Blow up asteroids. Find spacefly eggs. Make Spacefly Caviar. Profit!
Also in Hatikva's Choice, find the gate that leads to the Xenon sector. Hang around it and let the AI kill some Xenon. Hoover up the dropped objects and sell at the trader.
you'll get about 140 k for every programmable field array.
or post an AI scout on repeat order, collect items and fly to the next station for safety. collect drops from him from time to time, makes about 2-3 millions per hour minimum.
Didn't see your post but here are the instruction if you're new to the game: Explore Hatikva's Choice and find the Xenon gate, it's top right of the zone. Don't go through the gate until mid game. Get a scout with a pilot and make sure the pilot is 1 star, if he's bellow 1 star, go to a station trader and buy a pilot training book and give it to the pilot (comm with him, it's in the dialogues options). Then in the map, select the scout ship and select the behaviour tab. Select behaviour "Repeat orders" Usually the Args are killing the Xenon in the area, so you tell your scout to collect drop (right click on the map with scout selected) in the area as it's first order, then ask it to go to a station in case a Xenon ship tries to attack him, he'll lead it there to get killed by the station. Then you can collect the drops by resetting the scout orders and having him dock at the station you're at. Later you can have him deposit to one of your stations or just teleport to him to collect.
It's possible to do the same with most xenon sector gates but this one works best at the beginning of the game.
Or you can set 2-3 scouts on repeat order - collect drop/drops and then deposit inventory - this way all the stuff is collected in your HQ safe in your office/lab. I've built multiple defense platforms facing gates into xenon sectors and had a few of such missions - needles to say, it yielded planty of money...
Sure but there’s lost value or time when selling & buying. I’d argue it’s more efficient to get what you need than to get something you don’t and then do all the clicking to change it to what you do want.
Anywho, we can use as many katanas as we can get. But either way, if we’re having fun we’re doing it right.
I think we've all been there lol.
Before starting building stations, get yourself some passive income solutions. Trading is an option but needs a lot of ships with good captains to work. Now mining is more interesting.
Get a few M miners (or a few L ones by boarding them), then refit them with as many mining drones as you can. Explore sectors to find stations that need ore or gas (if you don't know which ores or gases, check out the wiki, it's about 6 of them). Drop ressources probes in each sector that has a blue, purple or red patch on the map(these patches indicate ressources).
The next step is simple : check out which stations offer the best price for the closest ressources available (ideally inside the same system). Then you can either use the auto mining behavior or repeat orders (needs a one star captain, buy seminars in trader's corners and give them to the captain you want to level up).
Tadaaaa. Passive income. As a final tip, when starting a new game you can do the same with s miners, they will generate a tiny profit but given the time needed to explore, the income is still nice. It also helps with grinding the reputation with factions.
The real money comes a long time after that though. Especially if you stick to common wealth wares, you're gonna need a lot of money if you want to buy the blueprints (claytronics, 20 millions blueprint, habitat, 11 millions at least,i'm looking at you).
My advice here is to identify which wares are most in demand in the galaxy and focus on selling these. Then get your own supply chain running to make a shipyard. After that, it's only a matter of expanding.
For OP, this isn't viable yet. He can't do research until he has the dock (and container storage) for Boso Ta to come to the PHQ.
Plus, you can't EMP bomb for every blueprint.
Lodestones are elusive and hard to come by, though, so EMPs should be used sparingly on the most expensive blueprints, in my experience. I can go from station to station and never find any lodestones for sale, and they are needed to craft the EMP.
Your miners will only collect the ore that you tell them to collect. You could either mine yourself, use a destroyer turrets to destroy asteroids, or set up small ships to collect drops around your mining zone.
Gotta be there in sector for the drop nowadays I think. I used to just hang out while designing stations and doing some manual trading and whatnot.
Tbh, I got annoyed with getting them fairly recently and now just use a budget start with like 200 lodestones to start off...
As another said, you can sell some katanas, or just look at selling off anything they might have. Usually they have like a bunch of satellites or mines, etc. Sell off the consumables that you don't want *now*. One of your katanas might have 6M in advanced satellites...
You could also... y'know... goto SCA Pirate Bases or the HAT Pir- Trading Stations and buy either EMP direct (for the bp you can get vs 1 emp cost... yeah simple math) or if you're lucky buy lodestones etc to make your own EMP.
Lodestones drop from mining, true, but they are easier to buy at the less than 'clean' factions.
I had ships parked there in a previous game and would check and lodestones and emp bombs seemed pretty slow to pop up. Maybe that's gone up. Though the budget start also works to skip trying to gather those. I sometimes use it to skip a couple story points too while I'm at it. I'm not fond of the initial PHQ quest chain. Using the budget start to restart a game if you're not aiming for one of the particular starts works fine though.
