Fleet carriers buying up steel from trailblazer carriers & selling with a huge markup
- Thread starter Dragsham
- Start date
I would have thought steel would be the worst way to get into scalping. There are stations out there with supplies in the millions.
They are catering to people who don't want to take that much time.
I noticed the Fleet Carriers over at Trailblazer Dream, I'm colonising a System ~90ly away, I assumed people were simply stocking them to move out into the black to make the effort less of an effort. Seems quite odd to have such a high mark-up, I'd have assumed it was to dissuade people from buying their inventory, but don't you need to specifically list items for sale?
You don't need the Trailblazers for Steel. You can still find good supplies of those in other starports, and after that you'd still have planetary refineries to source from. A quick search on Inara ordered by "best supply" shows at least 100 starports with over 1 million Steel available.
If anything, it shows that the Steel supply% per 10 minutes is in a healthy spot - meaning that even the highest suppliers can actually run out if pressured enough.
There are many commodities in this game which the supply% per 10 minutes will go over 700 tons (especially CMM composites as they increased the supply, then the supply rate, then the supply again but did not revert the supply rate buff. The Most requested colonization commodity doesn't even go slightly below its supply cap at the megaships because of this) - at that point it won't matter if that supply is 0, 1,000 or 1,000,000,000,000,000, every 10 minutes anyone docked there will be able to fill up due to how the market will only re-calculate at the 10th minute.
If anything, it shows that the Steel supply% per 10 minutes is in a healthy spot - meaning that even the highest suppliers can actually run out if pressured enough.
There are many commodities in this game which the supply% per 10 minutes will go over 700 tons (especially CMM composites as they increased the supply, then the supply rate, then the supply again but did not revert the supply rate buff. The Most requested colonization commodity doesn't even go slightly below its supply cap at the megaships because of this) - at that point it won't matter if that supply is 0, 1,000 or 1,000,000,000,000,000, every 10 minutes anyone docked there will be able to fill up due to how the market will only re-calculate at the 10th minute.
When I was building my Coriolis only one system had it in any quantity according to Inara. Every other station had it in quantities of less than 20.
Meanwhile, 2 systems near me have it in quantities >15,000...
I am just being a bit of a masochist* today as I started building an outpost at noon. I sourced a little locally, otherwise running back and forth to Trailblazer Faith. Only 3000 tons or 4 cutter loads left.
* Because I loaded carriers with enough to build the outpost, but when I got in system said, nah, I'll save those mats for later and do the red ball express instead.
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Speaking of being a masochist, in my first system, I had enough points to build an orbis. Notice I said "had"...
Did you set a minimum supply threshold on the search?
Insulating Membrane is a very low-supply good, so it needs a big Refinery to have more than that sort of amount even as baseline stock, and they're all generally towards the centre of the bubble. So if you just do a "search for nearest" and don't set a minimum, you get the literal nearest which will be a bunch of random outposts which have a few tonnes each.
If you set a minimum supply of 500t then hundreds of more distant but very plentiful options come up and have done any time I've tried that in the last month. It feels unlikely that it's been plentiful any time I've looked, but there was one time when it all ran out.
(And there are very few constructions which require more than 500t total)
That's probably something like the ship's ten-minute restock rate, then (so because of how market data synchronisation works, it's probably not possible to get much less than that on the market at all) - another reason that attempting to corner the Steel market is doomed (if that's even what anyone is doing in the first place) because even within that system no matter how much you personally buy you can't stop anyone else buying ~3000t an hour either.
Don't buy from them, let them horde it, there's plenty of stock out there, the two stations i use have plenty of stock, again folks just looking at 3rd party sites and not looking for themselves.
I have no shortage of any material at all.
O7
I didn't set a minimum, I did set a medium minimum pad size. I had been watching the supply for a few days and it was going steadily down. Plenty of supplies at carriers in the same system where there were previous adequate supplies. Plenty of sketchy behavior in those systems as well...
This is exactly what I do but with whatever commodity I happen to be in need of. So even though the Star has been running less than 1k of titanium, liquid oxygen and steel I've never had an issue getting a 728 ton load on a T9 by simply taking combined deliveries (and primarily focusing on the ones that have a tendency to run out until their demand is completed). Occasionally I'm able to pick up a full load of one commodity, and particularly in later hours of the EU night I see a few thousand in supply now and then too. It's really not that complicated. And - barring that I haven't checked surrounding player construction - it does appear to be the nearest station from which to obtain those materials without a carrier.
At least until I have set up some local refinery production - which I currently am rather than continuing to build a primary Orbis at ~25% completion (and three week left so I'm pretty much in the schedule if I want to use all four) - then I will just be using that*, not from the supply limitations but just because it will be significantly more convenient and/or faster at a single jump distance with under 200ls distance to the station. Of course I'll still have to source the CMMs from the Trailblazer because I won't be building a surface port so quickly... and it's no guarantee they would even offer those with the 3 commodities bug.
*Providing it offers the good stuff from the moment it is completed. Otherwise I am putting in a lot of effort to wait until Thursday - if not beyond - for the port to come online properly.
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That would be why you saw "shortages", then.
The maximum supply of Insulating Membrane, at a Refinery station with a population of a million, assuming no relevant BGS states, might be a couple of hundred tonnes. And refinery systems - especially on the fringes of the bubble - are low population where a million on a single station is likely on the high side.
Quite a few of those stations showing 50t of IM might have literally been at their market cap.
Meanwhile, not that much deeper into the bubble, there have been stations which have consistently been able to supply thousands of tonnes for the whole time I've been building stuff.
If I search Inara now, medium pad, no minimum supply ... then basically everywhere other than the nearish Trailblazer ship is on double figures at best. But most of these are stations like https://inara.cz/elite/station-market/17124/ - a tiny outpost in a system with a total population of 45,000. I'm sure there were plenty of people desperately loading a tonne at a time every 10 minutes from those stations - and people in nearby carriers offering to sell them a much larger amount which they'd quietly moved from somewhere with a high supply - but it wasn't reflective of the supply situation bubble-wide.
If I repeat the search and set a minimum supply of 500t ... then there's basically nothing within 100LY, but then there are plenty with 4-figure or even 5-figure supplies not far beyond that. And that's been true every single day I've done that search for the last month.
Ironically, they spend much more time at the Trailblazer ships XD
I searched all, there were 3-4 stations that I had watched from about 100 to 150 ly away from my system. These all went from a steady supply to nothing. I am quite aware that most places have it at low stock. The only one that had stock was 350 ly from me at that time. This was a couple of weeks ago, since the trailblazers megaship have deployed, stocking levels have largely returned to normal patterns.
I saw the same for insulating membranes where a carrier was selling them for 200k/T.
btw, why don't you simply go to settlements instead of stations where there is plenty of alu, steel, cmm and titanium. I own a system where i can go search for some material i does need wich is at less than 15 ly for one system and less than 2.68 ly for another one. and i mainly go there.
btw, why don't you simply go to settlements instead of stations where there is plenty of alu, steel, cmm and titanium. I own a system where i can go search for some material i does need wich is at less than 15 ly for one system and less than 2.68 ly for another one. and i mainly go there.
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