Never fly a ship you can't afford the insurance for, lol...

 

If you can get into a ship with at least some cargo room, and are ever in the neighborhood of Hawley Dock (Yimanbin System) I can fling a few hundred tons of I. Slaves your way to help you get a few million credits.

You'd probably need some collector limpets unless you're amazing at cargo scooping.

 

That has a good chance of working, actually. You might not get the python itself back, but they might give you some money to re-buy it.

 

Did they tell you what actually happened?

 

Just be glad you're playing in a time where you can have turrets that don't inexplicably auto fire friendlies in a station...

 

Just a headsup for anyone playing this, there is currently some powerplay themed ship emblems you can get for free on the store.

Link

 

I started playing a few weeks ago and I'm finding it a bit difficult to make money. I've been trying delivery missions but progress is slow.

Does anybody have some tips?

 

What weapons/loadout would you recommend? I did try bounty hunting but I kept getting my ass kicked.

 

First things first:

DO NOT FLY WITHOUT REBUY

Don't EVER spend so much money on upgrades that you can't afford your insurance. Because the second you leave the shipyard, a full wing of Elite Fer-de-Lances will kill you.


Second: Fly whatever ships you feel like. It might not be the 'meta', or 'perfect play', but that won't matter unless you're at top level play, or aiming to get there fast.

I saved up in my Sidey until I got an Eagle, then bounty hunted my way up to a Cobra Mk4, then traded my way up to an Asp (still have the Cobra). The Cobra is my favourite so far, because she's versatile - strong enough to kill most weaker pirates, fast enough to outfly most of the rest, and could carry a not terrible cargo at the same time. I could still take on some of the interesting looking missions. Also, I hated flying the bricks that were the dedicated freighters.


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When you do delivery missions, fill up the rest of your cargo hold with stuff, and take it with you. Either just personal freight, or other mission things.

There's two ways you can do this, the simple and the hard.

The simple way is easy - you use a route planner. There are two that I've found.
The first is the EDDB trade tool. You put in your ships specs for jump range and so on, it'll give you the two-part trade loop you can make, but it won't take into account where you are. EDDB has a few other trade tools you can use if you want.

The second is Thrudd's tool. Again, put in your ship specs and location into "trade calculator", but this one DOES take into account where you are and where you're going (so good if you're filling up your corners on a mission). "Find trades" will search nearby for decent trading routes.

However, both of these tools take something away from the game - you're not doing discovery by yourself, you're just following steps given to you by someone else. So it's good if you need a cash injection (it's how I got myself an Asp), but I found it less interesting to play that way.

Instead, I tried the harder route (it also gives you much less money, but still more than doing nothing).

Get a sheet of paper, and buy one of everything you can from your starting location. Write down what it cost. Fly to your other location, find out the profit per item, and purchase one of everything they have for sale here, then fly back, sell, and record profit for those. Then keep on selling those. Flying coffee against agri/adv. meds worked well a few times.

You can use the galactic map to figure out imports and exports, but I couldn't always make sense of it, so trial runs it was.

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Smuggling works wonders if you can find a decent blackmarket. I've found that OFTEN the outposts won't have many cops around, so you can do slave/porn/liquor runs easier. Just make sure that you'll make a decent profit.

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As Jon said, bounty hunting can be quite good, and I think the new updates makes it even easier (I think the Wing gets bounty like an individual commander, but then each commander in it gets the full value. Don't know if bug or feature or patched out yet), but can't promise that. Without a bounty scanner, you'll only get a single bounty per ship, but the KWS downloads EVERY bounty, so you'll get a bunch. Remember to check that the commander is wanted in your current system before opening fire, though.

Get a bounty scanner (if you have a spare slot, I'd advise getting one anyway. My tradeship has one, so if I get interdicted I can get ALL the bounties of whatever pirates thought they'd get the better of me)


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Mission stacking.

Often, somewhere has a 'bug/feature' that gives multiple missions to the same place. If you're really lucky, these missions are info carrying/scanning/SRV killing missions, where doing it once counts. As you can stack 20 missions at once, this can net a decent amount of credits.

 

Actually, in the upcoming 2.3 patch, they're limiting massacre missions etc. to only being able to stack 3 at once.


Bounty hunting will work such that if you're in a wing, and you shoot a target worth say, 200k.
Instead of everyone getting an equal share of that 200k (ie 100k for two people, 50k for 4, etc.), in 2.3 everyone in the wing would get a full 200k.

The downsides to the bounty scanning is that you often have to go to many different systems to claim all the different bounties. If you just want to grind in the one system it can be better to just not bother with a KWS.


Do use a Wake Scanner though, if you have Horizons, as it gets you some types of Data for engineering when you scan Frameshift Wakes.



Biggest Tip: Don't rush to the big ships. Lots of people are rushing to get as much credits as fast as they can.

They get to the 'Big three' (Anaconda, Imperial Cutter, Federal Corvette) and are so burnt out/etc. that they end up quitting the game because they didn't stop to have fun along the way.


TL;DR: Most important thing is to have fun playing the game the way you enjoy it.

 

I just want to go out and explore shit, but grinding the money to get a good ship to do that really just winds up boring me, so I kind of have a love-hate relationship with this game.

 

I mean, you can actually explore pretty decently in just a Hauler or an Adder.

They won't be as 'good' as some of the bigger ships (Asp Explorer/Anaconda are arguably the two best ships) - but they CAN be pretty good.

The key is that when exploring you try to make your ship as lightweight as possible, with the biggest jump distance you can get. (Obviously, engineering can help a lot)

Here's an absolutely basic barebones Hauler that can get 26~ly per jump, refuel itself, and do scan. (Left one empty slot to fit either Detailed Surface Scanner, or optionally if you have Horizons a planetary vehicle hangar)

Total Price: 1.7 million~

Bonus: Horizons version with Planetary Vehicle hangar, and FSD Range engineered.



Basic Asp Build for Exploration


Honestly, exploration is pretty easy. There's people that have gotten to Sag A* with a Fer de Lance or Federal Corvette (which both have shitty jump ranges)

The basic method is to get a ship, strip it down as light as possible, get the biggest FSD, D rate everything else (D-rated modules are the lightest), and... go.

Planetary Vehicles, Scanners, Cargo(Or Passengers if that's your thing), AFMU's. Those are all sort of luxury items for exploring. You don't really need them too much.

Fuel Scoops however are definitely mandatory, otherwise you can't refuel.

Edit: Just in case any of you want to brainstorm builds for ships, you can use EDCD Coriolis to see pretty much everything. If you click on the little Hammer icons on the various modules you can even preview the effects different Engineer Upgrades can have.