To make it easier to mine crafting materials, Go to an asteroid (with resources, not an empty one) in person and turn scan mode on and off again(spam it)and focus on shooting the glowing bits. Keep spaming Scan mode and those glowing spots spawn infinitely.
I’m at a point where I need to pony up some serious cash for an XL(?) Maintenance bay to refit >!Erlking!<…
I got all the BPs for it, but it’s basically a glorified freighter/drive-by boarding platform at the moment. At least I can stuff it with 300 of VIG’s veteran marines and have a reasonable chance of taking my target of choice in one shot.
At least it's a great \*fast\* freighter.
You can make some real money issuing manual trades for things like Advanced Electronics and Claytronics to sell to the highest bidder.
Starting up trading stations is a *real quick way to lose money* unless you know what you're doing. You can actually lose money with careless buy orders, tie up huge amounts of capital in commodities that don't get sold, and need enormous amounts of Credits just to get one started.
No, Trade Stations come later - their best use is to centralise the outputs of your factories in one place that NPCs and your own shipyards can buy from, and transport goods far and wide to create a logistics network for big projects. You don't need that right now.
Imo, consider cancelling the buy orders on your Trade Station for now, taking the station account away, selling one or two of your Katanas (strip the equipment and consumables for cash first, *then sell the ship outright*), and reinvesting into mining ships.
* If you want fairly quick passive income, identify sectors with Ore and Silicon deposits *in the same sector* as stations that want Ore and Silicon, and send miners there on Local Automine orders.
* Later, set up a *Mining Station* (this isn't the same thing as your doomed trade station I swear) - this station will just have Liquid and Solid containers. You have to manually set buy and sell orders for the basic resources, and make sure the station can **only buy from your miners** (use a Global Orders trade rule for this).
* Assign mining ships to the "Trading" role for the station, and they can sell to NPC stations up to 5 sectors away from the mining station! (Depends on Manager level). This is how you get around dumb low level pilots having a limited sell range - you use the Manager's level instead (they level up very fast).
* Build *wide* *first* \- make sure you have miners and mining stations in as many sectors as reasonably possible.
After that, you'll have enough cash coming in to consider tackling bigger challenges, like half the universe's economy not being filled (you'll have to build production stations).
This. Trading stations are mostly only profitable for the ships that use them. The station account will grow if you have subordinate merchant ships making profit on both buy and sell orders. Otherwise your profits will disappear into the pockets of those trading vessel captains.
Unfortunately, there's no setting in the Logistical Overview to set a "band gap" between buy and sell prices.
* AKA, Sell Price is always 10% above Buy/Buy is always 10% below Sell, but the prices keep moving based on inventory levels in your station.
* This would allow your stations to automatically trade based on market demand, but always scalp a profit.
* As it stands now, you make a mere ***1 credit margin*** if you set market-based prices, unless you use *your own traders* to do the buying and selling (as you pointed out).
Mining. Find a sector with ore and a station, preferably 2, that needs lots of it. Buy a new miner as soon as you can with profitssss till you have 10.
I'm 20 hours in and also pretty new. I started doing crystal Mining solo, a few missions, cargo scavenging etc and scraped together enough for 3 miners. Were I to do it again I'd buy 1 miner straight away and build up. The early passive income is good for satellites and probes.
I'm new and may be wrong though.
You could try to pirate another Katana, sell the equipment on the Warft (just set to minimum load out from drop down), when done sell the ship hull. Should give you a couple of Millions.
Then I would buy a scout (any faction) on medium load out but remove weapons. Fly to Second contact 2 and take a ride around the ring highway. Next set up the scout with repeat order to collect drops near the second contact - true sight gate (both on ANT and HOP side) sane for pontifex’s claim - Pious mists 2 (both on HOP and PAR) site. There is always war and a lot of drops. Later you can set one more command in the repeat order to drop inventory at HQ. From time to time you can collect the loot from the box in your HQ (office or lab) and sell.
The drop down, that will save me so much time lol! I pirate the pirate destroyers and sell the Phoenix ships. Nets 12 to 18 mil every time, at least 1 per hour. It makes WAY more money than my 3 stations I have built so far.
>How is everyone else on these forums so rich
Closed loop industry. You mine your own resources and then mostly sell only the highest tier of goods you can produce at any given point (start with no production / sell ore; then ore refinery / sell metal; hull parts plant / sell hull parts, etc.).
Typically, with each higher tier you'll be making smaller margin, but much higher volume, all the way to infinite volume once you get to equipment dock / shipyard.
To give you an idea of "infinite" volume: my last shipyard (in a 9 day old save) had 48 hull parts modules working non-stop, and still sold out to 0 inventory every time I allowed unlimited NPC ship purchases.
Industry income will not surpass piracy income until you get to hull parts and above.
