Newbie Guide to Making Money Through Trading
Posted: Thu, 19. Feb 04, 23:54
Well, now that I've done the initial trading routine twice, I think I've gotten the hang of it, and in order to share my findings, I figured I'd write a guide on the topic.
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PLEASE NOTE : This guide was written before patch 1.4 was introduced and made some rather massive changes. The biggest change is that you can no longer use a Manta to sell Silicon! Only TS ships will now allow you to do so!
Playing with 1.4, I would either use the Mercury given to you in mission two to do the initial trading, or buy a dolphin AND a jumpdrive, and immediately go to the satellite / jumpdrive part of trading. Unless you're a really patient person, and don't mind flying around at 120m/s...
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Starting the game, it can be quite hard to make yourself some money with which you can finally begin to set up your trade Empire, or even buy yourself a decent ship with which you can start capturing other ships. I've found that trading is the best bridge between your start and your first million.
(I've tried mining, and while it's a nice bit of income, in my opinion it pales when compared to efficient trading. I spent two hours completely emptying Seizewell of all asteroids, with two AI ships to haul all my loot away, and found I'd made a little over a million credits. Once your trading routes are firmly established, you can pretty much double that, and there aren't that many profitable asteroid sectors to be found (initially) anyways.)
I'm sure that some of the experts here will disagree on the issue of trading vs mining, but let's keep that for other discussions, shall we?
Anyways, without further ado, let's get started.
Starting up
The first thing you need to do is get yourself a ship that will allow you to trade in a decent volume. Trying to trade in your Argon Discoverer is an excercise in sheer futility, so please don't do that. To get enough money to get started, you can follow several paths
1) Use the famous "Sell Stuff From The Express In Mission 2" method, which will set you up nicely with a good ship and cash to trade with. I won't go into details on how this work, use the search function and you'll find thousands of posts on the topic.
2) Run some BBS missions. This is very slow, but it works.
3) Search for packages. If you start on X-Treme difficulty, this is pretty much the only thing that will work (at least until you get to mission 2), but surprisingly it can gather you a reasonable amount of credits in a short amount of time, if you know where to sell certain items. (Hint : Spaceflies, Space Fuel and Space Weed can all be sold to the Pirate Base which is about 50km North of the North gate in Ore Belt). It's totally random what you will get from a package, it's usually energy, but you'll often get 10 spaceflies or something, which you can sell for about 38K.
I would recommend hunting for some packages until you have 30 cargo space in your discoverer, then going off to do Terracorp's missions, and selling the loot from the Express. Once that's done, you should have approximately 400k in credits.
Now, don't run off and dump this into an SPP just yet. We're talking about trading, remember?
Your Trading Vessel
Once you have your money (200k will do, in which case you'd get an Argon Mercury), fly up to Kingdom End, which is in the extreme NorthWestern corner of the Galaxy map, and dock with the Boron Drydock. Buy yourself an S version of the Boron Manta, and upgrade its speed fully. It already comes with a cargobay of 1000 units, and can haul XL cargo. Fully upgraded, it will fly at a reasonable 216m/s, which makes flying around the spacelanes at least tolerable. Don't worry about any weapons or shields (although the S version comes with a 1MW shield), you aren't going to fight, and if anyone wants any trouble, you can always just run away. Don't sell your Disco. (we'll need it later)[/b]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PLEASE NOTE : This guide was written before patch 1.4 was introduced and made some rather massive changes. The biggest change is that you can no longer use a Manta to sell Silicon! Only TS ships will now allow you to do so!
Playing with 1.4, I would either use the Mercury given to you in mission two to do the initial trading, or buy a dolphin AND a jumpdrive, and immediately go to the satellite / jumpdrive part of trading. Unless you're a really patient person, and don't mind flying around at 120m/s...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Starting the game, it can be quite hard to make yourself some money with which you can finally begin to set up your trade Empire, or even buy yourself a decent ship with which you can start capturing other ships. I've found that trading is the best bridge between your start and your first million.
(I've tried mining, and while it's a nice bit of income, in my opinion it pales when compared to efficient trading. I spent two hours completely emptying Seizewell of all asteroids, with two AI ships to haul all my loot away, and found I'd made a little over a million credits. Once your trading routes are firmly established, you can pretty much double that, and there aren't that many profitable asteroid sectors to be found (initially) anyways.)
I'm sure that some of the experts here will disagree on the issue of trading vs mining, but let's keep that for other discussions, shall we?
Anyways, without further ado, let's get started.
Starting up
The first thing you need to do is get yourself a ship that will allow you to trade in a decent volume. Trying to trade in your Argon Discoverer is an excercise in sheer futility, so please don't do that. To get enough money to get started, you can follow several paths
1) Use the famous "Sell Stuff From The Express In Mission 2" method, which will set you up nicely with a good ship and cash to trade with. I won't go into details on how this work, use the search function and you'll find thousands of posts on the topic.
2) Run some BBS missions. This is very slow, but it works.
3) Search for packages. If you start on X-Treme difficulty, this is pretty much the only thing that will work (at least until you get to mission 2), but surprisingly it can gather you a reasonable amount of credits in a short amount of time, if you know where to sell certain items. (Hint : Spaceflies, Space Fuel and Space Weed can all be sold to the Pirate Base which is about 50km North of the North gate in Ore Belt). It's totally random what you will get from a package, it's usually energy, but you'll often get 10 spaceflies or something, which you can sell for about 38K.
I would recommend hunting for some packages until you have 30 cargo space in your discoverer, then going off to do Terracorp's missions, and selling the loot from the Express. Once that's done, you should have approximately 400k in credits.
Now, don't run off and dump this into an SPP just yet. We're talking about trading, remember?
Your Trading Vessel
Once you have your money (200k will do, in which case you'd get an Argon Mercury), fly up to Kingdom End, which is in the extreme NorthWestern corner of the Galaxy map, and dock with the Boron Drydock. Buy yourself an S version of the Boron Manta, and upgrade its speed fully. It already comes with a cargobay of 1000 units, and can haul XL cargo. Fully upgraded, it will fly at a reasonable 216m/s, which makes flying around the spacelanes at least tolerable. Don't worry about any weapons or shields (although the S version comes with a 1MW shield), you aren't going to fight, and if anyone wants any trouble, you can always just run away. Don't sell your Disco. (we'll need it later)[/b]