It brings down your hull strength in combat to 70% of total strength and stops there. For exploration it's pretty useless to keep paying for it.
Balance Hourly Rates - Exploring needs a huge % Uplift on body values
- Thread starter Nutter
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It brings down your hull strength in combat to 70% of total strength and stops there. For exploration it's pretty useless to keep paying for it.
Trading can bring in a lot of cash, but you need a large investment in the first place, and also, the ability to switch off every part of your brain except the bit that works the throttle. It's boring and repetitive, but pays well once you've got the initial cash to get a Lakon.
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Any sort of combat has its risks, such as being blow up. There's also ammo and damage to account for, so it makes sense that there's profit to be made. That profit tends to be in line with the ship you're using. You're likely to earn money at a higher rate in a pimped out Viper than you are in a basic Eagle.
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I enjoyed exploring in my Sidewinder, especially as at the start of my pilot career, earning 5K was a big deal. It was also quite relaxing and fun, finding things by intuition and noticing pixel sized points of light that were moving against the background. It's also quite risk free as you're unlikely to encounter any bad guys.
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Of course, there is one major risk in exploring, and that's losing all your exploration data by getting destroyed. However, that's a risk in all other ventures as well. Get destroyed in trading, you lose your ship and your cargo. Get destroyed bounty hunting, you lose your ship and bounties.
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Any sort of combat has its risks, such as being blow up. There's also ammo and damage to account for, so it makes sense that there's profit to be made. That profit tends to be in line with the ship you're using. You're likely to earn money at a higher rate in a pimped out Viper than you are in a basic Eagle.
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I enjoyed exploring in my Sidewinder, especially as at the start of my pilot career, earning 5K was a big deal. It was also quite relaxing and fun, finding things by intuition and noticing pixel sized points of light that were moving against the background. It's also quite risk free as you're unlikely to encounter any bad guys.
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Of course, there is one major risk in exploring, and that's losing all your exploration data by getting destroyed. However, that's a risk in all other ventures as well. Get destroyed in trading, you lose your ship and your cargo. Get destroyed bounty hunting, you lose your ship and bounties.
Seems to me, most people are overly concerned about wear and tear. Doesn't matter at all for exploration. It's not really necessary for trading or mining.
I don't often bother with it for combat either, and due to all the overpowered shield cells the shields hardly ever break anyway.
I think it's likely it's an oversight on the maximum jump range of an Anaconda. IIRC you have to downsize on a lot of modules to push the range up to 40 LY and the Anaconda has more scope for weight saving by doing so than the Asp. In other words, maybe it wasn't intended you go exploring in 40 LY jumps.
Which may cost you a few hours at most, unless you fly without insurance. Imagine slamming into a dock when returning from an expedition to the galactic core, that's one or two weeks of work completely gone with nothing to show for it at all.
The difference being that all that exploration data have taken many, many hours to collect whereas one lost hold of cargo is recovered in an hour. For bounty hunting, you're mostly in inhabited space so have the ability to dock regularly to secure your earnings. Exploration does not quite offer that option.
It's not fair to quote "exploring" as having a low (40,000CR per hour) earning rate, then qualifying that as "proper" exploring...
...and implying that methods of earning higher credits per hour "aren't really exploring".
[edit]Apologies. With the thread merge, I've got totally confused as to who said what... or perhaps I'm just stupid.
Are you focusing on the money (credits per hour), or on the experience (ooh, aah)?
You need to decide.
From the original post, I assumed this was a "Show Me The Money!" focus. Moving the goalposts mid-thread will just confuse and frustrate participants in this discussion.
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No offense Nutter, but every time I see one of these threads, I can't help but think: "You don't take a luxury Winnebago to go exploring. You take a Jeep and a tent." Now, if you want to take a luxury Winnebago out to go exploring in style, that's fine. If you need an expensive ship to do the Elite: Dangerous equivalent of climbing mount Everest or reaching the south pole, that's also fine. But you shouldn't expect to make a profit while doing so.
