by processing lesser tier products into higher tier products like this :

• tier 0 (P0) : Raw Materials (requires Extractor structure)
• tier 1 (P1) : Processed Materials (requires Basic Industrial Facility structure)
• tier 2 (P2) : Refined Commodities (requires Advanced Industrial Facility structure)
• tier 3 (P3) : Specialized Commodities (requires Advanced Industrial Facility structure)
• tier 4 (P4) : Advanced Commodities (requires High Tech Production Plant structure, which can only be built on Barren or Temperate planets).

You can do PI in highsec, lowsec, NPC 0.0 space, W-Space, unclaimed 0.0 space and 0.0 space where your alliance has sovereignty. You need to train the skills and buy at least one Command Center to get started.

Required skills

There are two new skills directly associated with the use of Command Centers:

• The skill Command Center Upgrades allows players to build more complex command centers.
• The skill Interplanetary Consolidation allows players to build one extra Command Center/level. At level one you can build two Command Centers, so at level 5 you can manage the maximum of six.

Along with the new skills for Command Centers, three new skills associated with planet scanning have also been added:

• The skill Remote Sensing allows a player to scan planets remotely, each skill level increases the distance at which it’s possible to scan.
• The skill Planetology increases the accuracy when scanning planets for resources. This is visible in the number of gradient bands displayed on the planet surface when scanning for a resource (requires Remote Sensing L3).
• The skill Advanced Planetology further increases the accuracy when scanning planets for resources (requires Planetology L4).

Command Centers

The Command Center is at the very heart of your colony. The Command Center provides power and CPU to the rest of your colony. It must be the first structure you must construct before any other work can be done. There are six variety of Command Centers, each one corresponding to a type of planet. It is important to note that only the Command Center can only be placed on the planet type it is specifically designed. So plan ahead before making your purchase.

To construct the command center you will need it in the hold of your ship. While you are in the same system of the planet you wish to build your colony on. Once you are in Planet View mode, you will be able to construct the Command Center on the planets surface. To do this select Command Center from the build menu. Drag the icon to the site you have chosen and left click. Click on submit in the build menu to complete the process. The Command Center is where you view will center every time you enter the Planet View mode for this planet. For this, and other reasons you may find it ideal to center your Command Center in the middle of your colony.

Once you have construct the Command Center you can build, and manage your colony from any location. This includes being docked. The cost of additional buildings will be charged directly to your wallet. Once the construction is finalized by hitting the submit button. You should only need to return to system when you wish to move goods to, or from the planets surface.

Removing the Command Center will remove your entire colony. The Command Center can also export goods to the planets custom office. However in practice it is cheaper to use a launch pad. The Command Center can also store materials. However it's storage space is dwarfed by both the Silo, and Launchpad.

The ability to upgrade Command Centers came with the launch of Incursion 1.1.0. Command Centers are all now purchased, and deployed at level one. They may be upgrade up to level 6 for a cost. Each upgrade provides greater power, and CPU ouput for the colony. The upgrade level available depends on the skill Command Center Upgrades. The table below provides details on each level.

Planetary Infrastructure

There are five different types of structures that you will build on the planet as you develop and grow your colony. Each type of structure can be built as many times as you wish as long as your Command Center has enough powergrid and cpu to run these structures and the links in-between these structures that you must create.

After you've placed a Command Center on the planet you can start mining Raw Materials from the planet by placing Extractors.
The Raw Materials can then be processed by Basic Industrial Facilities, Advanced Industrial Facilities and High Tech Production Plants in more and more valuable commodities. Your whole Colony setup and productivity is determined by how often you want to interact with it, or more specifically, with the Extractors.

Extractors

Note: As of Incursion 1.1.0 this section is out of date.

Extractors are the backbone of your colony. They are what extracts the Raw Materials out of the planet itself. Each Extractor costs 45,000.00 isk to build and costs 800 MW and 200 tf to operate.

