Overview
A map of Sol showing factions, and a trader guide showing pricing on different planets.
Sol System Map
Ships
There are currently five ships in the game. Note that all the components of the ship will jack the price up considerably, and there may be a bit of variance built in too.
The Lynx is a good starter ship. Cheap and useful.
The Ocelot is a hot rod – it’s smaller than the Lynx with an extra engine, so you get better handling with it. Good for taxiing people when you don’t care about guns or cargo space.
The Cougar is a nice upgrade over the Lynx. It seems to be designed as a warship with all those guns, but also has more cargo so it’s pretty much the best all-round ship. Also an amazing mining ship due to the way mining works.
The Tiger and Big Tiger are cargo ships, capable of hauling lots of cargo. But you will need good engines to maneuver well, which usually isn’t possible with rented ships. I advise looking for a ship with engines that have slightly better turning and thrust when you rent, it will make flying far easier.
The equipment in the game is limited – 4 different equipment items. The best ones come from roaming engineers with legendary intelligence.
You have one type of gun – bolt guns – and different randomly generated variations which vary on 3 things. Rate of fire, bolt size (which seems to indicate damage), and muzzle velocity. Legendary bolt guns are so far beyond the basic ones it’s not even a contest – they fire about 15x faster, the bullets travel way faster, and they deal more damage per hit.
You have one type of engine varying by the turning, max speed, and acceleration.
You have one type of hyper drive, which doesn’t seem to actually be different despite them coming in different qualities for the same price.
And you have the passenger cabin, which varies on price but I haven’t noticed a difference between them yet.
Making Money
Money isn’t the goal of this game (unless it’s your characters goal), but it can come in handy to own a ship for completing your goals. I’ll briefly touch on ways to make money.
Mining is simply shooting asteroids and flying over the loot to pick it up. The more expensive resources get more and more difficult to mine. The basic guns are painfully slow at mining, so I wouldn’t recommend mining the more valuable resources until you have higher end guns with a faster fire rate.
On the other hand, legendary guns shoot and mine way faster. You can mine fast in the Cougar ship by putting 6 powerful guns on it (although first you need the huge chunk of money to buy the 6 powerful guns, at which point you’re rich enough to fulfill your life goal anyway…).
Good places to mine early on:
Old Federation:
Copper around Mars – Mars has a good price for copper, and it’s usually present there. And copper isn’t too hard to mine with starting guns.
Frontier Space:
Water around Vesta or Ceres – both of these planets have good water prices, and water is the fastest thing to mine by far. You’ll just have to do a lot of back and forth flying to unload it.
New Order:
No asteroids in New Order space, so you have to go into Frontier space. If you don’t mind traveling a bit you can mine Titanium near Cybele and haul it back to Ganymede for a hefty profit. It’s slow to mine, but high value.
Alternatively, Gold is high value on Io and can often be found near Cybele too. Just be prepared for a lot of shooting that darn asteroid before the gold shows up.
Outer Alliance:
Water around Ariel if the asteroids are present. Ice mining can bring in a nice profit out here with the high price of water – it’s worth nearly twice as much as copper or aluminum out here.
This part of the guide is woefully underdeveloped, because I haven’t done enough missions to know about them.
You can get well paying missions hauling passengers around, as well as some basic delivery missions that pay a few hundred here and there. Other missions I believe you need to either have a good relationship with someone important or be in a job.
Buy low, sell high. Repeat. The easiest and earliest way to make good money, but not the most interesting. The cheapest ships can carry 2 cargo, and hauling expensive goods like gold on a good route can quickly let you afford to buy a Cougar for more cargo capacity. See the trading section for trade route info.
Or you can just go the space pirate route, and kill people for their cargo. Just remember – you can only pick up their components if you have the component space on their ship. Having extra internal slots for this is a good idea, so a Cougar is a good ship for this. It also has the cargo capacity to hold more loot. Also make sure your engine’s top speed is high enough to catch your target AND the loot once you destroy them – watching your loot fly off with no hope of catching it in your clunker ship isn’t much fun.
Right now the AI all seem to be flying pretty terrible ships, so the risk of being destroyed is pretty low even in a cheap ship of your own. It will make people mad at you for killing their friends and family, though.
Trading Guide
Below is a table of all the planets and their respective trade good prices, pulled directly from the game files. Prices are multiples of the below values, plus a random element of some kind:
Note that Cybele has no market, and thus a route from Io to Cybele isn’t possible. You can still provide a few goods to the businesses there, but can’t make purchases.
Example single jump trade routes:
Outer Alliance:
Ariel <-> Neptune
Buy gold at Ariel, buy diamonds or elysium at Neptune.
New Order:
Io <-> Ganymede
Buy nickel at Io, buy medicine at Ganymede
Old Federation
Vesta/Ceres <-> Mars
Buy nickel, titanium, or elysium at Vesta or Ceres, buy food at Mars
You may also notice some planets have different prices between cities on the same planet (in the instances where it has a letter along with multiple prices, the letter is the first letter of the city name with that price). In that case you could simply buy and resell on the same planet if you wanted to. And multiple jumps can get you better prices in some cases, it just depends how far you want to fly.
-Update 8/15/16-
Gold prices updated to new values. Gold trading is significantly less profitable now across the board. The old Callisto <-> Io gold route is no longer that profitable, so I changed it. Optimal goods between Vesta/Ceres and Mars also changed due to gold price change.