I've read your guide. There's a lot of good information in there. But your ship designs aren't what I take to go exploring. I take a ship that can give me the range I need to jump without costing me a fortune to repair afterwards. An extra five light year range is not worth an extra 600,000 credits in repair bills. An extra 8 light years definitely isn't worth an extra 8 million credits of repairs. If there's a jump out there longer than 30 light years, I move on or find another route.
And then there's your general strategy, "Let's bring expensive survey equipment, just in case I might need it." The purpose of exploring isn't surveying. The purpose of exploring is to see what's out there. To get basic information about a place. You need to sort through a lot of silt when panning for gold, and it makes no sense to me what so ever to bring anything but a basic discovery scanner out into the black with you. You're just increasing your expenses and risk for little gain. 90% of what's out there is barely worth the time to scan it, but you have to sort through it anyways to find the good stuff. Granted I haven't gone deep into space like you have, but I have made two hour trips into the black, made about 20-30k each time, and found a couple of systems that were worth bringing the survey equipment to and make a 100k for half an hour's work. And my expenses were less than a 1000 credits since I don't bother repairing wear and tear for my battered little Jeep.
This strategy doesn't require expensive capitalization. You can get up to 12 ly out of a sidewinder for 15k, 15 ly for an extra 25k, and 18 ly for 30k more. By the time you can afford a detailed surface scanner, you've got a list of good candidates to use it on. You don't need to grind out 12 million credits trading in order to start exploring. All you need is a cheap ship, the best frame shift drive you can afford to lose, a fuel scoop, a basic discovery scanner, and a bit of wanderlust.
There is only one complaint I have so far about exploring, and that's there's only two things to do: find planets to discover via parallax, and scanning planets and stars. But I figure the good stuff will come with planetary landings and the ability to walk on the surface. But until then, I'll be gathering a list of planets worth setting foot on when the wanderlust strikes.
I've read your guide. There's a lot of good information in there. But your ship designs aren't what I take to go exploring. I take a ship that can give me the range I need to jump without costing me a fortune to repair afterwards. An extra five light year range is not worth an extra 600,000 credits in repair bills. An extra 8 light years definitely isn't worth an extra 8 million credits of repairs. If there's a jump out there longer than 30 light years, I move on or find another route.
And then there's your general strategy, "Let's bring expensive survey equipment, just in case I might need it." The purpose of exploring isn't surveying. The purpose of exploring is to see what's out there. To get basic information about a place. You need to sort through a lot of silt when panning for gold, and it makes no sense to me what so ever to bring anything but a basic discovery scanner out into the black with you. You're just increasing your expenses and risk for little gain. 90% of what's out there is barely worth the time to scan it, but you have to sort through it anyways to find the good stuff. Granted I haven't gone deep into space like you have, but I have made two hour trips into the black, made about 20-30k each time, and found a couple of systems that were worth bringing the survey equipment to and make a 100k for half an hour's work. And my expenses were less than a 1000 credits since I don't bother repairing wear and tear for my battered little Jeep.
This strategy doesn't require expensive capitalization. You can get up to 12 ly out of a sidewinder for 15k, 15 ly for an extra 25k, and 18 ly for 30k more. By the time you can afford a detailed surface scanner, you've got a list of good candidates to use it on. You don't need to grind out 12 million credits trading in order to start exploring. All you need is a cheap ship, the best frame shift drive you can afford to lose, a fuel scoop, a basic discovery scanner, and a bit of wanderlust.
There is only one complaint I have so far about exploring, and that's there's only two things to do: find planets to discover via parallax, and scanning planets and stars. But I figure the good stuff will come with planetary landings and the ability to walk on the surface. But until then, I'll be gathering a list of planets worth setting foot on when the wanderlust strikes.
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These threads got merged, the second was about the fact that the only ship able to get to the farthest reaches is a tricked out anacondabago.
If there was a 40 light year light jeep explorer the Asp would be redundant.