How to place an Extractor:
Once you have located an area of concentration for a particular type of material, go ahead and choose that Extractor under the build menu. Drag the Extractor icon to where you would like it to be built and left click. This is important, you must click on submit in the build menu on the left side of the screen or else nothing will be built. This is true for most of the actions you take in building your planetary infrastructure.

Once the Extractor is built, the next thing to do is to select your shiny new Extractor and survey the area around it. To do this, left click on the Extractor and select the first icon. After a quick few seconds you will be treated to what is available to be extracted from your current location. You are given four different choices, each one having a different concentration of material, amount of materials extracted on each run, number of runs to fully extract that vein of material, and time to complete the whole batch. Use the last column of information, which is time to run the entire batch, as your primary indicator since it will determine how often you have to come back to the planet to set up another extraction batch.
The Extractors can be set to produce Raw Materials for this batch duration, called a cycle. After the cycle runs out you'll need to reactivate them again (resurvey) and select a cycle again. Depending on the cycle chosen they will run for a short time and often produce output, or they will run for a long time but produce output less often.
The various cycles are :

• 30 minutes (output every 5 minutes) <-- highest yield/output
• 5 hours (output every 15 minutes)
• 23 hours (output every 30 minutes)
• 96 hours (4 days, output every hour). <-- lowest yield/output

You'll always want to move Raw Materials to a Basic Industrial Facility to make Processed Materials (P1) as Raw Materials have practically zero value. A Basic Industrial Facility has a fixed production time of 30 minutes, so you can see that the 23 hour cycle (output every 30 minutes) matches this exactly.
If you choose a shorter cycle, you will extract a lot of Raw Materials very fast, which will often produce problems as your links are not able to transport that much volume without upgrading.

Basic and Advanced Industrial Facilities

Industrial facilities are what your new colony is all about. They take the Raw Materials you extract out of the planet and make them into trade goods for sale or use. Basic industrial facilities take the Raw Materials and make them into simple trade goods such as oxygen or water, or into more advanced trade goods to be used in advanced industrial facilities.
Advanced industrial facilities produce goods that require at least two or more materials to produce. Both the basic and advanced industrial facilities use schematics to produce their products. Schematics are part of the facilities and can be accessed via a drop down menu once the facility is placed on the planet. A Basic Industrial Facility costs 75,000.00 isk and uses 800 MW of power and 200 tf CPU, while the Advanced Industrial Facility costs 250,000.00 isk and uses 700 MW of power and 500 tf CPU.

High-Tech Industry

This is the highest production level, producing the Advanced Commodities. High Tech Production Plant structures can only be placed on Temperate and Barren Planets.

Silos

A Silo can be used in various ways. The first use is as the point of collection for all your Raw Materials coming out of your Extractors. The second use is as the point of collection for products coming out of industrial facilities prior to shipping off-planet.
A Silo can also be used to store materials brought to the planet from elsewhere in New Eden to be used in advanced industrial facilities. Each Silo costs 250,000.00 isk to build and uses 700 MW and 500 tf. Silos have a maximum capacity of 12,000.0 m3.

Spaceports

Launch pads are exactly what their name suggests. They are used to ship goods to and from the planet using an orbiting planetary Customs Office, unlike the Command Center, which launches to a non-specific location orbiting the planet. Launch Pads cost 900,000.00 isk and require 700 MW and 3,600 tf to operate.
Launch pads are the most expensive structures to build, but they also offer 10,000.0 m3 capacity to store goods prior to transport off planet. Spaceports are required if you plan to import any materials to the planet.
Be aware that exporting and importing materials costs #Taxes.

Connecting the Planetary Infrastructure

Your structures, often called pins, are placed on the planet and linked together with links in a connect-the-dots way, allowing you to transport materials between the the structures using routes.

