Reprocessing Report #5, August 2026: Ore Mistakes and the Day the Scanner Lied

July was the loudest month this series has had. August, as if embarrassed by it, went quiet. Through the 27th the scanner logged 539 flagged trades worth about 3.9 billion ISK, half of July's flag count. Quiet didn't mean poor, though. Jita's median trade climbed to 3.0M ISK, the highest since we started tracking (2.3M in May, 2.1M in June, 2.2M in July). Fewer gaps, fatter gaps.

Also, one day this month the scanner flat-out lied to us, to the tune of 3.6 trillion ISK. The honesty section at the bottom is longer than usual. It earned it.

The scoreboard (through August 27)

Hub	Flags	Distinct items	Total profit	Median trade
Jita 4-4	259	159	~2.44B	3.0M
Dodixie IX	123	83	~862M	1.8M
Amarr VIII	104	63	~475M	1.9M
Rens VI	29	14	~71M	2.1M
Hek VIII	22	12	~56M	1.4M

Look at Hek. 746M in July, 56M in August. That's what I meant last month about the Medium Ship Assembly Array basically being the whole hub: the fifteen-day mispricing died on July 9 and took Hek's numbers down with it.

The month of ore mistakes

If July belonged to armor hardeners, August belonged to mispriced ore. Compressed and unrefined materials produced about 863M in Jita alone, over a third of the hub's month, and the same theme kept showing up at the other stations.

The star was Compressed Lavish Chromite. It flagged three separate times as someone kept listing enormous stacks below the value of the moon materials inside: 26,000 units on August 10, 168,200 on the 11th, 196,100 on the 25th. Buy at 50–100K per unit, reprocess into 142–158K. The three stacks together held about 261M of spread, and unlike a one-off module snipe, this one needed nothing but a hauler and patience.

It wasn't just chromite either. A 3,000-unit batch of Compressed Gneiss IV-Grade hit Jita on the 24th (147.9M). Over in Dodixie, 2,502 batches of Compressed Hedbergite IV-Grade sat listed at 2K against 58K of minerals each, 128.6M for whoever got there first. On August 13 three different unrefined moon materials (Prometium, Solerium, Hexite) flagged in Jita within the same day for a combined 219M. And my favorite footnote of the month: on August 8 someone listed 161 Hedbergite batches at essentially zero ISK. The scanner dutifully flagged 8.7M of literally free minerals.

Item	Hub	Flags	Total profit	Avg buy	Reprocessed value
Compressed Lavish Chromite	Jita	3	~260.8M	66.7K	151.7K
Covert Mobile Cynosural Beacon	Dodixie	1	~191.1M	25.0M	33.8M
Batch Compressed Gneiss IV-Grade	Jita	1	~147.9M	100.0K	162.7K
Batch Compressed Hedbergite IV-Grade	Dodixie	1	~128.6M	2.0K	58.0K
Capital Crystalline Carbonide Armor Plate	Jita	1	~123.4M	130.2K	273.0K
Capital Salvage Tackle I	Dodixie	1	~116.4M	1 ISK	20.5M
Unrefined Hexite	Jita	2	~97.8M	56.3K	141.9K
Discovery Survey Probe I	Jita	1	~90.8M	26.8K	63.9K
Unrefined Prometium	Jita	1	~81.0M	10.0K	1.69M
Afocal Precise Dual Giga Pulse Laser	Jita	1	~77.5M	8.5M	37.3M
Small Audit Log Secure Container	Amarr	1	~68.0M	1.0K	74.3K
Large Graviton Smartbomb I	Amarr	1	~62.9M	122.7K	304.1K

Dodixie's 1-ISK aisle

Dodixie was August's second hub, mostly through comedy. On August 13 someone listed six Capital Salvage Tackle I rigs at exactly 1 ISK each, against 20.5M of reprocessed materials apiece. Four days later a Capital Energy Neutralizer II showed up, also at 1 ISK, holding 68.6M of minerals. A fat finger? A hangar clearout with the price field ignored? Someone's idea of a gift? The scanner doesn't care. Call it 180M of spread from seven items priced at less than a sandwich.

The hub's biggest line was more conventional: thirty Covert Mobile Cynosural Beacons at 25M each against 33.8M of materials, 191M total, though that's a 750M buy-in for a deployable most people don't trade daily. Amarr contributed its own entry to the comedy file, a thousand Small Audit Log Secure Containers at 1,001 ISK each that reprocess into 74K apiece. Sixty-eight million ISK hiding in the world's most boring item.

The lanes are gone

The assembly lines from June and July are gone. That structural share (profit from items flagged three or more times) collapsed everywhere: Jita 25% after July's 62%, Amarr 14%, Dodixie 14%. Amarr's faithful 'Concussion' smartbomb, twenty flags in July, managed two. The Rens grappler factory idled at 29 flags for the entire hub.

So August looked like what the May report called Jita's natural state, a hundred small unrelated cracks, except this month that was every hub. The loot pipelines that made June and July legible either dried up or got eaten by someone faster than us. The market doesn't owe anyone a lane. It leaks, and the leaks move.

The day the scanner lied

Now the embarrassing part.

On August 19, the scanner flagged 41 trades in Dodixie claiming a combined 3.6 trillion ISK of reprocessing profit. Trillion with a T. Forty of the forty-one were pilot implants — High-grade Ascendancys, Raptures, Nirvanas — supposedly reprocessing into 19 to 45 billion ISK of materials each, at margins between 3,000% and 11,000%, on markets with zero traded volume.

Implants don't reprocess. The game won't let you. But the static game data ships phantom material-yield rows for a few item classes that can't actually be refined, and on the 19th a handful of absurdly priced buy orders on the output-material side (the classic margin-trading-scam wall, orders that exist to be seen and never to be filled) gave those phantom yields a price tag. Multiply garbage by garbage and you get 3.6 trillion ISK that never existed.

Every number in this report has those 41 flags stripped out, along with a couple of smaller artifacts of the same shape, per the July rule: a four-digit margin on a dead market is an artifact, not a trade. And as of this week the scanner enforces that rule itself. Implant-class items are excluded outright, and any material whose buy price sits miles above CCP's own reference price gets treated as a scam wall and skipped. Future reports shouldn't need the asterisk.

I could have deleted those rows quietly and nobody would ever have known. But the whole point of publishing this series is that the numbers are real, and "real" has to include the day our scanner got baited by a scam order and believed it. Bad day, receipt attached.

The shape of the month

• August 13 was the best real day: 456M across 25 flags, the Capital Salvage Tackle and the unrefined moon-material trio all landing at once.
• August 24 (291M) and August 10 (282M) rode the Gneiss batch and the first chromite stack.
• The quietest completed day still logged 19M.

How to read these numbers

The usual, plus one: this covers August 1–27, so the totals will drift up a little by month's end, but the pattern won't change. Reprocessed values assume standard yield and tax; your skills and standings move your personal number. The 1-ISK finds require being there first, and the 196,000-unit ore stacks require hauling capacity most of us don't keep warmed up.

Since the scanner came online on May 20, roughly a hundred days, it has logged about 17.6 billion ISK of real, filter-surviving reprocessing spread across the five hubs. Not one fat vein. Thousands of small cracks, every day, for anyone bothering to watch.

Next month: whether the ore lane survives September, and the scanner's new guardrails get their first full month on duty.