Why do they have to be the same or similar rates at all. Different jobs pay different amounts as in real life, do you campaign for equal pay across all jobs in real life, of course you don't.
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There is absolutely no reason that the various professions need to make the same amount of credits per hour of graft, play the game how you want and try them all or just stick to one you like and enjoy.
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The game is not all about making the most credits in any case, just because some people have to strive for a meaningless goal does not make it necessary or even a requirement for enjoyment.
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There is absolutely no reason that the various professions need to make the same amount of credits per hour of graft, play the game how you want and try them all or just stick to one you like and enjoy.
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The game is not all about making the most credits in any case, just because some people have to strive for a meaningless goal does not make it necessary or even a requirement for enjoyment.
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I think these numbers are skewed you'd have a list of "if you instance reset" and "if you don't" for max profits
If you reset
Trade: 10mil/hr
BH: 3mil/hr (double conda/cobra instance)
Mining: 1mil/hr (about 100k/reset platinum roid 50%)
Piracy: 250k-500k/hr
Exploration: 200k/hr (if your being as efficient as possible)
Smuggling: 100k/hr (rather summarise as half of nothing)
If you don't reset
Trade 10mil/hr
BH 200k-1mil/hr
Piracy 250k-500k/hr
Exploration 200k/hr
Mining 20k-300k/hr (you'd have to be seriously lucky to get 300k/hr)
Smuggling still functionally nothing
If you ask me exploration isn't the number thats out of whack here, i'll give you one guess which one is? I should point out these aren't fictitious numbers they are a combination of my personal data with some standard deviation for the fact there will be players better than I am. I try my best to be as efficient as possible in any activity I do so without some hidden knacks I don't know about I really doubt you could get too far away from these numbers, and if you did on an average they would fall back in the region again.
An interesting tidbit from crunching some numbers for this, if you removed rares from the game piracy proceeds would be reduced by 1/3 to 1/2 (comparison of rare price / average commodity price of anything actually traded + additional scoop time as you'd need more cargo) It could even dip below half depending on how good you are at scooping, what the people in your area are carrying and how much they are actually willing to part with.
Edit: I felt the need to seperate the lists as claims of 1mil/hr mining are ludicrous without instance resets, as are 3mil/hr BH averages unless you were lucky enough to just arrive in the best instance. The last BH extraction zone I went in only had sidewinders, i'd have been lucky to pull 100k/hr there.
If you reset
Trade: 10mil/hr
BH: 3mil/hr (double conda/cobra instance)
Mining: 1mil/hr (about 100k/reset platinum roid 50%)
Piracy: 250k-500k/hr
Exploration: 200k/hr (if your being as efficient as possible)
Smuggling: 100k/hr (rather summarise as half of nothing)
If you don't reset
Trade 10mil/hr
BH 200k-1mil/hr
Piracy 250k-500k/hr
Exploration 200k/hr
Mining 20k-300k/hr (you'd have to be seriously lucky to get 300k/hr)
Smuggling still functionally nothing
If you ask me exploration isn't the number thats out of whack here, i'll give you one guess which one is? I should point out these aren't fictitious numbers they are a combination of my personal data with some standard deviation for the fact there will be players better than I am. I try my best to be as efficient as possible in any activity I do so without some hidden knacks I don't know about I really doubt you could get too far away from these numbers, and if you did on an average they would fall back in the region again.
An interesting tidbit from crunching some numbers for this, if you removed rares from the game piracy proceeds would be reduced by 1/3 to 1/2 (comparison of rare price / average commodity price of anything actually traded + additional scoop time as you'd need more cargo) It could even dip below half depending on how good you are at scooping, what the people in your area are carrying and how much they are actually willing to part with.
Edit: I felt the need to seperate the lists as claims of 1mil/hr mining are ludicrous without instance resets, as are 3mil/hr BH averages unless you were lucky enough to just arrive in the best instance. The last BH extraction zone I went in only had sidewinders, i'd have been lucky to pull 100k/hr there.
