Elite Dangerous Money Making in 2024

[Kira Goto]

Did them last night, this is definitely not what happened in 100% of the cases.

Shooting one will flag all as Hostile on scanner, but only the ones you hit will attack you still.
The fact they're "Master" level suggests you're taking a different sort of mission... Threat 3 should be expert or competent and below.

I know what you describe can happen with other templates, so it still sounds like you're not taking the general pirate massacres... maybe a "massacre deserters" or other stateful one?

There are some threat 4 pirate massacres that will drop you into a debris field, and a bunch of them that quickly make their intent of all opening up at the same time on you clear(in the chat box). And they absolutely do.

The mission itself is marked as threat 4, possibly a wing massacre, not quite sure any more. Not every station/system might offer them, too. I find these quite fun to take a Corvette(or possibly other large ships of the type) into, as it actually provides a decent challenge instead of being an utter stomping experience.

What goes into spawning these instead of the ‘regular’ massacres, I can’t say for sure. Or if they have a higher difficulty variant than the threat 4.

 

[Schmack]

Aruagea has several different PA levels available right now.

 

[Jmanis]

There are some threat 4 pirate massacres that will drop you into a debris field, and a bunch of them that quickly make their intent of all opening up at the same time on you clear(in the chat box). And they absolutely do.

The mission itself is marked as threat 4, possibly a wing massacre, not quite sure any more. Not every station/system might offer them, too. I find these quite fun to take a Corvette(or possibly other large ships of the type) into, as it actually provides a decent challenge instead of being an utter stomping experience.

What goes into spawning these instead of the ‘regular’ massacres, I can’t say for sure. Or if they have a higher difficulty variant than the threat 4.

Yeah that sounds like a wing mission Threat 4.

 

[Shurimal]

The fact they're "Master" level suggests you're taking a different sort of mission... Threat 3 should be expert or competent and below.

I know what you describe can happen with other templates, so it still sounds like you're not taking the general pirate massacres... maybe a "massacre deserters" or other stateful one?

Definitely taking solo pirate massacre missions, not any other mission type. Maybe it's the fact that I have bottomed out my reputation with that one pirate faction next door to my home system, IDK.

 

[Jmanis]

Definitely taking solo pirate massacre missions, not any other mission type. Maybe it's the fact that I have bottomed out my reputation with that one pirate faction next door to my home system, IDK.

Hostile rep usually only affects interactions with police & military vessels, not criminal or .

The only thing I can think of is that you've taken one that isn't one of the general massacre templates, and is a "Massacre Deserters" or some other stateful/government template. If you still have them, a screeny would help a lot. This is my usual fare:

...As opposed to these:

 

[Kayvan]

Yeah I've had those ambush situations when I was relatively new to the game ... Honestly haven't dropped into a pirate mission signal since.

They are marked as relatively low threat - you drop in and at first there's only a single neutral pirate ship on the scanner - as you approach a bunch of hostiles spawn directly on your arx. That happened to me a couple of times, then I learned my lesson not to drop in on mission signals anymore but farm that kind of mission in RES.

 

[Jmanis]

Yeah I've had those ambush situations when I was relatively new to the game ... Honestly haven't dropped into a pirate mission signal since.

They are marked as relatively low threat - you drop in and at first there's only a single neutral pirate ship on the scanner - as you approach a bunch of hostiles spawn directly on your arx. That happened to me a couple of times, then I learned my lesson not to drop in on mission signals anymore but farm that kind of mission in RES.

Yep. That's a wing mission.

 

[Hellrider]

You can definitely just do some low ground CZs (at 10 minute each) for 6M. You can't even lose bonds if you die. Do you want to start with a cobra or a conda? The will conda take a bit longer and will be a bit crap but you can say you've got the end game ship already.

Or do exobiology, where he can earn 20m by touching grass in his 100k suit in 100k ship.

*Still a little meh’d at the extremely high payouts provided by invasion AXCZs, because it went from ‘Actually had to work for the money’ to ‘You can spend a few hours a day peppering Cyclops with AX multis and get half a billion in funds’. But I like doing those in open rather than being all by myself in solo play.

