Black Marketers and Station Scans

[aurelcourt]

Hello,

Trying to discover as many black marketers (BMs) as possible to slowly start my smuggling (sorry : transport !!) empire and before moving on to station building (honest work... of course !).

Questions are:

1/ how many BM can you discover in the world map? Is it one per sector/system/...more ?

2/ the buy offers the BMs provide : they refresh very regularly at a great price (that's the point ), but do they ever get bigger in time, or stick with the same 400-500 space fuel/weed/...?

3/ while scanning all these stations to find BMs, I've never unlocked any module blueprint, despite the dozens of stations scanned... (yes I have done all the associated research...)... any help on that?

4/ just an observation : it appeared to me that I could never find a BM "lucrative opportunity" before I completed the HQ plot, is it intended?

5/ once I get enough satellites and trade ships, would the "AutoTrade" behaviour work well with the BMs? (If I only select the illegal goods as trade wares) ?


Thanks in advance for your thoughts on all this!
Have a great day.

Aurelien

[krapht]

1/ As far as I know, the limit is one per station, I have multiple BMs in a sector/zone. If there are multiple BM missions for the same station, accepting one seems to accept all of them. They all point to the same NPC. Don't know if there is any benefit to do more than one
2/ From what I've seen, no. They are small. Good use case for fast S sized ships =) Back in my v1.5 save I tried this as well. I don't know if its been fixed or not, but don't do any of these on defense platforms. Back in 1.5(ish) you could get BMs advertising goods on defense platforms, but those don't have any storage. So my auto-traders would just go there, dock and fail the trade so they'd give up and get stuck.
3/ Are you scanning the correct things? The sparkly balls where someone is talking will give you missions. To get blueprints (but more likely discounts / commissions) you need to scan the flashing red things. They sound a bit different. Don't know if it's a bug or not, but I managed to get several blueprints prior to my HQ research, but the success-rate seemed to increase greatly after the research was done.
4/ I'm not 100% sure, but I do believe I saw some of these prior to getting around to the HQ

[aurelcourt]

Ok thanks !

Great if there can be many BM, I love the idea of having later my own drug lab and ship it stealthily with fast couriers all over the place! (And occasionnaly of course a refined metals cargo heading to a trade station might (-might- ) inadvertently carry a few tons of weed... who knows...)

So yes for the blueprints, I get it it's the red lights and not the sparkles.... but all I get is discounts... guess I'll keep scanning
Anyways I want BMs everywhere so still got some work to do!!

BTW I wish we could send some explorer ships on these painful station scanning.. would make more sense rather than having to do all the stuff yourself, for me X is about managing an empire, not doing all the dirty work haha !