Saturday 2 August 2014

The Milk Run

I do "Milk Runs" frequently, where I gather up everything not worth posting where it was bought and transport to a neighboring region (always in a Blockade Runner and usually on autopilot). I post whatever's worth posting there, gather up stuff in that region, make up another load and send it off to the next region.

Rinse and repeat until I've had enough for the day. The next day (or maybe a few days later) I'll continue on from wherever I left off until I've hit all my traders or there's not enough unposted stock left to make another trip worthwhile. When enough stock piles up to make another milk run worthwhile I start the process all over again.

Important note: All my traders fly Blockade Runners, doing similar milk runs in anything else wouldn't be nearly as safe. Especially not on autopilot as I usually am.

Here's an example of one day on the milk run.

The first thing I did was sort my Assets in jEveAssets with the most assets at the top to see where I had the most stock lying around unposted.




The first 2 traders had over 12 billion in assets each. Since those are the traders of Hek and Rens, it made sense to start the milk run off in Minmatar space. So I posted some stuff on Hek, then contracted 8.6 billion worth of stock from Hek to the trader on Teonusude in Molden Heath.




The Teonusude Trader posted a few things (not much, only 2 or 3 billion worth), added some implants to the load and contracted a bit over 7 billion worth off to Rens.




The Rens trader picked it up, flew it back to Rens, posted a bunch of stuff and added a bunch more to the load. He contracted over 15 billion off to the Berta trader in Derelik.


The Berta trader picked it up, flew back to Berta, posted some of it there, added a few things to load and contracted 13 billion worth of stuff off to the next trader in line.

In all it took about 4 hours real time (mostly AFK) and maybe 15 minutes where I was actually at the keyboard. I spent more keyboard time on this post than on the actual trip.

Just in case some ganker reads this and gets the bright idea it might be worth his time to kill all BRs leaving Berta for a day or two... The milk run was long gone from Berta before I posted this.

6 comments:

  1. Can you start your circle from anywhere? Say you start in Amarr. Do you then go Jita to Dodixie to Hek?

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    1. Yes I can start from anywhere and I mix it up quite a bit. Different starting locations, different routes and going clockwise or counterclockwise. Sometimes I'll do one big circle hitting all 24 active traders, other times I'll just do smaller routes of the regions clustered around each main hub without moving anything between clusters.

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  2. When you say anything worth selling there what are you looking at? General competition, like a lot of orders being renewed that day? Do you eve-central best prices at different locations and not put ones up that are bottom of the barrel where your currently at?

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    1. When I say "worth selling" I mean anything that I don't already have enough posted and has a high enough price to make a decent profit on. Otherwise I'll just hold onto until either the price goes up or I have enough stuff piled up to make it worth my time to move it somewhere else (whether myself in a BR or by contract).

      I rarely look up prices online, it's just not worth the trouble imo. The milk run will find somewhere with a decent price soon enough.

      Besides if I look for the place with -the best- price what usually happens is someone else (or several someones) ship there too, we wind up in fierce competition and prices go down fast anyhow. I find I actually make more by shipping to places with -decent- but not really high profit margins.

      When I do look something up (usually PLEX) I always use eve-marketdata.com

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  3. Maybe it's me. I'm always terrified of moving the gold shinies anywhere, ever. Espeically in autopilot

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    1. I've been doing it long enough I consider flying BRs on auto safer (much safer even) than flying anything else manually.

      I'm fairly comfortable moving anything up to about 2 billion on auto (a day's worth of income on average), but much more than that makes me a little nervous, especially if one of the gank camps (Uedama, Litiura, etc.) is on the route.

      In that case I'll usually try to come back to the keyboard in time to fly the gank system manually.

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