Wouldnt say, that it is meh'd, but maybe because I look at payouts/prices of gear, not pure gains. Above some point additional credits makes no difference.
Hundreds millions or billion in hour- for me it isn't big difference, since for 200, maybe 300 millions I can outfit one of 90% of ships in game.
Or for much less, if cargo/mining/explo without A rated afmu/scoop builds.

 

[Globusdiablo]

Made a little guide.

Credit/hour guesstimates are my own. YMMV.

Nice video.

 

[Jmanis]

Wouldnt say, that it is meh'd, but maybe because I look at payouts/prices of gear, not pure gains. Above some point additional credits makes no difference.
Hundreds millions or billion in hour- for me it isn't big difference, since for 200, maybe 300 millions I can outfit one of 90% of ships in game.
Or for much less, if cargo/mining/explo without A rated afmu/scoop builds.

I think for me, it's about what the target is.

I'd say 90% of my play has never been for credits, and (historically) was always about influence for factions[1], or the material option. A very small amount of it has been getting credits. The funny thing being (and how you know things are totally out of balance with the game's economy), you can broadly categorise activities into two things:

• Activities that are good at making credits; and
• Activities that are good at literally anything else

Want to earn credits? Massacre stacking ✓
Want to earn influence? Massacre stacking ✘
Want to earn credits? Salvage mission stacking ✘
Want to earn influence/materials/rep? Salvage mission stacking ✓

Of course, that's not exhaustive, and there are some exceptions, but they're few and far between.

It's why I get so in a knot about game balance. There's some really fun and involved activities out there, that simply aren't worth doing for anything, other than saying "you did it", which is pretty big fail of game design.

 

[Kayvan]

Yeah, that's really a bit of a shame.
Will you believe that last night I did my absolute first Megaship Scan mission, in over 3 years that I've been playing this game?
There is also a bunch of other mission types that I never tried, or tried only once, had no idea what to do, failed the mission, never tried again.

That's also a big fail of the game -- that many mission types leave you completely in the dark what you're in for. For instance, once I took some planetary scan mission or something, I thought nothing of it, flew to the installation in question - and floop I had a bounty on my head and everything started shooting at me. I still don't know what I was supposed to do there, or how I could have avoided that bounty.

I mean on the one hand it's nice that there's so much optional content, and you don't get forced to do stuff you don't want to, but you can get some variety if you do. Well, some engineers require certain things, but that's usually not a big deal and it actually helps exploring some more of the game's functions.
Anyway, on the other hand there really should be more in-game pointers on how to do certain missions. As it is, you can only try to find such information on the interwebs, and even then many videos etc take too many things for granted.

Also, I'm a bit on the fence how I feel about the (lacking) lucrativeness of illegal activities. Again, on the one hand it's nice that you don't get forced to engage in illegal activities to earn serious money. On the other hand, some subterfuge can be fun and then it's weird that you get paid worse for taking risks than for playing it safe.

 

[Jmanis]

Also, I'm a bit on the fence how I feel about the (lacking) lucrativeness of illegal activities. Again, on the one hand it's nice that you don't get forced to engage in illegal activities to earn serious money. On the other hand, some subterfuge can be fun and then it's weird that you get paid worse for taking risks than for playing it safe.

Illegal activities are all but broken, basically. Their mission templates have been untouched for ages pending a "We'd rather make crime be more than just 'it pays better than lawful stuff' "... it's virtually impossible to stack criminal missions like you can with lawful ones, and any value-based payout in missions use the stolen (i.e debuffed) value compared to lawful missions[1], so they'll never pay more despite being higher risk.

And you can forget about pursuing any sort of antagonism towards a superpower a-la the FE2/FFE naval career paths. If I want to hurt factions belonging to a particular superpower, my best approach is to go beat up some pirates in a neighbouring system apparently; playing the Elite: Best Friends way will hurt your enemies far more than any targeted act that might hurt your reputation with them. It's so dumb that the reward of pursuing antagonism against a faction is to, essentially, be locked out of undertaking further antagonism... "Crime and Punishment" is simply "& Punishment"... bounties exist purely to be avoided, and Hostile rep is just a joke in it's current form.