Links

Links are used to connect any structure to any other structure. You can only transport material from a structure to another structure if they are connected with a link (not necessarily directly).
Links use a lot of power and CPU, eating into the amount of power and CPU that the Command Center can provide to place structures. The longer a link, the more power and CPU it requires. Each link costs about 0.1539 MW per KM and 0.1575 tf per KM to build. While this might not seem like much, costs for operations on a planetary scale can add up quickly.
A standard link can transport a maximum of 250 m3/hour (calculated as the sum of all the material moving over it in either direction). If you want to move a lot of volume/hour across a link, you will have to upgrade the link which will cause the link to use more power and CPU, but also to double its maximum allowed transportable volume/hour (to 500 m3/hour, 1000 m3/hour, 2000 m3/hour, etc.). Placing another link alongside an existing one is slightly more expensive in power and CPU than upgrading an existing one. A link can theoretically be upgraded ten times (each time doubling the maximum allowed transportable volume).
When you set up your colony you usually want to prevent having to upgrade your links and want to have as few of them and as short as possible. If you find you are upgrading your links, in many cases you want to take another look at your base design.
Constructing links does not cost any isk.

You may move material from one place to another using a route which happens with the material is available such as from an extractor, or from a processing plant when something is created. You may also move materials from one place to another with an "Expedited Transfer". Click on the source building , then click on the Storage icon. Then click on the expedited transfer button at the bottom right hand side). You then choose a destination and a dialogue box appears similar to the launch pad moving dialogue box, that allows you to move materials.

Note: You can't just move as much as you want as fast as you want. The transfer takes time so transfer wisely or wait in the PI limbo room of doom for your transfer to complete.

Routes

Everything from Raw Materials to Advanced Commodities is transported using routes. A Route is an instruction that the output from one structure should be transported over the links to another structure as input. Routes allow you to automate all transport in your colony from Raw Materials to a finished product(s) that gets transported to the Launchpad for export.
There is another way to transport materials called Expedited Transfer. If you find yourself using this, you're doing it wrong. The only time you might want to use this is when you are rearranging your colony and moving materials from storage to storage. When using Expedited Transfer you can move materials between structures that are not connected with links.
You cannot make a route from storage to storage, so always route the output of a process to the Launchpad.
Once you have the whole colony set up and routes set up for everything all you'll need to do from then on is resurvey the Extractors whenever the cycle runs out.

Maximizing Colony Efficiency

If you extract Raw Materials, refine them on the spot into Processed Materials using Basic Industrial Facilities so you only need to transport these. 3000 Raw Materials units process into 20 Processed Materials units, so this dramatically reduces the amount of materials you need to transport, you don't need to upgrade your long distance links and you make significant saving from import / export taxes.

If you route the output of Extractors straight right into the Basic Industrial Facility you will lose all output from the Extractors that the Basic Industrial Facility can not handle. This is why you always want to use a buffer between every input and output of the production process.
Instead route the output from the Extractor into a storage (Silo or Launchpad) and then make a route from the storage to the Basic Industrial Facility. The Basic Industrial Facility will then only take what it can handle from the storage when it is available. The same goes for all higher processes. This way you will not have any waste.

You want your colony to run at maximum efficiency. So you need enough Extractors for each Basic Industrial Facility to produce the 3000 units of the Raw Materials it needs every 30 minutes.
A Basic Industrial Facility outputs 20 tier 1 (P1) product units every 30 minutes. An Advanced Industrial Facility producing tier 2 (P2) products requires 40 tier 1 (P1) product units (of 2 kinds) as input every hour. So you need one Basic Industrial Facility of each kind to feed the Advanced Industrial Facility.

Finding the ideal planet and what to produce

Think of something you want to produce and determine what kinds of planets you would need to set up production, or the other way around, look at the planets available and determine what you can produce on them. You will find the Planetary Interaction Material Diagram an amazingly usefull help for this.
If you have several planets to choose from, pick the one with a lot of the desired materials on the scanner. How to scan for Raw Materials is shown in the Planetary Interaction Tutorial.

Highsec versus lowsec versus 0.0/W-Space

The planets in highsec will produce the least Raw Materials/Extractor (about 800 units/30 min in the 23 hour cycle for average planet), the planets in 0.0/W-Space the most (about 1400-1900 units/30 min in the 23 hour cycle for average planet). Lowsec is somewhere in between.
A Basic Industrial Facility requires 3000 Raw Materials every 30 minutes to keep running. This means that you will need about 2 Extractors to feed one Basic Industrial Facility in 0.0/W-Space and about 5 in highsec (if you run 23 hours cycles).

