# Solving PI — Planetary Industry, Made Simple

**solvingpi.com** — free, open source, no login, no ads.

---

## PI is not hard. It's just tedious.

There's nothing complicated about Planetary Industry. Rocks come out of a planet, rocks become goods, goods become ISK.

The problem is everything in between. Five planet types. Extractor cycles that decay. Factory ratios. Customs tax. Market tax. Hauling. Prices that move while you're doing the arithmetic. None of it is *difficult*, exactly — there's just an enormous amount of it, and it all has to be right at the same time.

So most people open the planetary window, feel a great weariness settle over them, and go back to ratting.

Solving PI does the tedious part. All of it. You keep the decisions.

---

## How it works

**You tell it what you have.** Your systems, your planets, your characters. Or drop in screenshots and it reads them for you — the OCR runs in your browser, so your images never leave your computer.

**You tell it what you want.** The most profit you can get. A specific product. Or the one that catches people out: *"I want this many units, in this many days"* — and it tells you how many planets you'd need, and which types. That one works before you own a single planet.

**It gives you the answer, and then it gives you the steps.** Not a wall of numbers. A per-character, per-planet checklist with copy-paste templates you paste straight into the game. Tick things off as you build them.

It won't click the buttons for you. Sorry. Everything up to that point, though, is handled.

---

## Why it's different

Most PI calculators do the easy half of the maths and quietly skip the rest. This one accounts for the things that actually decide whether a setup is worth running:

- **Your real resource densities** — not a generic average

- **Customs office tax**

- **Market and sales tax**

- **Shipping costs**, priced on the actual volume of what you're moving

That last one matters more than people expect. Plenty of setups look profitable right up until you notice the freight bill, at which point they quietly become a hobby.

**It also builds things PI can't.** Fuel blocks, nanite repair paste, deployables and more — the stuff you actually make *from* PI. It prices the non-PI inputs those need too, so a fuel block run shows you the real cost including the ice, not a number that pretends ice is free.

**Every figure comes from the game.** The maths is EVE's own mechanics; the prices are live from Jita through CCP's API. Nothing is a guess, and where something genuinely can't be known, the tool says so instead of making it up.

**You define everything.** Your costs, your taxes, your shipping rate, your extraction cycle, how often you actually log in. It's your operation. The tool just does the arithmetic.

**All the numbers are open.** So is the source code. Check any of it.

---

## Honest bit

I've made mistakes building this. More than a few. Some of them were embarrassing.

I move fast and I break things — that's genuinely how I work, and it's the only reason a tool this size exists at all with one person on it. The trade is that bugs happen. When they do, they get fixed as fast as I can manage, and each one becomes a test so it can't come back.

The first version of this fundraiser was also, frankly, over the top. It asked for far more than this needs and dressed up costs that weren't real. That was me getting carried away. Consider this the corrected version.

The tool is good. It isn't finished. It never will be, because CCP keeps changing things and that's the job.

---

## Where the money goes

Nobody takes a wage. Here's the whole cost:

**The AI development tooling.** This is a big, heavily-tested codebase kept alive by one person with a full-time life. That's only possible with a serious AI assistant subscription, and it's by far the largest cost — everything else is a rounding error beside it.

**The domain.** I own solvingpi.com outright, paid for a couple of years, for about the price of lunch.

**The hosting is free.** It's a static page. It costs nothing to run whether two hundred people use it or twenty thousand, and I'm not going to invoice you for servers I don't rent.

That's the list.

**Every transaction will be public.** Money in, money out, itemised, on a platform where the ledger is just how it works — not a spreadsheet I promise to keep updated. Including the AI subscription, since that's where most of it goes.

Anything extra extends the runway and gets logged as it's used. Anything short buys however long it buys, and I'll say exactly how long. The code stays open either way.

---

## The ask

If this saves you an hour of spreadsheet work, that's worth more than an hour of mining. Give whatever that's worth to you — no tiers, no rewards, no minimum.

Can't give anything? That's completely fine. It's free to you regardless; that's the entire point. Share it instead. Post it in corp chat. Send it to whoever asked how PI works and then immediately regretted it.

**Try it first:** solvingpi.com

**Read the code:** github.com/LackingTallent/SolvingPI

**Watch the money:** *[ledger link]*

---

## Who's doing this

**Admiral Leyton**, also known as Lacking Tallent.

I've played EVE since I was a pre-teen. I'm thirty-six now. Long breaks, always came back, because the people are worth coming back to.

I love this game and I hate the arithmetic. So I did the arithmetic once, properly, and put it where everyone can use it.

Go check on that planet you abandoned in 2023. It misses you.

o7

---

## FAQ

**Is it really free?**

Yes. No paywall, no premium tier, no ads, nothing held back for donors.

**Is CCP okay with donations?**

Yes — their Developer License Agreement §4.4(b) permits them, so long as access is never conditioned on donating. It isn't. Not affiliated with CCP Games; EVE and all related assets are theirs.

**Does it touch my account?**

No login, no SSO, no credentials. It only reads public data anyone can query.

**Where do my screenshots go?**

Nowhere. The OCR runs in your browser. There's no server for them to reach.

**Why is AI tooling the main expense?**

Because it's the true answer. I could have listed servers and sounded more conventional, but you'd rather know what you're actually funding.

**What if you stop playing?**

The code is public and permissively licensed, and the whole tool is a single file you can download today. It doesn't disappear with me.

**Can I help with code instead?**

Please. Issues and pull requests welcome.