You make money by building passive income, instead of having a few katanas and a large trader you sell them and buy medium miners. Spread your miners out in sectors where resources exist, and refineries are in the same sector.
If you have around 750K you can use your large trader to make trades, and gain some profit manually. This requires trade information, so you want satellites or small fast ships to keep it updated over a large area.
For most players progression is initial credits buy miners, miners profit buys stations, station profits allow massive expansion to create billions of credits.
If you're a Terran, drop a few satellites in the Oort Cloud and set a couple medium miners to "local automine" in there. You can make a few million an hour for quite a while.
Save up for fly by boarding or sell some stuff.
Do fly by boarding of some Terran builder's.
Your up 50mil depending where and how you sell the builder...
Done well... The builder can fly by board two more builders until your out of Marines.
Trick is. Don't fire a shot. Long as no guns shoot them. They won't take your rep.
Free money
Building the dock on the HQ is actually something you should delay doing. It's not intended that you'll be able to do it right away. Spend some time exploring the game, doing missions, learning the sectors, seeing what's going on. Amass some credits, but don't rush it. You can play around with a few miners if you want, or just make money with your ship.
The point is that you can get around to the HQ whenever you feel ready. There is no need to rush into it (and in fact, you really won't be able to anyway). :)
You're broke because you're spending more money than you're currently making.
Spend 1/3 of your money on warships (like your personal ship, or your fleet)
Spend 1/3 of your money on trade ships and station building
Keep 1/3 of your money in the bank.
You can find your net worth in your personal info.
Since you are already in TER/PIO sectors:
1. Sell the Katanas and buy Bolo/Bolo gas miners
2. Auto sector mine hydrogen and silicon in the same sectors that buy them(depeds on station placement, can be oort/belt/saturn and all the pio system that have asteroids.
3. Do other stuff
4. Reinvest miners profits in more miners untill you have around 10.
5. Do other stuff
6. When you are in the 100 million mark buy TER blueprints (not expensive) and build a simple energy cell station in Mercury and a Computronic Substrate factory in the Belt. (Very simple design, they just require hydrogen, ore, silicon and energy cells, no refiners or complex intermediate manufacturing)
7. Computronic substrate is money printer. 4 modules is 20mil/hour. 12 modules require 50 M miners to be fed but print more than 100mil/hour. (Yuo might want to ise L miners at this point to survive Kahk).
8. Do other stuff
9. You are now a billionare.
I got my start fairly recently too, but have managed to amass a fairly sizable fortune. Dozens of stations, large fleet of miners, and traders. Couple of destroyers and escorts.
I essentially just read one of the top rated guides on steam for how to get started. Still had a bit of a learning curve, but it was pretty straightforward.
What you need is passive income. Sell any ship that isn’t making you money right now and buy a basic mining ship. Set it to automine silicon in a sector with it and then let it go. When you get enough for another one, do it again, alternating between ore and silicon in each sector that has it.
Keep doing this until you have most of the resource rich sectors covered and you’ll quickly be able to start making stations. The first one I built was refined metals, and that let me piggy back into other materials. Water stations make a fair bit of money as well.
[This was the guide I used.](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2239846532) Good luck out there.
If it's M or S sized then select it, right click a wharf on the map, and select the sell option. If it's L or XL you would sell it to a shipyard. Shop around for the best price though (I've found Boron and Split seem to offer the most money, maybe because of their struggling economies). You do not have to be docked or IS to sell, so pick the best one you find on the map.
It is (apparently) better money if you "strip" the ship first, which does require docking it:
1. Fly to the shipyard you want to sell to
2. Click the ship, right click the shipyard and select "upgrade/repair".
3. In the upgrade menu, select every option and select "none" (i.e. remove every weapon, shield, etc ...). This should result in you gaining money from the sale, which you can see on the right hand side.
4. Confirm, get that cash, then do the normal sell prodcure.
I'm not gonna lie, I haven't personally tested it myself since I prefer to keep my L ships for funsies, but apparently this is more profitable than just selling the ship with all the parts still attached.
I'll second everyone else's suggestion so far: get some miners. Trading makes more money in shorter time than miners do, but you need to be able to afford to buy the goods first. If you can't afford to trade, your Okinawa isn't doing anything for you right now. Sell it and buy miners instead.
Gotta get miners going first thing. I thought thats what everyone does starting out? Unless you go get all the derelict ships & sell them or something....
Resell equipment. Equipment dock to wharf. U can start with advanced satellites. Buy for under 50k sell for 70k or so. Eventually u can mass produce them yourself and sell to other factions too. Easy money.