Hotspots

What is the most important criteria for establishing a colony are the hotspots on the planets for the Raw Materials you are looking for.
The most efficient way to find hotspots while scanning is to minimize the slider width, and then drag the slider from right to left untill you see the hotspots appear.

A high skill level in Planetology and Advanced Planetology will increase the accuracy of the planetary scans and will sometimes even reveal hotspots not visible at lower skill levels.

If several planets have equally good hotspots that look to be equally close to each other, then select the planet with the smallest radius (so your links will be shorter and require less Power and CPU).

Production Strategy

If you don't want to import/export between your planets then the highest-tier product you can make on a single planet is a tier 3 product (Specialized Commodities) and each planet can produce only one :

• Barren -> Transcranial Microcontrollers
• Gas -> Condensates
• Ice -> Synthetic Synapses
• Oceanic -> Vaccines
• Temperate -> Industrial Explosives
• Storm -> Ukomi Super Conductors
• Lava -> Smartfab Units
• Plasma -> Robotics

If you want to manufacture other tier 3 products you will always need multiple planets and if you want to manufacture tier 4 products you will also need a Barren or Temperate planet to set up a High Tech Production Plant.
An alternative strategy is to buy what tier products you need and sell higher tier products you make from them. This is an especially good strategy if you want to set up PI in highsec as your extraction rate is so low there and there are bound to be a lot of people making tier 1-2 products. Let those others make tier 1-2 products, then buy them up and process them into tier 3-4 products on colonies filled with Industrial Facilities and sell those higher tier products.

You might also want to take the rarity of planet types into account when deciding what to build on which kind of planet :

You cannot do PI on shattered planets.

Restricted Systems

Be aware there are certain systems that you cannot perform PI in. This list may change over time depending on system load but it is currently :

• Amarr (System)
• Arnon (System)
• Aunia (System)
• Auvergne (System)
• Balginia (System)
• Dodixie (System)
• Fricoure (System)
• Ichoriya (System)
• Irjunen (System)
• Isaziwa (System)
• Isinokka (System)
• Jita (System)
• Lustrevik (System)
• Motsu (System)
• Oursulaert (System)
• Rens (System)
• Sankkasen (System)
• Umokka (System)

A practical example

Note: As of Incursion 1.1.0 this section is out of date.

We want to manufacture Oxygen (tier 1, POS fuel) and Coolant (tier 2, POS fuel) on a Storm planet in 0.0
The base design will be determined by the fact that we want to use 23 hour cycles for production.
You will need to be in the system with an Advanced Storm Command Center in your cargohold to begin.
This example will also demonstrate how to do PI with the minimal amount of mouse clicking.

Setting up the Colony

1. First we scan the planet for all the Raw Materials we will need
   • Noble Gas to make Oxygen
   • Aqueous Liquids to make Water
   • Ionic Solutions to make Electrolytes
     (from the Water and Electrolytes we shall make Coolant).
     Find a place where there are hotspots for each of the materials as close together as you can. Take your time on this to prevent a lot of frustration later when you keep running out of power as your links are so long.
2. When you've found it, place your Advanced Storm Command Center in the center of the hotspots.
3. Place two Noble Gas Extractors on the Noble Gas hotspot and four extractors (of their kind) on the Aqueous Liquids hotspot and on the Ionic Solutions hotspot. Click submit.
4. Place a Silo and a Basic Industrial Facility right next to each of the groups of Extractors. Instead of a Silo, place a Launchpad at one of the groups. Click submit. Once you build a Launchpad the planet immediately gets a Cargo Link in space you can use to import/export.
5. Place an Advanced Industrial Facility right next to the Launchpad and click submit.
6. Connect all the Extractors with the Silo or Launchpad with links (make links by CTRL-clicking on an Extractor and then clicking on the Silo).
   We want to make groups like this, E-E-S, not more than 2 links deep. The reason is, if you add more Extractors in a chain, the volume/hour transported from the Extractor to the Silo will be too high for the link if you choose a 5 hour cycle (in 0.0, in highsec you can add more as they produce less output). And we want to be able to do that to kickstart the whole operation.
   Now connect the Silos and the Launchpad so the links make the shortest possible line and click submit.

