Overview
Overview of game play mechanics and a walkthrough on getting started with profitable trading.
Intro
There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about needing to cheat in the beginning and that just is not the case. Key thing to understand that is that although this is largely a sandbox game and you could very well never trade a single item, the whole economy of the game revolves around trade.
If you have never played before, or have never successfully managed to get it going in the game – this is a brief synopsis of things you can do to get going.
This should get anyone going with a profitable system. You will benefit from exploring, trying new things and taking advantage of steals and deals when and if you find them. Every game is different. GOD (yes, the actual name of the in-game Metadata processor) might kill some important factories in the first week of the game, or you may run into the Paranid destroying half the facotires in Home of Light – which has happened in 3-4 of my games over the years.
There are many ways of getting going. This is just one system that will work.
I do not cover derelict ships or trading illegal goods because they don’t fit in with helping the game thrive.
Character Selection
Select the Humble Merchant “start”. This will start you in Heron’s Nebula, give you 2 ships: a Mercury and a Discoverer as well as about 20k credits to start trading with immediately.
The different starting characters are simply starting conditions. You never actually view yourself at any point in the game so the avatar you see in the menu is virtually meaningless. There are quite a few additional starts available to be unlocked after you reach certain milestones; either in combat/trade rank, racial reputation or story progress.
Some of these can be quite challenging and other less so. Humble Merchant is a good, generic start to the game.
Initial Trading and Travel Walkthrough
Right off the bat:
Start trading ore. There are 2 ore mines and 1 silicon mine in Heron’s Nebula. Avoid the Silicon mine like the plague (for now) and concentrate on the ore. Both of these mines should be near full to start.. low end price on ore is 50cr/unit. You can sell this for as high as 185cr/unit at a starved factory. You can hold a bit over 300 units of ore and a in a best case scenario you can pull in around 35k per load.
There are only 1 or 2 factories in Heron’s Nebula that consume ore, periodically you can find a quick trade in sector but it will not be common. Target the factory and hit “U”, this will bring up the remote trade window and you can see what the stock levels look like before landing.
Fly through the south gate to Argon Prime and fly around to discover the factories here. Right near the gate is a missile factory that is typically in need of ore. Key factory to discover here is the Advanced Satelite Factory near the East gate. You will want to keep this factory working for you. Hit “R” to bring up your property, select your Discoverer and issue it a remote command to dock at the Equipment Dock in Argon Prime.
Fly through the East gate to The Wall. Pick up the three Solar Power Plants on your sector map, dock at the one selling the cheapest power and get a full load.
Go back to Argon Prime and find the best place to sell your energy cells. Always give preference to the Satellite factory and keep in mind you’ll be going back and forth between Herron’s Nebule and The Wall for a while. Going to the far side of the sector and back for an extra could K of profit may not be worth your time. Keep an eye on the other factories in the sector.
Typically, when you are approaching an unknown station you can see it from quite a distance before you actually got a lock on. During your approach, hit “T”, this will change your HUD to active targeting mode and you can get a lock on from further out. This is troublesome in some sectors with many floating objects, such as the floating ore deposits in the Ore Belt.
Depending on your luck, the Ore supply should hold up for 3-5 trade runs before your returns start dimishing due to increasing cost.
Head through the north gate of Heron’s Nebula to discover Power Circle. There are a few more Solar Power Plants here as well as an Ore mine or two. Unfortunately, there aren’t many quick trade opportunities here. Energy Cells are good for extra money on a return trip or keeping a factory up and running, but they are not good for a long term profit.
Head through the south gate to Home of Light. Keep flying to the south gate to discover the Ore Belt sector. The Ore Belt is rather large, what you are looking for here is to “ID” the 2-4 mines that may be here. It varies from game to game and “GOD” isn’t kind to the Ore mines here. GOD is the behind the scenes system that processes the game’s meta data. It will periodically close unprofitable factories and open new ones.
Once your game matures, you will typically find that Ore is the single most under traded commodity in the game. Energy Cells is the crowning champ in the beginning but the NPCs get this under control eventually. Most energy traders are in extremely slow super tankers and it takes time for that situation to come under control.
What’s next? Things to buy as your cashflow allows
- Max out your engine tuning on the mercury – This will increase your max speed. While it is not earth shattering, it is a significant improvement. Time is money and speed will help you dock quicker than that super tanker that’s trying to buy the same product as you.
- Buy a jump drive from Terracorp in Home of Light – This is absolutely essential and will be a game changing moment. As long as you keep a decent amount of energy in your hold to power the jump drive, most trades will only be 1 sector away.
- Buy Advanced Satellites and deploy them in your trading sectors – for most sectors, coordinates of 0,0,-10k will work fine – bring up your frieght and eject 1 satellite from your frieght. Advanced Satellites have greater range than the standard Navigation Satellite. Satellites allow you to remotely view sectors and monitor what is going on there. Very handy when you are looking for a good place to sell a load of cargo.
- Fly out ot Legend’s Home to OTAS HQ and buy a Docking Computer – This module will automatically dock your ship when you send a docking request within 5k of the docking clamps. This is an absolute godsend, and essential when you want to pick up some of the more lucrative passenger transport missions. This is a dangerous journey, but less frustrating that trying to raise your reputation with the Paranid initially. Gate sequence from Argon Prime E,S,E,S,E,S,E,E,E,E,S You could use the Discoverer for this journey, however the Discoverer will not be able to store enough energy to jump back.
- Max out the cargo hold and engine tuning on the Discoverer – Buy the Trade Command Software packages and set it to a manual trade run for Energy to any factory of your choice. This is a very fast ship and while the hold is small, even externded, it can make money for you instead of sitting in a dock somewhere.