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Imagine real life, where you are able to do what you love dearly: head out into the deep woods and gather data on new species. It pays $0.10 per hour and you have to pay it out of pocket. OR you can go work at Mc Donalds and earn $5000 per hour flipping burgers. We're not asking for all professions to make the same, just to make it actually worthwhile!
Sorry the the thread merge has done it's job of completely confusing the WHOLE topic!
The question was....
FD, is paying to explore by design?
I explore by choosing a set of interesting systems and plan a route (as best I can) turns out some places I want to visit are only reachable with a Anaconda. Result being a trip to that system will cost me 10 million credit.
If that is intended then I need to start trading, if it not intended then fine, I'll carry on exploring until the 'solution'
Threre
If someone tells us that the Anaconda is supposed to be the best explorer ship, than that's that.
Therefore the question for the intention of the hourly rates and the jump ranges in the OP.
And, basically, all exploration is currently more a hobby than a profession, if only because of opportunity costs. Do you buy an Advanced Discovery Scanner for your long range Cobra, or a Type 6? Spend 10 hours with both, and one person will end up with something like a million credits, and the other with something like 10 million credits. And if one gets killed after 10 hours, he ends up with 9 million, and the other with nothing.
If it is supposed to be that way... o.k.
But one can ask and try to get an answer as to which role Exploration is playing in Frontier's master plan, can't one?
Thank you Flin
It was a Question - The reason I raised it was, I speculated a LONG time ago in early beta that exploring would be an expensive Hobby and not a source of income.
Just wanted confirmation.
They don't need to do the same. But as it is right now, you can either play the game right, then you trade. Or you can play the game wrong, then you do all other stuff.
Because that is what the data says.
It's not that exploring is mighty entertaining or oh so varied gameplay. It's neither exceptionally fun, nor exceptionally risk free. To have a good exploring ship, you need as much investment as for a good trading ship (Advanced Discovery Scanner costs more than Lakon Type 6).
And this isn't real life, this is a game, where the Designer can promote things he wants to see in his game by giving away virtual gimmicks, usually in the form of credits.
Now which other virtual gimmicks do the Explorers get?
BH and pirates get the adrenalin of the battle, and the overall well thought out mechanics for scanning (cargo, kill warrants, frameshift wakes) or other action (targeting subsystems; firing defensive abilities like shield cells, chaffs, ECM; firing a Hatch breaker). They get bounties, stolen goods and smuggling, and paying off fines.
Miners get a refinery and the scooping minigame.
Explorers get... a better discovery scanner that does the same as the old scanner but actually takes away the "find the star" minigame.
They get a Detailed surface scanner that does... nothing. Apart from credits.
So basically Explorers are the bottom of the food chain in terms of
- credits
- game mechanics
- fun
The whole challenge comes down to "is it blue on the galaxy map?" and "does it look like a high metal / metallic / earthlike / water planet on the system map".
And actually you could just remove exploring from the game in it's current state, and it wouldn't be a big loss. (I know some people enjoy it. I enjoyed it, but haven't actually done it for weeks, because... *yawn* might as well iron a few shirts.)
Deleted member 38366
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I had high hopes for exploration and actually wanted to go and explore. But now I can't be bothered. Because in the end, what do I get? Nothing. Except for "Oh, i have been to some random place 3.000 ly away and saw what everyone else has already seen on youtube." It's not even fun.
Give me
- life scanners
- mineral scanners
- Probe analyzers to analyse mining probes
- radiation scanners
- Detailed Surface Scanner drone hangars of size 6...
Whatever. Just let me do more then "press button. Fly close to stuff and aim at it without doing anything".
EDIT: Or give me some credits that make me endure the tediousness.
EDIT2: A pirate gets more scanners than an Explorer. So do Bounty Hunters.
A miner gets a distinct mechanic he needs to do his profession.
Explorers get nothing. Not even missions.
400 billion stars of nothing.
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