Smuggling Boosters—and EVE's Tiny Drug Market.

Read about smuggling in EVE Online—and how it's not the best dedicated profession.

I've been ambitiously smuggling boosters in EVE Online; 5 Billion ISK worth yesterday... ish. Now I have a lot of illegal goods to sell—and many buyers to connect with. Selling is the real challenge with space drugs.

A Small Drug Market

You'd think in a game like EVE Online there would be a big underground market. Alas, the market for boosters seems pretty small. It appears to be centered in Jita. Outside of The Forge the volume for most boosters is miniscule; Meaningless.

Barrier to Entry

As far as market segments go, boosters do have on saving grace; The barrier of entry is higher than, say, Damage Control ii's. My margins are decent—and there's not a ton of competition in the market screen. I never find people 0.01ing on cooldown.

I Smuggle Because it's Convenient.

I can't say I would ever be a dedicated booster smuggler. The idea of it is fun, but I only do it because it fits into my general speculative hauling strategies: Move tiny, high cost goods from highsec/lowsec to trade hubs. I'm already in the neighborhood so boosters are nearly free ISK.

However—if I already had my current data scraping tools, but only had 30 minutes a day for trading? I may target the booster market and do one run per day.

How to Smuggle

So how do you smuggle in EVE Online? I won't tell you; It'll be more fun once you figure it out. I will say that it's pretty simple, and although I don't understand all the mechanics of it—I've never been caught by customs because I'm pretty careful.

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Hauling Other People's Space Junk for ISK

As I write I'm casually flying my blockade runner around New Eden. Along my zig-zag route I'm grabbing trash people are selling in remote stations. Pretty glorious, huh?

Moving Junk Around

Most of it doesn't look like much by itself; I'm hauling T1 mods, ammo, gasses, a salad of scraps high and low volume. There are deadspace mods and other expensive items mixed in—but it's mostly trash salad.

Trash salad can be profitable though. I may not be flying a Leopard, but Viators are pretty quick—and I've got 13k m3 or so cargo space. I can make a lot of quick stops... and stash many things in my cargo. Why be picky? ISK is ISK!

Data Source

All the the data on these deals comes from EVE-central's trade finder tool (through my Python data scraping scripts.) That means I could drop most of them in a buy order in Jita for instant returns. Sometimes it pays to do that; Other times you can make 10x or 100x more ISK with a well placed sell order (when the first margin is low.) Cha-ching!

Barrier to Entry

The beauty is that without data tools and some experience this part of the market is both out of sight—and not attractive to other traders. There's a definite barrier to entry.

Do Your Thang!

These opportunities highlight one of the most delightful things about trading in EVE Online! If you have creativity and vision you'll not only make good ISK... but it'll happening in interesting and rewarding ways. Trading in EVE is good fun!

I'm certainly not looking for competition...my skills would make more ISK if I were station trading anyways. I'm just hoping to give you some trading ideas. Maybe you'll follow through with one of your funky station trading schemes. Maybe you'll take a new risk, or figure out a fun scamming strategy. Just don't do business as usual! 

Now fly safe... and fly weird. o7

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