- Do NOT expand the cargo hold of the Mercury at this time. It is simply too expensive.The total cost for the 1000 additional cargo units is around 500k credits. While useful, this is quite time consuming to have it pay for itself and there are better things to do with your money.
- Keep an eye out for ships for sale. The most important being an Express. Once you have a jump drive and the docking computer, you can realistically take Passenger transport missions and start pulling in a lot of credits very quickly.
Factories
Factories are actually fairly complex and I will only cover a basic starting scenario. If you read most guides online you would end up being of the impression that they are giant ATM machines waiting for you to take the money. This is not the case.
When you experiment with setting up a factory, I would recommend not purchasing anything unless you will have 2x the cost of the factory in cash reserves. So, in other words – if a factory costs 100k credits, don’t buy one until you have 300k. In addition, getting set up with your Jumpdrive and Docking computer is far more important – do that first.
Start with a Medium-sized, botton tier resource producer. Examples : Plankton, Wheat, Scruffin Fruits, Teladianium
All station components are only capable of being hauled in a TL-class vessel. These are extremely expensive. Every sector with a Shipyard that sells factory class components will have a TL available to hire.
I would recommend a Plankton farm in a sector with Cattle ranches. Why? You are in Argon space and there is a good bit of Wheat available. Kingdom’s End – which is a Boron core sector with a Shipyard – is very close by. Medium Plankton factories are available here and a decent sector to put one in is Cloudbase Northwest – just two gates to the south.
The worst part about this sector is initially tracking down the Boron Orca to hire it. Kingdom’s End is quite large, despite initial appearances and having the gates so close together -the factories are quite spread out. The Orca can be close or out past the furthest factories.
Once located, target the ship – hit “C” to open communications, talk to the captain and hire the vessel. The comms channel is how you will tell your hired vessel what to do, first of which will be to tell it to dock at the Shipyard.
When waiting for the Orca to dock I would advise that you leave the sector. While you are in sector the ship has to avoid all obstacles and actually navigate. When out of sector (OOS), the movement and docking is handled by the meta game and will happen considerably faster. Satellites can help here and allow you to monitor the progress.
Once the ship is docked, you now have the ability to purchase the factory components and load them on to the TL. Later, when setting up complexes or multiple factories – you can load more than one component at a time. Each TL has its own max cargo and you can fill it like any other ware… it is just that factory parts are much larger.
Once purchased, communicate with your hired ship and instruct them to travel to the destination sector. Again, not being in the same sector as the travelling Orca is ideal. Once arrived, communicate again and tell them to drop your cargo. You will then be tasked with posistioning your new factory on the sector map. Keep it convenient, yet out of the main traffic lanes. Remember you can hit the Insert key on your keyboard to switch view to the Z-plane to move it up and down vertically.
You will need to get your factory initially stocked with Enegy Cells, and very likely for the mid-term going forward. The NPC traders are looking for good deals too, so unless you set your buy price on energy to 20 no one will prioritize you for a delivery. In any event, this move would make no business sense at all.
Medium factories of this type produce product on a 1:1 ratio. Each production cycle consumes 30 energy and produces 30 plankton. Essentially, each unit of plankton costs one unit of energy. If you are able to buy your energy at the cheapest possible price of 12 and sell for the max price on Plankton to a Cattle ranch – your return on each unit is 10.
NPC traders do not trade secondary resources, so if you go with this example – the trading is all on you. The only time you will see a trader docking to buy your plankton will be if you set your sell price very low and rarely you will see a Boron food transporter diverting to get a deal. This isn’t necessary at all, so keep your buy price of Energy to 12-14 and your sell price of Plankton to 20. Now, no NPCs will ever have reason to dock here.
This is a good use for the Discoverer and any other small, fast ship you may’ve picked up along the way. Without putting out 100’s of thousands outfitting a mercury to handle the trading you can use several small, fast ships. Simply set their home to the factory and sell for best price. The factory option for sell price will apply here as well as range. If you don’t want them to leave the sector – set the range to zero; never want them to sit idle, set the sell price to 20. The max price on Plankton is 22 and since their holds are small their sales will not fill the stores on the cattle ranches fast enough to drop the buy price by more than 1 or 2 over time.
Multiple small and fast ships will keep your surpluses in check. When you restock your energy, simply pick up a large load in the Mercury and sell to a cattle ranch in another sector – such as Power Circle or The Wall.
You will not get rich any time soon, but you will learn more about how factories work and get a good understanding how long they take to pay themselves off.
Alternatively – you can always go with an old standby, which is a Wheat farm next to the 2 Space Fuel refineries in Heron’s Nebula. Wheat farms are fine, but again – you are in Argon space with many Wheat farms. There is competition for Wheat prices and you will rarely achieve max margins.
Buyer Beware!
Trades to be wary of:
- Silicon : These mines tend to fill up quickly and sit idle for long stretches. There just are not many factories that need silicon and you have to be careful about buying it and knowing you can dump it FAST.
- Warheads : Another tempting buy. These tend to get backed up on the production side as well. Problem is, the Mercury actually holds quite a bit more than you can sell at one factory. If you arent careful, you may end up with about 200 units sitting in your hold and looking for a place to sell them. There are a couple of Argon trading docks that will take them, but not many.
- Missiles : Some missiles can be sold indefinitely to Equipment Docks and yes this is considered to be a bug. However some can’t be sold anywhere or only in very small quantities.
- Quantum Tubes : very expensive item, high returns.. similar to Silicon, very small market