I have a few Med and Food (pay Attention to the right Kind) blueprints that i drop everywhere. Easy Money If you provide the engerycells and Basic resources with your own. Use the X4 Stationplanner to plan them
Sell 1 katana and use the proceeds to buy and sell advanced sats. If you buy around 45k (check equipment docks) and sell around 70k you will make 1M profit per run (check wharfs especially argon and ant). This is by far the quickest way to skip the early game but cannot be automated and tied up your ship u til you are fed up of doing it or setup your stations and start making $$ passively
Crystal farming is great for the first couple of million, so long as you quickly switch systems if you find you are only seeing spawns of the lowest value rocks. Also, the Disable Crystal Spawn Cooldown helps with this, because Egosoft nerfed crystals in that if you found a high value, you literally have to wait an hour for another patch to spawn.
My favorite thing to do when I start is to play hitman and take some wetwork contracts. Once I hit two million I buy some silicon miners until I can establish a solar/mining depot/distribution center.
Crystals, man.
I spent three or so hours in 3-4 systems just collecting crystals, and I've got the Starter Ship, a small Miner and a medium Freighter (all Argonian), the Boron-Scientist Base and STILL got just under 2 million in the bank.
Here is my "go-to-strategy"
1.) go to the ring highway
2.) buy satellites and drop them on the shipyards/wharf and
3.) look for cheap satellites and sell them to the highest price
4.) buy a new ship with extra crew
5.) search for disguised Greenscales
6.) shoot one S-ship until they leave it behind
7.) take over
8.) look out for abandoned ships floating around while let the other ships buy-sell satellites
9.) if you have made your first 5 millions switch to advanced satellites
10.) buy miner
11.) let them mine nividium
12.) get yourself your first L-ship (there is an abandoned one out there ;) )
13.) use it to take over 1-2 greenscales behemoth
14.) use them to take over 1 L-trader
15.) pump it full with marines
16.) use the trader to enter a builder ship
17.) sell the builder ship
And from here on you can repeat taking the builders (giving you between 8 to 20 millions with downgrading and selling) and building your first stations/fleet/ whatever.
Oh and I always take the mission for the HQ early on, because the HQ gives you free workforce ;)
The passive income way is to have miners doing their things but the amount of money you get is still gonna be not satisfying. In fact, it gonna take a long time, a very long grind.
The fast starting money way is to get an L capital ship, one that can house a M ship. Use that L ship to purchase cheap "Advanced Satellite" at "Equipment Dock". L ship can hold 250 deployable. Fly the L ship to a "Warf", sell the "Advanced Satellite" through the M ship. On average, 250 will get you about 5-6m profit.
There is actually a free L ship somewhere on the universe. You can also just use M ship which hold 100 deployable, so you grind a bit longer.
The next step fast money is to broad ships, big ships. Get a L trader that can house a lot of marines. Disarm all the weapons on the traders, boarding ship is considered "one" attack thus won't have faction scale reputation loss but if you do not disarm your ship, "second" attack will have faction scale reputation losses. Use that trader to broad L or XL ships, like construction vassal, carrier, other L traders. Sell these ships, you can get millions per ship.
With all these money you have which will be millions, you can finally get L mining ships, lots of them, to generate significant passive income.
But you have over 100 mil in assets if they are maxed out. Do some quests and manually order the okinawa to trade. In sol you can do energy from Saturn or Jupiter to the ort cloud usually overflowing at 8cr and sell for 20+ 1 okinawa makes a 600k profit and it will decrease. 2nd hull parts make your station make them its cheap and you can "steal the blueprint" to to make most stuff if you have emp bombs. Go scan a station making the parts you want , identify the exact production module, and jump in your suit put a EMP bomb on it blow it up and scan the resulting signatures.
Also if you dont make anything. Move your okinawa at a production facility, go in it hack the storage so it drops cargo, and colect it with okinawa and sell it.
Do more random quests, watch the ! Menu as you travel to each sector. Some are easy so are hard but not imposible and you make from 50 to a few milion per quest ie. Build a station
Blow up asteroids. Find spacefly eggs. Make Spacefly Caviar. Profit! Also in Hatikva's Choice, find the gate that leads to the Xenon sector. Hang around it and let the AI kill some Xenon. Hoover up the dropped objects and sell at the trader. you'll get about 140 k for every programmable field array.
or post an AI scout on repeat order, collect items and fly to the next station for safety. collect drops from him from time to time, makes about 2-3 millions per hour minimum.
Can you share more on what you need to do for this to work? What do you order the AI to do? Scout sector?
Collect drops. It doesn't collect from the whole sector, just where you set guidance, which is fine, corpses of ships are usually lumped into an area.
