After losing my Mammoth a while back, I went looking for a way to get another Cargohold Optimization Rig I built for its replacement.
The sticking point was alloyed tritanium bars, which currently run for around half a million ISK on the market.
The blueprint original I have for Cargohold Optimization required 100 alloyed tritanium bars.
50 million ISK for one set of ingredients alone. Too much.
While I was slowly collecting those bars by running missions (I have 34 total now) I decided to see if material efficiency could save me a little ISK.
The blueprint original I had been processed to a material efficiency level of 20.
To get it to a material efficiency level of 80 would cost half a million ISK.
If getting to 80 would cut the bill or materials by even ONE alloyed tritanium bar, it would pay for itself.
So I queued up the blueprint and waited.
After a 30 day wait, I got to see if my bet paid off.
The answer is: No
At material efficiency level 80, the blueprint still requires 100 alloyed tritanium bars.
So the jump from 20 to 80 does not change your bill of materials by even 1%.
Be warned!
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Thats pathetic. Too bad i didn’t know, i had 166 bars, just sold on the market for 466 a pop, sad because i could have sold them in aunia last month for 600 a pop *sigh*
My suggestion is to run Exploration sites, Professional arc/salv sites are where i find them the most. I’ve gotten 50 bars in one run before. This was in angel 0.0 area though.
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Do a google search for EVE-Meep. It calculates ME changes before you actually pay for the lab. It also has a few other tools that will help you out.
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Its not hard to calculate yourself either.
On a typical BPO, initial material waste is 10%. That is, with Production Efficiency V a BPO at ME 0 uses 10% more materials than it could if it was perfect.
Going from ME 0 to ME 1 changes that to 1%. ME 1 to 2 changes it to 0.1%. And so on.
So unless you have a BPO that uses massive amounts of materials (like a battleship or a battlecruiser), going beyond ME 25 is usually a waste of time.
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Crap, gime a sec to look up my bpo
Incidentaly a new char who can barely build one of these things will need an indecent amount of trit bars.
When you hit PE5 it goes to 110 trit bars with an un-researched bpo.
As I recall 100 trit bars is the “perfect” level for this bpo it’s reached at ME I forget what but it was below 47. call it 20-something. Basically what this means is that for a single run getting better ME results in NO improvement whatsoever in the number of trit bars needed. Due to some changes a while back, you can still get some improvement on MULTIPLE count runs (i.e. do 5 at a time) by going to a higher ME, but for a single run, anyone researching the bpo beyond that 20-something level is just throwing away their isk.
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Forgot to mention: Get MLCALC – an eve tool useful for finding out at exactly what point a BPO stops improving. Due to changes it still only works out for single runs but it’ll tell you when a single run stops improving.
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My production efficiency is at 5 and that lines up with what I remember.
I did try to set up a production run for multiple, to explore what you said, but I happen to be max’d out in the number of runs I can do for the next few days, so I cannot get to the requirements screen.
I have EVE-Meep on my system, but it seems to be somewhat unstable. I gather from the errors that it has an issue with the latest .NET environment patches. Fun with Microsoft.
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Found it: ME:23 is the point at which the Cargohold Optimization I BPO stops improving. Note specifically that this is for the Fried Circuit Interfaces (at 118) as the Alloyed Tritanium Bars actually get perfect at ME:20 (so trit bar wise you didn’t have to do anything – but at 23 you did improve the Fried Circuit Interface usage). Anything beyond that only comes into play if you manufacture more than one rig at the same time. Oh and note: you only need 119 Fried Circuit interfaces at ME:20 so you go a savings of 1 Fried circuit interface from all your research if you’re only building one at a time.
Someone with an un-researched BPO and a Production Efficiency level of 0 will need 135 Trit bars to make said rig. If such a person managed to get ahold of a ME:23 or higher bpo they would still need 125 trit bars.
Moral of the story? Don’t get into production till you get Production Efficiency 5.
Incidentally if you dig around in the industrial forum of eve-o you’ll run across the various discussions about this subject and how it works. Plus you’ll get sucked into the recurring debate on the still not changed mechanics where currently it’s cheaper to make items one at a time.
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build your own calculator..
=ROUNDUP(C2*(1+0,1/(J2+1))*(1,25-0,05*L2);0)
this is the formula i use in excell where
c2 =base cost of item (on the eve-online website)
j2 = the me of the bpo
l2 =the production efficiency of your char
i have a full excell sheet if your interested it even has a capital sheet calculator and a bpo list with requirements
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