Advice needed for pirate hunting mission

Long story short, i accpted a mission to hunt a bunch of pirates, in a nearby system. Problem is, most of the pirates in the system are from another faction than the one i'm supposed to kill. I've tried dropping in on a bunch of random USS and hung out around the nav beacon, but all the pirates i found were from the wrong faction. Now in almost 2 hours i have killed 4/12 of the pirates, 1 was a target of another assassination mission i accepted, 1 was his guard, one interdicted me and one was found around a station. At this pace, i don't think i can complete the mission in time, so i'd like to ask if anyone has any secret tips for these kind of missions?
 
Get yourself some Modular Terminals, or Rubber Hoses, or Nanofabric Insulators - those commodities we don't currently need for Engineers and fly around with those in your hold. That stuff is pirate bait, and brings them out of the woodwork.

You can also try looking in RES points in that same system, if there are any.
 

Philip Coutts

Volunteer Moderator
I've had this issue as well but what I found was a lot of the mission targets were actually hanging around in supercruise. What I ended up doing was interdicting them in supercruise and getting the kills that way.
 
Try scanning the Nav Beacon in the system... it may give you a mission update. Basically more specific info on the location of the specified pirates.
 
It's been a long time since I tried one of those missions and I had the same problems. Your best bet apart from pirate bait is to interdict them. I saw plenty of the right faction in supercruise but I didn't have the right equipment with me.
 
Thanks for the answers. No RES point here, otherwise i obv would be there. Other than that, i've been hanging around in supercruise and interdicting those i found, but it's very scarce with them, i found like 3 or so in an hour
 
Thanks for the answers. No RES point here, otherwise i obv would be there. Other than that, i've been hanging around in supercruise and interdicting those i found, but it's very scarce with them, i found like 3 or so in an hour

Pirate bait, I'm tellin' ya.
It's like walking through a Beverly Hills spa with a hand full of credit cards....
 
If you had a mission like this, the game used to spawn ships of the target type frequently in system... unfortunately the "Mission Target" allocation was always booched, so on a "Hunt Pirates" mission, only the lead pirate of a wing would count as a target, or in a "Hunt Traders" mission, the actual cargo ship wasn't a target, but all the escorts were.

I have no idea why instead of fixing this, FD just removed it.

Also, the current implementation where you have targets needing to be faction specific adds another layer of RNG that makes these missions a pain.
 
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As much as i wanted to use pirate bait,there simply isn't space for that in my FDL.
Jujst after i replied here, i pulled one out of supercruise and somehow got another additional 4 of them out, which made for an easy finisher to the mission, lol.
 
Having some cargo helps being interdicted. Also, USS with weapons fire detected is a good place to check. Asteroid belts sometimes. But yeah, most of the time, the pirate faction you have to hunt is suspiciously "low profile".
 
In my experience, those types of missions usually tell you roughly when and where the targets can be found.

Course, if you miss that window, I dunno what happens next.

I have a sneaking suspicion they actually work a bit like the "recovery" missions, whereby as long as you're in the right place your objective WILL appear sooner or later.
 
I took on 3 of these missions, thinking "yeah, I'll head to a RES, I'll be done in no time!"

An hour later and I'd only finished one of the missions, which was kill 6. The others were kill 20 and 24. Lol

They don't actually spawn in RES' very much usually. I found a load more targets in supercruise, but I seem to have this annoying Interdiction bug that means I just get dumped with the bounty hunters that's always chasing me, and not my target. :(
So that's two of those missions, and 7,000,000cr failed, because I won't be online now until Friday. And those missions will expire some time tomorrow afternoon.
 
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