Astrahaus Sticker Shock

In hindsight I probably should have started buying all the materials to build an Astrahaus citadel back when the dev blog was released but my laziness meant I left it until recently. And boy, was I in for a surprise.

Going back to that cornerstone dev blog, Building Your Citadel, One Block At A Time there are some estimates about how much the citadels will cost:

With all of this in mind, we came up to the following:
- Medium Structure hulls will cost around 350-700m ISK in materials to build.
- Large Structure hulls will cost around 3-7b ISK in materials to build.
- X-Large Structure hulls will cost around 30-70b+ ISK in materials to build.

More details can be found here:

Click for full size

Now, what we don't know is if those estimates were with researched blueprints or not which could make a significant difference but I'm assuming that they would give the base material costs in this blog instead of optimal costs. What I do know is that prices at the time this dev blog went live had Astrahaus Citadel hulls (i.e. Medium Citadels) costing roughly in the 600 million ISK range for materials.

Based on those quantities in the dev blog I went out and bought the materials required for approximately three medium citadels and when I plug the prices into my spreadsheet I find a bit of a shock. Per citadel I spent just over 1.2 billion ISK for materials. The price for raw materials for a medium Astrahaus citadel doubled as market speculation and demand for stockpiles outstripped supply, not only in the Planetary Interaction market as Foo's Musings noted recently:

Normally P1 ranges from 80 - 700 isk per unit.  Today Bacteria (normally 60-80 isk/unit is sitting at 380 isk).  Proteins are up to 1100 isk/unit.
P2 normally ranges from 4k isk/unit to 11k isk/unit.  today ... Polyaramids are up to 20k isk/unit.  (Water Cooled CPU are still aweful)
P3 likewise is now up to 160k isk/unit for High-tech transmitters.
P4, with integrity response drones is up to 3M ISK/unit .  Well above the normal 1.3M ISK/unit.

But also with ice product rising prices as well. The dev blog estimated Strontium Clathrates at 416 ISK per unit but current prices in Amarr and Jita have them hovering around 4000 ISK per unit. The materials for Structure Fuel Blocks account for nearly half the price of the Citadel by the way.

So lets say that blueprint research can drive down the number of parts required for the structures to build the citadel, we're still looking at close to a billion ISK for materials for a Medium, which tells me that the market price could range from 1.5 to 2 billion ISK AFTER the initial rush to buy the first ones on the market, with a long term outlook of coming down to ~1 billion after material prices settle assuming demand does not outstrip supply as new producers of PI and Ice materials exploit the margins and increase supply.

The upshot of all of this is someone thinking from the dev blog that they could set up a Medium Astrahaus somewhere fully loaded for less than a billion ISK is sadly mistaken.