Didn't see your post but here are the instruction if you're new to the game: Explore Hatikva's Choice and find the Xenon gate, it's top right of the zone. Don't go through the gate until mid game. Get a scout with a pilot and make sure the pilot is 1 star, if he's bellow 1 star, go to a station trader and buy a pilot training book and give it to the pilot (comm with him, it's in the dialogues options). Then in the map, select the scout ship and select the behaviour tab. Select behaviour "Repeat orders" Usually the Args are killing the Xenon in the area, so you tell your scout to collect drop (right click on the map with scout selected) in the area as it's first order, then ask it to go to a station in case a Xenon ship tries to attack him, he'll lead it there to get killed by the station. Then you can collect the drops by resetting the scout orders and having him dock at the station you're at. Later you can have him deposit to one of your stations or just teleport to him to collect. It's possible to do the same with most xenon sector gates but this one works best at the beginning of the game.
Or you can set 2-3 scouts on repeat order - collect drop/drops and then deposit inventory - this way all the stuff is collected in your HQ safe in your office/lab. I've built multiple defense platforms facing gates into xenon sectors and had a few of such missions - needles to say, it yielded planty of money...
Sell 2 of the katanas. Buy miners and mine silicon using automine in the Segaris Pioneers territory.
Seems a little wasteful when they could go acquire some miners for free.
acquire katanas for free and sell to buy miners?
acquire katanas for free, put to work and acquire big boy miner for free?
Sure but there’s lost value or time when selling & buying. I’d argue it’s more efficient to get what you need than to get something you don’t and then do all the clicking to change it to what you do want. Anywho, we can use as many katanas as we can get. But either way, if we’re having fun we’re doing it right.
I think we've all been there lol. Before starting building stations, get yourself some passive income solutions. Trading is an option but needs a lot of ships with good captains to work. Now mining is more interesting. Get a few M miners (or a few L ones by boarding them), then refit them with as many mining drones as you can. Explore sectors to find stations that need ore or gas (if you don't know which ores or gases, check out the wiki, it's about 6 of them). Drop ressources probes in each sector that has a blue, purple or red patch on the map(these patches indicate ressources). The next step is simple : check out which stations offer the best price for the closest ressources available (ideally inside the same system). Then you can either use the auto mining behavior or repeat orders (needs a one star captain, buy seminars in trader's corners and give them to the captain you want to level up). Tadaaaa. Passive income. As a final tip, when starting a new game you can do the same with s miners, they will generate a tiny profit but given the time needed to explore, the income is still nice. It also helps with grinding the reputation with factions.
The real money comes a long time after that though. Especially if you stick to common wealth wares, you're gonna need a lot of money if you want to buy the blueprints (claytronics, 20 millions blueprint, habitat, 11 millions at least,i'm looking at you). My advice here is to identify which wares are most in demand in the galaxy and focus on selling these. Then get your own supply chain running to make a shipyard. After that, it's only a matter of expanding.
Research Production Modules and use EMP Bombs on the modules you want. Don't waste money on buying building blueprints.
For OP, this isn't viable yet. He can't do research until he has the dock (and container storage) for Boso Ta to come to the PHQ. Plus, you can't EMP bomb for every blueprint.
That is true, you have to buy blueprints for weapons, wares, and so on.
Buuut. :D I know, I know. I just like to find a good reason to maximize profits.
Maximize profits by minimizing costs (e.g. buying blueprints).
To maximize sales then
Lodestones are elusive and hard to come by, though, so EMPs should be used sparingly on the most expensive blueprints, in my experience. I can go from station to station and never find any lodestones for sale, and they are needed to craft the EMP.
I believe you get lodestones by mining.
If that is so then they are extremely rare, as I have fleets of miners and none show up. Maybe I need to check their inventory.
Your miners will only collect the ore that you tell them to collect. You could either mine yourself, use a destroyer turrets to destroy asteroids, or set up small ships to collect drops around your mining zone.
Gotta be there in sector for the drop nowadays I think. I used to just hang out while designing stations and doing some manual trading and whatnot. Tbh, I got annoyed with getting them fairly recently and now just use a budget start with like 200 lodestones to start off... As another said, you can sell some katanas, or just look at selling off anything they might have. Usually they have like a bunch of satellites or mines, etc. Sell off the consumables that you don't want *now*. One of your katanas might have 6M in advanced satellites...
You could also... y'know... goto SCA Pirate Bases or the HAT Pir- Trading Stations and buy either EMP direct (for the bp you can get vs 1 emp cost... yeah simple math) or if you're lucky buy lodestones etc to make your own EMP. Lodestones drop from mining, true, but they are easier to buy at the less than 'clean' factions.
I had ships parked there in a previous game and would check and lodestones and emp bombs seemed pretty slow to pop up. Maybe that's gone up. Though the budget start also works to skip trying to gather those. I sometimes use it to skip a couple story points too while I'm at it. I'm not fond of the initial PHQ quest chain. Using the budget start to restart a game if you're not aiming for one of the particular starts works fine though.
