Newcomer / Intro looking for a particular commodity

[Perjoss]

Is there a way to find if a station has a particular commodity in stock without having to dock there and browse the market? at this point I dont really mind what the price is, i just need to get my hands on it for a mission.

 

[aprodigy]

nope, not really. either you take notes via pen and paper, you strive to become rain man and remeber everything or, you do it like me and head out in the open to eventually have some luck and dock everywhere you possibly can don't really like this myself either but oh well, one side says: this is how it's supposed to be and work - the other group begs frontier for "some sort of a board computer". at least that's my notion of this situation.

 

[huwthomas]

Open the galaxy map, choose the View tab, go down to Trade Routes and click Clear, then select the particular commodity. E.g. if you're looking for Palladium, open up Metals and check the appropriate check box. This will show animated Palladium trade routes for your current system and for any systems for which you have trade data; if a system is exporting Palladium then it stands to reason there's a supply there.

If no trade routes are shown then there's no Palladium being traded among the systems for which you have trade data; you can buy further data from likely looking nearby systems, just be sure to buy data from systems with the appropriate economy type. You can identify economy types in the same part of the interface, at the top of the dialog box.

 

[InfiniteGremlins]

This will show animated Palladium trade routes for your current system and for any systems for which you have trade data; if a system is exporting Palladium then it stands to reason there's a supply there.

One caveat: it's possible for players to buy up the entire supply of a commodity, which reduces the supply to zero.

The find-some-stuff missions are easier when you know definitely where to find something. That's a little difficult, though, so what I've done is to get a feel for what each type of system will generally import and export. For example, non-lethal weapons are pretty much only in supply in high-tech stations, so I only check nearby high-tech systems for them.