Material Efficiency Research can only be performed on blueprint originals. Each blueprint original can receive 10 runs (levels) of Material Efficiency Research, each granting a 1% reduction of the required material for that blueprint original, or new copies made from them. Material Efficiency Research is subject to diminishing return, meaning that each subsequent level of Material Efficiency Research will take exponentially longer to complete than the previous one.
Material Research Requirements
Most Material Research jobs on Tech I blueprint originals do not require additional materials to be provided or skills to be trained to have Material Research done on them. However, for the blueprints that do require material input for the research (usually Tech II Blueprint Originals, as well as the "Prototype Cloaking Device" blueprint original), the following is usually needed:
- Reports, an NPC trade good
- R.Db of different kinds. Those can be manufactured from blueprints available on the market.
- a set of skills, often also needed to invent or even manufacture the blueprint.
Material Reduction Formula
Material Efficiency calculations are applied to the whole job, not individual runs. This means manufacturing a large batch of items will still give some reduction on Assembly Arrays instead of being simply negated. The formula is as such:
Job Material = Blueprint required material * Material Reduction factor
The results are subject to the following limitations:
- Material requirements will be rounded up to the next significant digit, meaning that for example 14.4 Tritanium required to manufacture 10 items will actually be rounded to 15.
- Whole and single items, as in "1 unit needed per production run", will not be affected by this calculation. This is most relevant for Tech I items required for the manufacturing of Tech II variants. For example, building 10 Paladins will always require 10 Apocalypse, independent of any Material Efficiency bonuses applying to the job.