EVE Online Planetary Interaction Guide

EVE Online Planetary Interaction is one of many side activities that support industrialists in the game. With planetary interaction or PI for short, you can set up mining or production facilities on surfaces of planets. It’s a fun and basically passive way of generating production materials or profit.

Table of contents:

1. Setting up a new colony.

2. Planetary Interaction Command Center.

3. Harvesting.

4. Refinement.

Setting up a new colony

New players can set up their command center and start harvesting straight away, but there are a number of skills that will greatly improve the efficiency of your planetside operations. Those skills are: Command Center Upgrades, Interplanetary Consolidation, Planetology, Remote Sensing and Advanced Planetology.

To get started you will need a command center. Command centers have to match the type of planet you want to set your colony on, so for example, if you are looking to mine resources of a Barren planet you will require a Barren Command Center. With command center in your cargo hold warp to a nearest planet matching your command center and open up PI menu.

With EVE Online Planetary Interaction menu up press the scan button to survey the planet for resources. Once you select scan menu you will see a list of harvestable resources and their density on this particular planet. Selecting a resource will show you its density all over the planet. The less common the resources are the lower scan resolution you will need to find the hotspots so adjust the scan resolution down to find a good spot for the resource you have selected.

Once you have decided on what resource you want to harvest, find a high-density place for it and go to the build menu. Place your command center close to the place you want to harvest them from and not directly on top of it. With place selected press the “submit” button.

Congratulations your colony is now set up.

Planetary Interaction Command Center

Command Center is the heart of your colony, depending on your skills you can improve its level, by doing so you are increasing its CPU and power grid which allows you to build more structures on the planet surface. Everything you will build, including resource links take up power so you don't want to build your harvesters too far away from the command center because further, the harvesting facility is the more expensive it is to connect it with the command center.

Command center has 500m2 capacity and a small launch bay used to send small amounts of the gathered materials to the orbit. If you want to send bigger quantities “up” you will need to build a launch pad. You can also build a storage facility to improve your storage capacity. Once both of the modules are placed you have to connect them to the command center power grid.

Now you have a very basic base setup, it's time to harvest something.

how to harvest in eve online

You want to build your extractors close to the resource you want harvested. Materials may overlap on the map but extractor will only harvest one type of material at a time. Once you have selected proper place for your extractor, click “submit” and connect your extractor with your storage facility by clicking on the extractor and selecting “create link” option then just drag and drop the connection.

To start extracting select an extractor and press “survey for deposits” button, a survey program window will appear. Select type of resource you want to extract, on the right side you will see option to build multiple “drills” or “extractor heads”, please note that each one uses CPU and power. Lastly you can modify extraction area, increasing it will also increase the time needed to finish the cycle and can be set to run between 1 hour up to 14 days. The graph in the center will show you the amount of materials you can expect to harvest during the set extraction period.

Remember to move the extractor heads tho where the resource density is highest. Once you have done all this you also need to establish where the harvested material should be routed to from the extractor, to do that, click on the extractor, select a product and press “create route” button. Next, click on a silo and click “select as a destination”. Great! Your extrator now gathers materials that are then sent to a silo.

EVE online Refinement

With your extraction operation running you want to refine the gathered materials into higher tier products. To do so build an industrial facility, place it near the silo and link them together. Click on the industrial facility and select the schematic (preferably one that uses materials you are harvesting) and press install. A product window will pop that will ask you to route the products, just like with your extractor, route the industrial facility produce to silo.

Industrial facilities require material to begin their production, to route the materials select your storage facility, select material you have been harvesting and rout it to the factory that needs it for their installed schematic. You can refine your products further by placing advanced factories and routing produced materials there.

Congratulations! You have successfully created a sustainable planetside operation. To retrieve produced materials from the planet you will need to use your launch pad.

Launch pads can launch up to 10,000m2 into space which are transported to the customs office orbiting the planet. To do so, click your launch pad and press the launch button, a new window will show up. In this new panel drag and drop the materials you want to transport from your silo to the launch pad. Once you have done all this simply click “transfer” button and our package will be sent to the customs office.

To retrieve the package leave the planet mode, select the planet from your overview and warp to customs office at 0, then just simply open the customs office and loot it.

Summary

Well done! Now you know how to set up a fully functional planetside colony using Planetary Interaction in EvE Online. Planetary Interaction is a great semy passive activity you can perform that does not take much time or effort to maintain and can prove to be a great secondary source of income. Feel free to experiment with various planets and material types. Fly safe o7