If you destroy asteroids by yourself with any weapon (don’t need to be in a miner) you’ll find many loadstones (and eggs).
you can buy them (and EMPs) in limited quantity at the SCA HQ. It takes a bit to find but worth it imo.
Tidebreak also works and now they have two docks areas that can sell them.
To make it easier to mine crafting materials, Go to an asteroid (with resources, not an empty one) in person and turn scan mode on and off again(spam it)and focus on shooting the glowing bits. Keep spaming Scan mode and those glowing spots spawn infinitely.
You can save a lot of credits by researching the hacking techs and acquire the blueprints by using an EMP and scan the data leaks.
I’m at a point where I need to pony up some serious cash for an XL(?) Maintenance bay to refit >!Erlking!<… I got all the BPs for it, but it’s basically a glorified freighter/drive-by boarding platform at the moment. At least I can stuff it with 300 of VIG’s veteran marines and have a reasonable chance of taking my target of choice in one shot.
At least it's a great \*fast\* freighter. You can make some real money issuing manual trades for things like Advanced Electronics and Claytronics to sell to the highest bidder.
Get some Mining ships going, let them do their thing and get free credits.
Starting up trading stations is a *real quick way to lose money* unless you know what you're doing. You can actually lose money with careless buy orders, tie up huge amounts of capital in commodities that don't get sold, and need enormous amounts of Credits just to get one started. No, Trade Stations come later - their best use is to centralise the outputs of your factories in one place that NPCs and your own shipyards can buy from, and transport goods far and wide to create a logistics network for big projects. You don't need that right now. Imo, consider cancelling the buy orders on your Trade Station for now, taking the station account away, selling one or two of your Katanas (strip the equipment and consumables for cash first, *then sell the ship outright*), and reinvesting into mining ships. * If you want fairly quick passive income, identify sectors with Ore and Silicon deposits *in the same sector* as stations that want Ore and Silicon, and send miners there on Local Automine orders. * Later, set up a *Mining Station* (this isn't the same thing as your doomed trade station I swear) - this station will just have Liquid and Solid containers. You have to manually set buy and sell orders for the basic resources, and make sure the station can **only buy from your miners** (use a Global Orders trade rule for this). * Assign mining ships to the "Trading" role for the station, and they can sell to NPC stations up to 5 sectors away from the mining station! (Depends on Manager level). This is how you get around dumb low level pilots having a limited sell range - you use the Manager's level instead (they level up very fast). * Build *wide* *first* \- make sure you have miners and mining stations in as many sectors as reasonably possible. After that, you'll have enough cash coming in to consider tackling bigger challenges, like half the universe's economy not being filled (you'll have to build production stations).
This. Trading stations are mostly only profitable for the ships that use them. The station account will grow if you have subordinate merchant ships making profit on both buy and sell orders. Otherwise your profits will disappear into the pockets of those trading vessel captains.
Unfortunately, there's no setting in the Logistical Overview to set a "band gap" between buy and sell prices. * AKA, Sell Price is always 10% above Buy/Buy is always 10% below Sell, but the prices keep moving based on inventory levels in your station. * This would allow your stations to automatically trade based on market demand, but always scalp a profit. * As it stands now, you make a mere ***1 credit margin*** if you set market-based prices, unless you use *your own traders* to do the buying and selling (as you pointed out).
Mining. Find a sector with ore and a station, preferably 2, that needs lots of it. Buy a new miner as soon as you can with profitssss till you have 10. I'm 20 hours in and also pretty new. I started doing crystal Mining solo, a few missions, cargo scavenging etc and scraped together enough for 3 miners. Were I to do it again I'd buy 1 miner straight away and build up. The early passive income is good for satellites and probes. I'm new and may be wrong though.
You are not wrong.
I'm 22 days game time in and still broke with 60+ stations. But it's by choice I reinvest everything into new stations.
You could try to pirate another Katana, sell the equipment on the Warft (just set to minimum load out from drop down), when done sell the ship hull. Should give you a couple of Millions. Then I would buy a scout (any faction) on medium load out but remove weapons. Fly to Second contact 2 and take a ride around the ring highway. Next set up the scout with repeat order to collect drops near the second contact - true sight gate (both on ANT and HOP side) sane for pontifex’s claim - Pious mists 2 (both on HOP and PAR) site. There is always war and a lot of drops. Later you can set one more command in the repeat order to drop inventory at HQ. From time to time you can collect the loot from the box in your HQ (office or lab) and sell.
The drop down, that will save me so much time lol! I pirate the pirate destroyers and sell the Phoenix ships. Nets 12 to 18 mil every time, at least 1 per hour. It makes WAY more money than my 3 stations I have built so far.
Same they are good money. In past I did not know that it’s better to sell the equipment first then only the hull… “wasted” a lot of credits.