People talk about "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime" but forget that underpinning crime is a significant, potentially long-term reward. The whole point of being locked up if I'm ever caught in a Federal system again and incurring a 1 billion credit debt, is meant to be because of that one time I raided the bank of Zaonce in a bold, day-long infiltration and wired a billion from Zak Rackham's account... not because I ganked some sap in an unshielded T9 carrying pamphlets for the princess.
I would gladly sign away my ability to ever dock at a Federal Starport, or be KOS in every Federal system, if it meant being able to make more money, materials or what-not by targeting Federal systems exclusively. For a game all about, dare i say, "blazing your own trail", the path of crime and antagonism certainly has nothing to be blazed.

Anyways, ugh, getting off topic. That whole section of the game is cooked.

[1] Explicitly, as an example, legal Delivery missions primarily use the value of goods to determine your reward.. so Reward = f(V), where f is the function and V is the value of the goods. Since criminal missions use the stolen value, it's basically just f(V*0.75) to represent the -25% debuff on goods value.

 

[Hellrider]

how I could have avoided that bounty.

you simply can't, it's illegal mission and I'm sure, that mission description has something like "interact with datalink", or hub.

Shame, that people ignore things, only because they don't see big shiny shiny reward like 20 millions, or because they failed once.
Example scanning megaships pay few millions just for doing 2/3 jumps (or 1 with good jump), and peacefull scanning datalink.
It is really so bad?

Actually, it reminded me my first docking at coriolis, when docking computer wasn't standard module.
I nearly runned out of time, because I couldn't find entrance XD
Approach "if I fail I'm not gonna try again" in game like elite could lead to very fast uninstall.

 

[St0rmFury]

you simply can't, it's illegal mission and I'm sure, that mission description has something like "interact with datalink", or hub.

Is it possible to avoid detection by going silent running?

 

[Jmanis]

you simply can't, it's illegal mission and I'm sure, that mission description has something like "interact with datalink", or hub.

Those ones actually don't note as being illegal, if I recall anyway (I rarely see those missions anymore... they used to be so common).

That said... silent running and moving quickly to get out the trespass zone (unlike in this video) will have you dodge any penalty.

Is it possible to avoid detection by going silent running?

Yes, see above.

Speed will ensure you don't get the trespass, but silent running will avoid the penalty associated with the scan.

EDIT: The same works with all megaship and non-dockable station assets.

 

[Kayvan]

you simply can't, it's illegal mission and I'm sure, that mission description has something like "interact with datalink", or hub.

It probably did. But how are you supposed to know that "interacting with datalink" is illegal? It would be different if it said something like "hack the datalink" or "steal data".

Also, to put a bounty on you it would make sense that they first need to know who you are. So I would expect that if you come in cold and they don't even detect you, let alone scan you, then I don't see how they would know who to put the bounty on.
Now ofc back then I did not run cold, but nowadays I would try that. But if it doesn't even help, and they just magically ID you, then I won't bother.

 

[metatheurgist]

A long time ago there were the occasional caches of gold lying around a planet, they'd be worth finding and picking up because gold was still worth something. Now, why bother, just laser mine painite or platinum. Just one less reason to explore planet surfaces.

 

[Jmanis]

you simply can't, it's illegal mission and I'm sure, that mission description has something like "interact with datalink", or hub.

Ah... yes.. it is now.

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

It probably did. But how are you supposed to know that "interacting with datalink" is illegal? It would be different if it said something like "hack the datalink" or "steal data".

When you target a terminal to be scanned, the info panel will say either "private" or "public". Public = legal, private = illegal.

 

[Jmanis]

A long time ago there were the occasional caches of gold lying around a planet, they'd be worth finding and picking up because gold was still worth something. Now, why bother, just laser mine painite or platinum. Just one less reason to explore planet surfaces.

Even then, the effort it took to find a cache that actually had that, and not just clothing and bootleg liquor. You didn't go out looking for this stuff deliberately... rather, if it happened to be there, you'd get it.

But yeah... even those big mining operations where there would be dozens of miners to blow apart... most would drop some cheap-as mineral... maybe you might get 1t platinum from them. I remember the excitement of finding one, before popping the miners and going "Oh... is that it... oh well."