Can you keep a secret? [...] The secret you need to keep is whatever great place YOU ultimately find! That's the REAL secret!
I started playing a little over a year ago, and my focus was simply on making credits. I avoided all the "questionable" methods and systems (Mission stacking/Mode flipping, Sothis/Ceos, Rhea, Quince, 17 Draconis*, etc), and have amassed a bit over 5 billion in assets (53 ships, fully outfitted, fully engineered) and over a billion credits in actual credits.
The "secret" to my success? There is no secret, I just did things. I flew missions, hauled rare goods, mined ores, blew up bad guys, participate in CG's, even scavenged planets for lost cargo - I did it all, and I did a lot of it. I still do it when I want to buy something new.
Let's look at a typical session for me, when I'm out to make credits:
Log in.
Check the mission board at the system I'm in.
Check the Community Goals.
If there's a CG somewhere near me (aka not Colonia), I'll fly out there, participate for a while (usually bounty hunting, sometimes hauling) until I get into the top 10%. Then I look at the local mission board.
If there are good paying missions, I'll take them.
I'll check the Passenger board.
If there are good paying passenger missions, I'll take them.
If there are not, I'll leave for a system where I have Allied Status with at least one or more faction.
These systems always offer better paying missions than systems where I have lower status.
Then I run missions, haul passengers - just play the game.
I'll take mission wrinkles if they pay well enough.
I'll stop to pick up a couple tons of tee-shirts for passenger who ask, because they're paying me.
I might even sell them off as slaves to another faction, if the money is right.
And at the end of the evening, I'm usually up quite a bit of credits.
And by Thursday, when the CG comes to an end, if it didn't end sooner, I'll have some extra credits to pick up somewhere.
And then it's rinse and repeat and profit.
The real "secret" is two-fold:
1. Don't get blown up. Rebuys cost, and can cost quite a bit. This is profit lost.
2. Don't fail/abandon missions. This is profits lost.
That's really all there is to make more credits than you know what to do with.
That said, there are plenty of ways to not just maximize profits, but to maximize profits-per-hour. To be honest, it's not really much fun. It feels like a lot of work, because it is a lot of work. You'll burn out fast doing it, and when you're sitting there on a pile of 2 billion credits and can't muster the moxie to go buy an Anaconda, Cutter or Corvette because you just spent 60 hours making a fortune... yeah, you're feeling burned out. So don't. Don't burn yourself out chasing credits.
These days, I spend most of my time running Site-Seeing passenger missions, and I have a method for it as well.
I usually fly an Orca, and I have 4 cabins - one of each class. It looks a bit like this:
https://coriolis.io/outfit/orca?cod...18SQ==.Aw18SQ==..EweloBhBmSQUwIYHMA28QgIwV0A=
I'll load up on passengers wanting to see different places, and then The Method begins.
I look at the Galaxy map to see where these places are, and will start with whichever is closest to where I am, fly out there, scan whatever tourist beacon there is, and then it's back to the Galaxy map again. Once more, I see which destination is closest to where I am, and that's where we go. Rinse and repeat, until everybody has seen every place they want to see.
Payouts? These missions are usually in the range of 5-12m credits each, so 20-48 million credits per shipload of passengers shuttled around. Plus any extras from taking out enemies, picking up trinkets, or making that side trip to a CZ to sit and watch ships blow each other up for 5 minutes. Usually I make around 40 million per trip like this.
But that's not all - many times these trips will have stops to visit Ice Geysers, Fumerols, Lava Spouts or other volcanic features. These are important to keep note of - as they often contain deposits of valuable materials as well. Great to return to at a later time and harvest valuable materials. And ventures into never-before-visited systems always net Cartographic Data as well, which is just some sprinkles on top of the icing of a delicious and honest credit-cake.
Without any tremendous effort, I was able to make a bit over 100m credits in 35 hours doing nothing but this. I also learned some interesting in-game lore, and found a couple of spots with some really nice cargo caches of extremely valuable Commodities (Platinum, Palladium, and Taafeitie (or however it's spelt)) - usually numbering around 20 canisters in total, all legal salvage.
tl;tc;du? Do stuff. The credits will come.
*I have been to 17 Draconis, back when it was in a perpetual state of civil war. I have blown up ships in CZ's there as well, but it was as an alternative to mission-running to make rank, not as a credit mill, and even then I didn't need to stack missions and board-flip, just take what was available, complete and repeat.. wound up with a pinched nerve in my thumb that took a week to work itself out for my trouble lol