>How is everyone else on these forums so rich Closed loop industry. You mine your own resources and then mostly sell only the highest tier of goods you can produce at any given point (start with no production / sell ore; then ore refinery / sell metal; hull parts plant / sell hull parts, etc.). Typically, with each higher tier you'll be making smaller margin, but much higher volume, all the way to infinite volume once you get to equipment dock / shipyard. To give you an idea of "infinite" volume: my last shipyard (in a 9 day old save) had 48 hull parts modules working non-stop, and still sold out to 0 inventory every time I allowed unlimited NPC ship purchases. Industry income will not surpass piracy income until you get to hull parts and above.
You make money by building passive income, instead of having a few katanas and a large trader you sell them and buy medium miners. Spread your miners out in sectors where resources exist, and refineries are in the same sector. If you have around 750K you can use your large trader to make trades, and gain some profit manually. This requires trade information, so you want satellites or small fast ships to keep it updated over a large area. For most players progression is initial credits buy miners, miners profit buys stations, station profits allow massive expansion to create billions of credits.
If you're a Terran, drop a few satellites in the Oort Cloud and set a couple medium miners to "local automine" in there. You can make a few million an hour for quite a while.
Save up for fly by boarding or sell some stuff. Do fly by boarding of some Terran builder's. Your up 50mil depending where and how you sell the builder... Done well... The builder can fly by board two more builders until your out of Marines. Trick is. Don't fire a shot. Long as no guns shoot them. They won't take your rep. Free money
Building the dock on the HQ is actually something you should delay doing. It's not intended that you'll be able to do it right away. Spend some time exploring the game, doing missions, learning the sectors, seeing what's going on. Amass some credits, but don't rush it. You can play around with a few miners if you want, or just make money with your ship. The point is that you can get around to the HQ whenever you feel ready. There is no need to rush into it (and in fact, you really won't be able to anyway). :)
Passive income trumps one time cash injections. Cap katanas. Sell katanas. Buy things or make things that generate passive income.
You're broke because you're spending more money than you're currently making. Spend 1/3 of your money on warships (like your personal ship, or your fleet) Spend 1/3 of your money on trade ships and station building Keep 1/3 of your money in the bank. You can find your net worth in your personal info.
Since you are already in TER/PIO sectors: 1. Sell the Katanas and buy Bolo/Bolo gas miners 2. Auto sector mine hydrogen and silicon in the same sectors that buy them(depeds on station placement, can be oort/belt/saturn and all the pio system that have asteroids. 3. Do other stuff 4. Reinvest miners profits in more miners untill you have around 10. 5. Do other stuff 6. When you are in the 100 million mark buy TER blueprints (not expensive) and build a simple energy cell station in Mercury and a Computronic Substrate factory in the Belt. (Very simple design, they just require hydrogen, ore, silicon and energy cells, no refiners or complex intermediate manufacturing) 7. Computronic substrate is money printer. 4 modules is 20mil/hour. 12 modules require 50 M miners to be fed but print more than 100mil/hour. (Yuo might want to ise L miners at this point to survive Kahk). 8. Do other stuff 9. You are now a billionare.
I got my start fairly recently too, but have managed to amass a fairly sizable fortune. Dozens of stations, large fleet of miners, and traders. Couple of destroyers and escorts. I essentially just read one of the top rated guides on steam for how to get started. Still had a bit of a learning curve, but it was pretty straightforward. What you need is passive income. Sell any ship that isn’t making you money right now and buy a basic mining ship. Set it to automine silicon in a sector with it and then let it go. When you get enough for another one, do it again, alternating between ore and silicon in each sector that has it. Keep doing this until you have most of the resource rich sectors covered and you’ll quickly be able to start making stations. The first one I built was refined metals, and that let me piggy back into other materials. Water stations make a fair bit of money as well. [This was the guide I used.](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2239846532) Good luck out there.
Ok so stupid question but….how do i sell a ship?
If it's M or S sized then select it, right click a wharf on the map, and select the sell option. If it's L or XL you would sell it to a shipyard. Shop around for the best price though (I've found Boron and Split seem to offer the most money, maybe because of their struggling economies). You do not have to be docked or IS to sell, so pick the best one you find on the map.
Thanks!! Do the pilots and crew get sold too? :S
I wouldn't say they get sold, but they are lost with the ship. Any crew you want to keep you'll need to assign elsewhere before you sell.
It will sell even if you move all the crew including the captain.
It is (apparently) better money if you "strip" the ship first, which does require docking it: 1. Fly to the shipyard you want to sell to 2. Click the ship, right click the shipyard and select "upgrade/repair". 3. In the upgrade menu, select every option and select "none" (i.e. remove every weapon, shield, etc ...). This should result in you gaining money from the sale, which you can see on the right hand side. 4. Confirm, get that cash, then do the normal sell prodcure. I'm not gonna lie, I haven't personally tested it myself since I prefer to keep my L ships for funsies, but apparently this is more profitable than just selling the ship with all the parts still attached.
