EVE Online planet resources and the PI production chain

• Planets on the left - each of the eight planet types yields exactly five raw materials, and every material can be pulled from several planet types. This is where a chain starts: you pick the product you can actually supply, not the one you like most.
• Five columns - Raw, P1, P2, P3, P4. One factory cycle turns the inputs on the left into the output on the right.
• Hover anything and its whole path lights up: what it needs below it, and what it feeds into above. Click to keep that path on screen while you read it.

Knowing what a planet type yields is half the answer; the other half is whether the system you fly in actually has those planets. The PI system checker takes a solar system and tells you which planet types are in it, what they extract and how far up the P1-P4 chain that gets you without hauling anything in - and the gates out, because a missing planet type is often one jump away.

When you already know what you want to make, the PI production calculator works the other way round: it takes a product and a quantity, breaks it down into factory cycles and raw materials, and says whether each step is cheaper to produce or simply to buy.

A higher tier is not automatically worth more per hour. Each step up costs a factory, power, CPU and - above all - the hauling between planets, while the margin between a P2 and the P1s it eats is often thinner than the margin on the P1s themselves. The prices on this board are what the market pays today, so the comparison is the honest one.

Raw materials rarely have a price at all: almost nobody sells P0 on the market, because it is extracted where it is used. An empty price here means "nobody trades it", not "it is worthless".