Multiboxing PI Extraction?

[gomeler]

Has anyone attempted this? I've run factory planets in the past, and once setup that would be easy to box as the menus are uniform. However, for an extraction planet the manual moving of the heads against a non-uniform interface is stumping me. Is there a way to box extraction, or will I need to cycle through each pilot manually for extraction and just box pickup?

I'm still a day out on skills and a decent HS route to haul in the command centers. Was just poking at the planet menu and using mouse broadcasting to test how close all the accounts get. In testing, so long as I am deliberate in my mouse movements, the 9 accounts track very closely but I have no reference point besides swapping between them to compare where the mouse pointer lies on the surface texture.

[EaTCarbS]

I never isboxed anything outside of the launchpad/poco menus, since everything had to be so different because different products/max yield.

tl;dr id rather drive nails through my balls then do PI

[Mokoi]

I have done this. Put every toons base in the middle of a big red hotspot. then let your damn extractor heads fall where they may
be inefficient with PI, it's SO bad anyway

[gomeler]

I have done this. Put every toons base in the middle of a big red hotspot. then let your damn extractor heads fall where they may
be inefficient with PI, it's SO bad anyway

Makes sense. Slightly inefficient but across many accounts is pretty much how multiboxing works. I'll give that a shot. I'm guessing it still requires individual attention to setup the links and routes?

Really wish PI was an actual 'fun' activity. But, the lure of passively acquired ISK to reduce the grind attracts me.

[Tylos]

This is something I do atm, once you know where you want the colonies to be fire up ISBoxer and build the colonies via multiboxing. This will ensure that all the structures are in the 'same' place. The largest issue I had when starting this was that the extractors were all in slightly different places so I had to do each planet one at a time. i.e. scan each planet in turn and place the command center first. Once that is done you use ISBoxer to build the colony.

As far as running the planets go I use ISBoxer to restart the extraction cycle and ignore the head placement, then one day a week I will do each planet solo and re align the heads.

[gomeler]

Just confirmed for myself, once you plop down the command center for everyone in roughly the same place, everything else is a piece of cake to box. Haven't setup a fully colony yet, still training upgrades, but it looks to be another activity that scales well.

[pinotnoir]

If you are not going to do PI right then you are wasting your time. If you want to make money with PI you need to reset your heads manually on all characters. It sucks but that's how to make money. Otherwise you may have heads sucking up next to nothing on the planet wasting your time for no isk. My last pi was 60 planets. We had to move space so now I will setup PI a 4th time. If you do it right you can make a lot of money with PI.

[CMKCot]

doing PI is all about doing it on the right place, highsec is a waste of time, same as hi-lowsec. only .1 low sec, or null will give you good yields. WHs are fantastic, but the logistics will drive you crazy.

i had for a long time a massive multiboxed pi chain. and yes, as said above me all you need to do is get the command centers down (anywhere on the planet, no need to sync this), then use the "->" button to center all the windows on the CC, and drop everything.

the limiting factor is that all characters need to have the same number of planets (lets call them "slots") and any given slot has to have the same production across all characters. (otherwise the pick up logistics are a pain) you can multibox, both the cycle refreshing, and the material pick-up this way. and in 10 minutes refresh an entire 100+ planet setup across multiple sets of characters.

i had all characters 1-10 do p2 materials on slots 1-5 then 6th slot was for overflow. (extracting whichever material i was low on) then everything was moved to the 11th character who grinded the stuff down to p3 - p4. everything in one wormhole, once a month i cashed out about 13+b in pi poo. i remember making an absurd amount of money initially, by simply making coolant. (p2)

your forte is being able to refresh cycles on a massive scale of planets in a short amount of time, so play on it, use short cycles. Wormholes are the best, specially C4. C3 are high transit, and C5 are all taken. short cycles have higher extraction rates over long cycles, on WHs this higher efficiency is SO crazy that my planets ended up having only one extractor and the rest factories, since i simply couldn't keep up with the extraction.

once a week empty the POCOs for the extractors, and once a month use you grind character to mash everything down, using a bunch of factory planets. (nothing but factories on the planets, no extractors)

should one of your planets have low yield, don't fix it manually, it doesn't matter. one of the other characters will cover the gap until the resource patches move around on their own.

[gomeler]

I'm roughly a week into this and slowly spinning up new planets as the relevant skills train. Using 9 accounts with CCU4/IC3 in w-space, I'm currently running 4 gas planets with 8 P0-P1 factories. I was able to setup the extractors on 12 hour cycles which yields enough on average to keep the factories running for the entire cycle with a little buffer.

I'm undecided on how I'm going to combine the P1 goods into P3 condensates. Every couple of days I transfer P1 material to the POCO. Haven't done a pickup run yet, but this weekend I'll have to scoop the POCO before it fills up. I think I'm going to setup a 5th planet for each character that solely works on manufacturing condensates from the input stream. Playing with planetary planner, I think I can set it up where each character can process it's outputs and I can store enough goods on planet to only have to fiddle with the factory planet once a week or so.

Resetting the extractors is a piece of cake, and each reset cycle takes me ~5 minutes. Takes longer to log the character in than it does to reset the cycles. Initially I manually placed all the heads and I haven't had to move them yet. However, placing the heads is easy. I simply remove all the current heads, add new heads, and then drag/drop while mouse broadcasting. The character I use to broadcast from has Planetology 3(plan on training advanced planetology) and since all the characters are in roughly the same location, they all benefit from the enhanced scan accuracy.

Right now, making condensates, assuming the factory planet goes smoothly, I'm looking at ~11m/day per character. The setup time is somewhere in the 4-6 hour range so far with each new planet(across all characters) taking ~30 minutes to setup. I suspect I'll end up with a second set of 9 characters running the same extraction as I'm digging into T2 and T3 manufacturing and it looks like that also scales nicely with additional accounts. Not sure if it is worth training CCU5 and IC5, given the long trains and my lengthy skillplan. Maybe in a few months, if this continues to be decent ISK for the amount of effort applied.