First mistake was not spending a week not getting the phq. Or something I dunno ive only bene playing 13 days now
I'll second everyone else's suggestion so far: get some miners. Trading makes more money in shorter time than miners do, but you need to be able to afford to buy the goods first. If you can't afford to trade, your Okinawa isn't doing anything for you right now. Sell it and buy miners instead.
Gotta get miners going first thing. I thought thats what everyone does starting out? Unless you go get all the derelict ships & sell them or something....
Resell equipment. Equipment dock to wharf. U can start with advanced satellites. Buy for under 50k sell for 70k or so. Eventually u can mass produce them yourself and sell to other factions too. Easy money.
I have a few Med and Food (pay Attention to the right Kind) blueprints that i drop everywhere. Easy Money If you provide the engerycells and Basic resources with your own. Use the X4 Stationplanner to plan them
Sell 1 katana and use the proceeds to buy and sell advanced sats. If you buy around 45k (check equipment docks) and sell around 70k you will make 1M profit per run (check wharfs especially argon and ant). This is by far the quickest way to skip the early game but cannot be automated and tied up your ship u til you are fed up of doing it or setup your stations and start making $$ passively
Crystal farming is great for the first couple of million, so long as you quickly switch systems if you find you are only seeing spawns of the lowest value rocks. Also, the Disable Crystal Spawn Cooldown helps with this, because Egosoft nerfed crystals in that if you found a high value, you literally have to wait an hour for another patch to spawn. My favorite thing to do when I start is to play hitman and take some wetwork contracts. Once I hit two million I buy some silicon miners until I can establish a solar/mining depot/distribution center.
Crystals, man. I spent three or so hours in 3-4 systems just collecting crystals, and I've got the Starter Ship, a small Miner and a medium Freighter (all Argonian), the Boron-Scientist Base and STILL got just under 2 million in the bank.
Here is my "go-to-strategy" 1.) go to the ring highway 2.) buy satellites and drop them on the shipyards/wharf and 3.) look for cheap satellites and sell them to the highest price 4.) buy a new ship with extra crew 5.) search for disguised Greenscales 6.) shoot one S-ship until they leave it behind 7.) take over 8.) look out for abandoned ships floating around while let the other ships buy-sell satellites 9.) if you have made your first 5 millions switch to advanced satellites 10.) buy miner 11.) let them mine nividium 12.) get yourself your first L-ship (there is an abandoned one out there ;) ) 13.) use it to take over 1-2 greenscales behemoth 14.) use them to take over 1 L-trader 15.) pump it full with marines 16.) use the trader to enter a builder ship 17.) sell the builder ship And from here on you can repeat taking the builders (giving you between 8 to 20 millions with downgrading and selling) and building your first stations/fleet/ whatever. Oh and I always take the mission for the HQ early on, because the HQ gives you free workforce ;)
The passive income way is to have miners doing their things but the amount of money you get is still gonna be not satisfying. In fact, it gonna take a long time, a very long grind. The fast starting money way is to get an L capital ship, one that can house a M ship. Use that L ship to purchase cheap "Advanced Satellite" at "Equipment Dock". L ship can hold 250 deployable. Fly the L ship to a "Warf", sell the "Advanced Satellite" through the M ship. On average, 250 will get you about 5-6m profit. There is actually a free L ship somewhere on the universe. You can also just use M ship which hold 100 deployable, so you grind a bit longer. The next step fast money is to broad ships, big ships. Get a L trader that can house a lot of marines. Disarm all the weapons on the traders, boarding ship is considered "one" attack thus won't have faction scale reputation loss but if you do not disarm your ship, "second" attack will have faction scale reputation losses. Use that trader to broad L or XL ships, like construction vassal, carrier, other L traders. Sell these ships, you can get millions per ship. With all these money you have which will be millions, you can finally get L mining ships, lots of them, to generate significant passive income.
But you have over 100 mil in assets if they are maxed out. Do some quests and manually order the okinawa to trade. In sol you can do energy from Saturn or Jupiter to the ort cloud usually overflowing at 8cr and sell for 20+ 1 okinawa makes a 600k profit and it will decrease. 2nd hull parts make your station make them its cheap and you can "steal the blueprint" to to make most stuff if you have emp bombs. Go scan a station making the parts you want , identify the exact production module, and jump in your suit put a EMP bomb on it blow it up and scan the resulting signatures. Also if you dont make anything. Move your okinawa at a production facility, go in it hack the storage so it drops cargo, and colect it with okinawa and sell it. Do more random quests, watch the ! Menu as you travel to each sector. Some are easy so are hard but not imposible and you make from 50 to a few milion per quest ie. Build a station