The base is all set up, now to fire it up.

Starting Tier 1 production (Oxygen, Water, Electrolytes)

1. Double-click each Extractor (or click on the reactor and click on survey) to open the Survey screen.
   Double-click the 5 hour cycle (or click on it and click on install) to open the Products screen.
   Double-click the Raw Material (or click on it and click create route).
   Double-click on the Silo or Launchpad next to it (or click on it and click create route again) to finalize the route.
   After you've done this for all the Extractors, click submit.
   Now the Extractors will begin producing Raw Materials at high speed and dump them in their Silo or Launchpad.
2. Double-click on the Basic Industrial Facility next to the Oxygen Extractors (or click on it and click Schematics).
   Select Oxygen and click submit to open the Products screen.
   Double-click Oxygen (or click it and click create route).
   Double-click on the Launchpad (or click it and click create route again) to finalize the route.
   After you've done the same for the Basic Industrial Facilities that will produce Water and Electrolytes, click submit. All the Basic Industrial Facilities will deliver their tier 1 product to the Launchpad.
3. Now Click on each Silo or Launchpad in turn and click Routes.
   Select the incoming Raw Material, like Noble Gas, and click create route.
   Double-click on the respective Basic Industry Facility, in this case the one producing Oxygen (or select it and click create route again) to finalize the route.
   After you've routed all the Raw Materials to their respective Basic Industrial Facilities click submit.
   If there are multiple incoming routes it does not matter which one you select.

Starting Tier 2 production (Coolant)

1. Now double-click on the Advanced Industrial Facility (or click on it and click Schematics).
   Select Coolant and click submit to open the Products screen.
   Double-click Coolant (or click it and click create route).
   Double-click on the Launchpad (or click it and click create route again) to finalize the route.
   It will now deliver the Coolant it produces to the Launchpad, ready for export.
2. Now Click on the Launchpad and click Routes.
   Select the incoming Water and click create route.
   Double-click the Advanced Industrial Facility (or click it and click create route again) to finalize the route.
   Do the same for the incoming Electrolytes. Click submit.

Running the Colony

The colony will start up rapidly as we chose the 5 hour cycle to begin with, which produces Raw Materials faster than the production chain can handle it. After 5 hours have passed return and you will see the Coolant and Oxygen have been produced and delivered to the Launchpad and the colony is running happily with plenty of Raw Materials in the Silos and the Launchpad.
Now resurvey (double-click) all the Extractors with a 23 hour cycle (double-click) and just keep doing that every day. The Coolant and Oxygen will start to pile up in the Launchpad. Whenever you want to, fly over to the Cargo Link in a hauler and use the Launchpad to export the Coolant and Oxygen from the planet.

Resource Depletion

If Raw Materials are extracted from a planet faster than they are generated by the planet you can suffer from resource depletion.

• The more Extractors that are in an area the faster a Raw Materials depletes. How fast depends on how many Extractors and what kind of deposits you use. There is a 'ideal' number of players for each planet based on undisclosed factors.
• Raw Materials regenerate over time.
• There is a minimum resource level, it is defined as a percentage of the initial un-depleted value.
• There is no redistribution of resources, it works like a hole. You dig a hole with extractors and it fills back in over time. If you dig at the same rate as it refills the hole it will never empty.

Taxes

Taxation is dependent on the customs station that the PI goods are being moved through. This was one of the three PI updates from Crucible. If you're in High-Sec, the tax rate is 10%. If you're elsewhere, and the InterBus Customs office hasn't been replaced, the tax rate is 17%. Otherwise, the rate is set by the owner of the Customs Office. The rates go from a base price for each tier of PI goods.

