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Research is the process of improving an Original Blueprint (BPO). Two types of research are performed: Material Efficiency research and Time Efficiency research, also known as ME and TE. Material Efficiency research decrease the amount of materials required for the production of the blueprint, whilst Time Efficiency research decrease the production time of the item produced. Research may also involve blueprint copying, which produces Blueprint Copies (BPC). As the blueprint is researched and copied, the ME and TE levels of the original blueprint will be transferred onto the blueprint copy.

Research does not actually require any skills. However, they can make it far more easier and quicker and are worthwhile training if you intend to do a lot of research.

Material Efficiency (henceforth known as ME) research reduces the amount of materials required to manufacture the item from the BPO. It can clearly be seen that the fewer materials you require to build an item, the more profitable selling your item is likely to be. New BPOs bought from the market will have an ME of 0%, but you can often find BPO sellers in contracts or on the Sell Orders forum, that will sell you pre-researched BPOs (or BPCs) for your manufacturing business.

The current ME level of a blueprint can be seen by looking at the info on a blueprint, or by opening the Industry window and browsing your blueprints. Each time you perform ME research on a BPO, it will reduces the materials required by -1%. You can do ME research 10 times in total, for a total reduction of -10% on the materials required.

Materials will always round up to the next whole number, so you will never need 23.75 units of tritanium to build a module, for example, or you will never need 0.75 Atrons to build an Ares.

It is important to note that material rounding happens after you have multiplied by the number of runs. Here's an example, the Scourge Rocket BPO. You can see that at 0% ME, the Scourge rocket requires 31 Tritanium and 26 Pyerite to build. If you researched it to 2% ME, it would require 30.38 Tritanium and 25.48 Pyerite. Because minerals round up, if you only did a single run to build a single batch of rockets, the amount of materials required would not actually change. However, if you did 100 runs to build 100 batches of rockets, because material rounding occurs after you multiply by the number of runs, you would need 3038 Tritanium and 2548 Pyerite to build 100 rocket batches. In this way, even researching to -1% or -2% ME can be worthwhile if you intend to mass produce items. However, no required materials can be reduced to less than one. If your 0% ME blueprint requires 1 unit of a material to build, even ME -10% will not reduce that amount of material at all.