Manufacturing in EVE Online: what it takes and what it costs

Every manufactured item in EVE has a blueprint, and every blueprint has a fixed list of materials. This works out that list for the quantity you want, prices it at one region's orders and shows what the finished item sells for there.

Why one region and not an average

Industry happens somewhere. A material costs what the cheapest sell order in that region costs, and the thing you build sells for what somebody there is willing to pay - an average across New Eden is a price nobody will trade at. Pick the region you actually fly in; Jita is the default, because that is where most price checks end up anyway.

An empty price is not a zero. When nothing in the region has orders for one of the materials, the totals that would need it stay empty and the missing names are listed. A sum that quietly skips a line looks complete and lies about whether the build is worth it.

Buy everything, or build the parts yourself

The tree under the material list is the real question of industry: many components are themselves built from something else. A fuel block needs robotics, robotics come from planetary goods, and those come from raw materials on planets. Two totals stand next to each other - what it costs to buy every direct material, and what it costs if you only buy the leaves of that tree and make the rest.

Production runs in whole batches: one run of a fuel block blueprint yields 40 units, so asking for 50 means two runs and 80 units. The tree counts runs, not fractions of them, because fractions of a run do not exist in game.