Manufacturing or production refers to activities involving players creating items.
In Eve, players can manufacture many items for themselves. Manufacturing is the primary source all ships, tech 1 and tech 2 ship equipment, ammunition, boosters, and several other miscellaneous items. Many varieties of manufacturing can be done by any player, with no skill requirements, though some items require millions of skill points on the part of the manufacturer. All manufacturing requires, at a minimum, the following items:
The blueprint may be a blueprint original or a blueprint copy, and the level of PE or ME research of the blueprint will govern how long the manufacturing process takes and how much it costs in materials. As well, many skills affect manufacturing - Mass Production and Advanced Mass Production give a player the ability to run additional manufacturing jobs, Production Efficiency reduces costs, Industry makes manufacturing take less time, and Supply Chain Management allows for remote operation of manufacturing jobs.
In order to start a job, all the necessary components must be present in the same citadel/station/POS, including enough materials for the desired number of runs, and in the case of a NPC factory, an ISK payment must be made to rent the factory slot. After all runs are completed, the manufacturing job will be finished, and the manufactured goods will be available in the station.
You can produce items in the following locations:
When creating things in POS and ECs, you may require special rigs or modules to make different kinds of things (ships, modules, etc).
It happens on occasion that two individuals select the same slot at the same time and start setting up their job. When this happens, the one who finishes the setup first will get the slot right away while the latter will have to wait until the other finishes his job. This is difficult to prevent but we don't recommend rushing through the job setup as if you make a mistake and then cancel your job, you will lose the entire bill of materials and whatever progress you had made in the production.
Note that it can take the server a while to process the requested job, so refreshing the job's status after a few minutes should display its correct status.
If cancelled, only the blueprint will be returned. The materials will be lost and the slot will be rented until the normal expiration date.
Production of Tech 1 items - ships, modules, ammunition, or even components - is the simplest of manufacturing tasks, within reach of even the newest player to EVE. Although whether they will actually be able to make a profit is another question entirely. Very few skills are needed and the materials are often fairly easily acquired.
Requires T2 BPCs, which are 'invented' through the invention process. This is a chance-based process, requiring a lot of skill investment in advance, and you are not guaranteed to get a T2 BPCs at the end of it. Some T2 manufacturers do not invent, but instead merely buy T2 BPC packs from dedicated inventors.
Production of Tech 3 ships, also known as Strategic Cruisers - the Legion, Loki, Proteus and Tengu - have their own specialized construction process, which is a combination of invention using ancient relics from relic sites, and including datacores gathered from data sites - to discover the BPCs for hulls and subsystems, and then built using those BPCs with materials gathered from within w-space - including gas clouds (which are reacted in a reactor array), Sleeper salvage and normal minerals.
Capital ship construction can be an extremely lucrative business, although requiring a large initial investment, and, depending on what capital you are constructing, may need to be based in Lowsec, or even sovereign Nullsec.
The creation of Rigs. A rig is a module that cannot be removed from a ship without destroying the Rig. Each Rig generally comes with a bonus (positive effect) and a drawback (negative effect). Unlike T1 and T2 manufacturing which creates modules and ships which require minerals and tech 2 construction components, rigs require salvage, which is harvested from rat or player ship wrecks. To fit a rig requires certain skills, but once fit, the ship may be traded to a player without those skills; the effects of the rigs will still apply.
Combat Boosters are manufactured from mytoserocin and cytoserocin gas harvested from clouds in cosmic signatures found in known space. These signatures only spawn in specific regions of New Eden. These gasses are distinct from the fullerine gasses found in wormholes, which are used to create Tech III ships and subsystems.