Long distance smuggling & illegal passenger transport

[greywolfplays]

Hello Commanders,

I am new to Elite and have been enjoying the game very much so far. However, I have joined with an ambition to become a long-distance smuggler and illegal passengers transporter and I have yet to find a single smuggling mission...
From everything that i have read it looks like the Developers have nerfed smuggling a lot. But I am not there for the money or/and coolest ship. I just enjoy the process and the idea of it.
I have tried all the systems that were popular amongst long ranged smugglers back in the days, e.g. Fehu, Robigo, Ceos, Sothis...But nowhere i have seen a single smuggling mission, nor an illegal passenger.
I know i can just buy goods that are considered illegal in certain systems and deliver there. And i have done it and it is fun. But i want a real smuggling mission that would send me with some serios assignment through hundreds of light years or/and a passenger who does not care about having fun or sightseeing, but rather stay alive, unnoticed and get delivered to a system far-far away.

Can anyone suggest a system that can still generate these type of missions, especially for a long-haul?

 

[Frop]

Any system really, but it also of course seems to depend on the BGS states of the surrounding systems. As with other mission types, some refreshes I find no smuggling missions at all, some refreshes there are plenty about.

 

[goemon]

• for smuggling missions you usually need some rep with the local anarchy faction, which you probably need to gain first. than it is mainly down to state and mission board rng.
• longrange (smuggling) missions only show up at thursday after the server maintenance.

- for illegal passengers really all you need to do is go for any passenger lounge in my experience.

if you want to do a deep dive into the rules of mission generation, you can for exampel check into this thread: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/rev-enging-mission-boards.543467/

 

[goemon]

smuggling missions sometimes spawn system security trying to get you scanned. beside that they don't provide much in terms of gameplay above simply running your own smuggling routes.

from the perspective of challenge/gameplay in my experience the most complicated thing is to dock without being scanned at an orbital military outpost. for exampel Banks Refinery in the current CG system George Pantazis is such a military outpost, and it has a black market. probably before doing that i would in a first step recommend smuggling to any surface port (look out for the local chatters and system security)

if it is more about being criminal and stealthy - i have detailed how to steal from military courier vessels or convoys without firing a single shot. you'll have to work out autoresolve distance, cold running, matching speed of the convoy and positining of your ship relative to cargo hatch and point defense to make that work --- the general technique i have pointed to here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/questions-for-experienced-salvagers.549271/post-8574426

 

[goemon]

if you want to sandbox your own long-distance smuggling, you could go with Zoys Bootleger Route between all often illegal Rare Goods: http://zoy.rf.gd/rares/

 

[Jmanis]

Smuggling missions are only available from Anarchy factions (specifically, criminal-ethos factions, but I won't dive into that...).

As for long-range... you're out of luck there. FD didn't nerf smuggling missions per-se, rather, they put limits on how missions (in general) are spawned... specifically, delivery/smuggling missions will only target 20Ly away, and many edge-cases now have diminishing returns on their reward effects. If you check mission boards after the Thursday tick, you will find the occasional mission out to 200Ly, but you'll only find them for maybe a couple hours after the tick. Lots of speculation why, none of it particularly useful though, other than "probably a glitch in the deep, dark recesses of the game".

tl;dr the only reason why Sothis/Ceos were a thing for smuggling was due to an edge-case in the mission generation algorithms, not because FD specifically created them to spawn from those systems. When FD changed the rules for missions in general, this also nixed that edge case (and a host of other things, but you won't hear about them because they weren't broken cash cows).

If you hate yourself... go to a Tourism-economy station and check the Anarchy-faction mission boards. Tourism stations will generate delivery & smuggling missions (amongst a couple others) all the way to Colonia (~20k LY). The kick in the proverbial is that they will reward roughly the same as a standard one-jump delivery mission, and have the same time limit (i.e 24 hours in most cases). Basically completely worthless to do.

As a last point, it's worth noting the rewards for smuggling missions are pretty broken in a negative way; rewards seem to be calculated based on the "stolen" value of goods, which is always less than the not-stolen value... so smugglintg 60t of, say, stolen gold, will always pay (much) less than delivering 60t of clean gold.

Regarding passenger missions, as others said, it's easy enough to find criminal transport missions; check VIP missions and look for the people who don't like to be scanned/aren't worried about ship damage or crime.