Round Trip and Chain Hauling Guide

A one-way route only looks profitable in isolation. If you haul 60,000 m³ from Jita to Amarr for 80M ISK and fly back empty, the return leg costs you 10-plus jumps of time for zero income — so your effective rate is closer to 40M per full circuit than 80M. Time, not cargo space, is the real constraint in EVE hauling: a freighter pilot has a fixed number of jumps per evening, and every one of them should be paid.

Round-trip and chain planning treats the route as a loop instead of a line. The question is no longer which A-to-B trade is best right now, but which set of legs starting and ending at your home hub earns the most per jump flown. Those two questions often have different answers — the best one-way trade frequently has a weak return leg, while a slightly worse outbound paired with a solid return beats it on ISK per hour.

The synergy engine evaluates three route shapes. One-way is the classic single leg — included as the baseline so loops can be compared fairly against it. Round trip pairs A→B with B→A, filling the hold in both directions. Chain runs three legs — A→B, B→C, then C back to A — visiting a third hub before returning home.

Each mode gets a score bonus reflecting its structural advantage: round trips +10%, chains +15%, one-way none. The bonus is deliberately small — a loop only wins if its legs are genuinely profitable, not because it is a loop. A round trip with a dead return leg still loses to a strong one-way in the ranking.

Chains are the most powerful and the most fragile mode. Three legs mean three separate order books that all have to hold up while you fly. The engine compensates by recomputing every 5 minutes, but as a pilot you should treat the third leg as the one most likely to have drifted by the time you reach it.

Every candidate route gets a composite score built from four parts: jump efficiency (weight 0.35), total profit (0.25), estimated hourly rate (0.25), and the mode bonus (0 to 0.15), minus a penalty for route danger. Jump efficiency carries the largest weight on purpose — it is the term that punishes long detours which look impressive in absolute ISK but waste your evening.

The danger penalty subtracts score for legs that cross low-security systems, recent kill hotspots, or suspected gatecamps, using the same per-system data as the route danger score. A loop that routes through a chokepoint like Ahbazon or Rancer needs proportionally more profit to stay ranked. Safe loops with moderate profit routinely outrank risky loops with spectacular profit — which mirrors how most haulers actually fly.

Round trips have a property one-ways lack: the outbound leg revenue becomes the return leg buying budget. Start with 500M ISK, sell the outbound cargo in Amarr for 580M, and the engine plans the return purchases with the full 580M — profit compounds within a single circuit. Chains extend this further: each completed leg raises the budget for the next, so the third leg of a chain often carries noticeably more cargo value than the first.

The snowball is also the main risk of the mechanism. If the outbound leg sells worse than simulated — because the order book moved while you flew — the return budget shrinks and the real result lands below the projection. The per-leg simulation already excludes loss zones, but a loop chains those assumptions together. Read the reliability grade of each leg individually, not just the loop total, to see where the plan is most likely to bend.

Start with round trips between two major hubs before attempting chains — two order books are much easier to sanity-check than three. Match the loop to your actual ship: the engine plans around the cargo capacity you give it, and a plan built for 60,000 m³ degrades badly in a 5,000 m³ hold, because the highest ISK-per-m³ items are the first to get cut.