• Tax % is taken off the material's taxable value.
  • This value is set by CCP and is based off the market values in November 2011
  • Import is always half of export tax
• The taxable value are the same for all items in the same tier
  • Advanced Commodities: 1,350,000.00 ISK
  • Specialized Commodities: 70,000.00 ISK
  • Refined Commodities: 9,000.00 ISK
  • Basic commodities: 500.00 ISK
  • Planet Resources: 5.00 ISK

The tax price is based on the tax rate of the Customs Office for the taxable value of the materials. I.e. Refined Commodities having a taxable value of 9,000.00 ISK and a Customs Office tax rate of 10% you will pay 900.00 ISK per units. For a tax rate of 17% you will pay 1,530.00 ISK per units.

So in High-sec, basic commodities such as Oxygen will cost 50 isk to export a unit, or 25 isk to import. As these numbers are significantly higher than they used to be, you may need to revisit any older processing plan to make sure it is still profitable. Eliminating a import export stage may be required to remain profitable.

Final notes

• If you only ever run 23 hour cycles, you can get away with losing all the Silos and routing everything trough the Launchpad, as the volume of Raw Materials/hour being produced and needing transport is low. You can make a kind of spider-like main base with long links to the groups of Extractors. Not being able to give the occasional 5 hour run boost when you've forgotten to resurvey is a bit sucky tough.
• It is impossible for people to destroy other people's colonies (yet). The only way to trouble you would be to camp the Cargo Links of your planets.
• If you're doing a more complex production that needs products from another planet transport the required products to the Cargo Link. Use the Launchpad to import it. Now Select the Launchpad, select Storage, click on the imported products and create a route to the factory. From now on all you need to do is import the products.
• An empty hotspot is not always best. You will always want to build extractors where you can obtain the most materials. One hotspot could sustain various players and still give more yield than another empty hotspot. There might not be hotspots empty (especially if you're restricting yourself to high-sec).
  The best way is to build various extractors in different hotspots to see the different yields.
  You can disable viewing other people structures on the interface (so it doesn't matter if you build structures on top of other people's bases).
• A Silo has half the storage capacity and uses the same amount of Powergrid as a Launchpad. A Silo does use less CPU than a Launchpad.
  So you might want to use only Launchpads as buffers for colonies with a lot of Extractors (who don't need a lot of CPU) and Silos and a single Launchpad for colonies with a lot of factories (which use a lot of CPU).
• If you have a colony in an 0.0 system and your alliance loses sovereignty the colony will continue to work as normal. It will continue working if another alliance claims sovereignty in the system.

Future

CCP has claimed on several occasions that they will continue developing PI as its success is a cornerstone for the eventual DUST 514 expansion.
The latest dev blog promises a large decrease in the amount of clicking necessary to do PI and also some fixes (like upgradable Command Centers), some of which have already been deployed ('marked extractors', double speed PI server processing).

Tools

• Eve online planetary interaction
• Interactive hierarchy tool
• Planetary Interaction Hierarchy Tool
• Planetary Interaction Material Diagram
• Fazenda
• 4WARD Planetary interaction tools
• EVE Online Planetary Planner
• Planetary Interaction Product Finder
• Planetary Interaction Spreadsheet
• Profit Calculations for Factory Planets
• PI Production cost spreadsheet
• Planet finder
• Eveeye IPS

Guides

• Louis's epic PI guide
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKnObxB9XCs EVE Online: Planetary Interaction Tutorial]
• Planetary Interaction Guide
• A Long Guide to PI
• The Eve University guide to Planetary Interaction
• Planetary interaction (CCP guide) - CCP's official guide
• Incursion and Planetary Interaction - CCP's official guide to Incursion and Planetary Interaction

Videos

• Eve Online Planetary Interaction Quick Start Guide
• EVE Online: Planetary Interaction Tutorial

References

EVE Community material added by Louis deGuerre.
Many thanks to Akita T, Krathos Morpheus, electrostatus and others.