I write this to do the following
Hopefully it’ll help 'somebody' if not just to kill 5 minutes. I've broken my experience down in days but are actually closer to in game hours because it just felt better to talk about days in relation to my game perspective.
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Day 1-5
My adventure started like most people, no money, bad ship and I personally had absolutely NO clue what to do. Having not been a ‘beta’ player I literally had no idea what to expect, other than my experiences with the Amega game in 1990s. BUT how hard can it be …. It’s just another space sim I thought to myself.
My starting location LHS 3447 - for me that was THE centre of the universe and I travelled almost exclusively within a radius of 12ly’s those first 5 days. Unfortunately for me I had no idea what ‘pristine metallic rings’ were (or what a ‘freagle’ was - let alone have one) so my life was spent in super-cruse between what appeared to be the longest travel time between those two stars in LHS 3447 (painful). After 5 days of trading / missions and getting nowhere I stumbled across my first ED epiphany.
After vehemently avoiding combat and only making 45,696 credits in the first few days I thought oh well why not shoot something, if nothing more than to feel something different than trying not to ‘overshoot’ in super-cruise one more time. Surprisingly USS zones became my friend and after claiming some bounties I got my first ship …. The mighty cobra
Day 6-20
Excited at my first ship I kept up with the USS zone hunting and made my first ED mistake, no it wasn’t hitting the docking bay wall (later to be my second), it was picking up stolen cargo after vaping some ships at a USS point. The fine put me back a bit and left me almost penniless, I certainly did not want to start back again in a sidewinder and I also couldn’t afford the insurance!
After a nervous few hours I managed to get back up to where I left off, and 5 days later had a nice pile of credits from my bounty hunting at USS zones. The next ED epiphany was rare goods.
Day 20-35
After seeing an Anaconda, and the 146m credits it would cost, I threw in the towel and to GOOGLE it was. The dreaded search I tried so hard to not type “elite dangerous how to make money”. I felt sick typing it and a failure. However I was also at the point of cutting my own testicles off with a cheese grater for all the money random USS zones was giving me towards 146 million credits.
Rare goods came up time & time again, even if they could not be farmed as much as they could in beta (so reddit told me). So this became my next grind ….. Xihe; Altair; Epislon Ind; Zeessze; George Pantazis and then travelling 120+ LY to Lave, Leesti, Diso, Uszaa, Orrere. Rinse repeat.
Day 31-100
After repeating this for what felt like an age I got my Asp. I then unsurprisingly kept doing this and upgrading the FSD so I could do this quicker. This became my life and I quickly learned some simple ED truths;
After a a long time I was burned out, 14million and a fully kitted Asp but no python. I quit for a about a month only to be drawn back like a moth to a flame….
Day 101-120
Returned after a month out, hoping to see if things had changed. Whilst ED had been pushing patches out nothing much had changed but community goals brought me back. After trading with a station with my Asp to drop off Copper (community goal) I decided to give hard core trading a shot …. Epiphany number 3.
My third purchased ship was a Type 6 and after some research I discovered how to find trade routes. I manually found these at first taking the time to understand the trade map and find out what was exporting what. This trading stuff was GREAT - I was earning lots of credits and once I discovered a tasty trade route I was earning more than rare goods trading.
What was disappointing, despite gaining from this personally, was that trade routes kind of stay the same. I was expecting supplies to run out but they never did (still haven’t) and I traded gold and advanced catalysers all the way to my python …..
Day 120+
Appreciate you’re getting pretty sleepy reading this so I’ll cut this bit short. I traded up to a python and then kitted it for combat. I’m now having fun exploring and killing things which is different from trading and it’s given me something else to do. Next will be reputation and I’ll perhaps expand on this later on, presuming anyone cares
I might even try a type 9 after grinding rep (be a fat cat (or space cow)).
Summary
It’s a good game but like so many it is a grind fest. I have found niches to keep me going and in my humble opinion it will be up to ED to keep this sandbox moving and perhaps become something akin to my favourite game of the past … SWG
See you out there CMDRs
- Share my personal ED experience
- Hopefully it will help a few CMDRs starting out
- Should any ED person read this it might help them with some user perspective, although they’d probably get more than enough from beta.
- Show folks you can get there eventually and the trick is to keep things fresh and try new things and break up the grind (and yeah it can be if YOU let it)
Hopefully it’ll help 'somebody' if not just to kill 5 minutes. I've broken my experience down in days but are actually closer to in game hours because it just felt better to talk about days in relation to my game perspective.
------------------------------------------
Day 1-5
My adventure started like most people, no money, bad ship and I personally had absolutely NO clue what to do. Having not been a ‘beta’ player I literally had no idea what to expect, other than my experiences with the Amega game in 1990s. BUT how hard can it be …. It’s just another space sim I thought to myself.
My starting location LHS 3447 - for me that was THE centre of the universe and I travelled almost exclusively within a radius of 12ly’s those first 5 days. Unfortunately for me I had no idea what ‘pristine metallic rings’ were (or what a ‘freagle’ was - let alone have one) so my life was spent in super-cruse between what appeared to be the longest travel time between those two stars in LHS 3447 (painful). After 5 days of trading / missions and getting nowhere I stumbled across my first ED epiphany.
After vehemently avoiding combat and only making 45,696 credits in the first few days I thought oh well why not shoot something, if nothing more than to feel something different than trying not to ‘overshoot’ in super-cruise one more time. Surprisingly USS zones became my friend and after claiming some bounties I got my first ship …. The mighty cobra
Day 6-20
Excited at my first ship I kept up with the USS zone hunting and made my first ED mistake, no it wasn’t hitting the docking bay wall (later to be my second), it was picking up stolen cargo after vaping some ships at a USS point. The fine put me back a bit and left me almost penniless, I certainly did not want to start back again in a sidewinder and I also couldn’t afford the insurance!
After a nervous few hours I managed to get back up to where I left off, and 5 days later had a nice pile of credits from my bounty hunting at USS zones. The next ED epiphany was rare goods.
Day 20-35
After seeing an Anaconda, and the 146m credits it would cost, I threw in the towel and to GOOGLE it was. The dreaded search I tried so hard to not type “elite dangerous how to make money”. I felt sick typing it and a failure. However I was also at the point of cutting my own testicles off with a cheese grater for all the money random USS zones was giving me towards 146 million credits.
Rare goods came up time & time again, even if they could not be farmed as much as they could in beta (so reddit told me). So this became my next grind ….. Xihe; Altair; Epislon Ind; Zeessze; George Pantazis and then travelling 120+ LY to Lave, Leesti, Diso, Uszaa, Orrere. Rinse repeat.
Day 31-100
After repeating this for what felt like an age I got my Asp. I then unsurprisingly kept doing this and upgrading the FSD so I could do this quicker. This became my life and I quickly learned some simple ED truths;
- No matter how hard you try, you will hit the docking bay wall at least once and die
- Auto docking computer isn’t worth it (imo resist the flames people)
- Combat isn't that hard against NPCs. In a sidewider with some help from security services i could take down an asp or dropship if careful.
- Turrets weren’t my thing
- Type C modules aren’t very good
- Silent running and overheating wasn’t fun, I had no idea it raised my heat and died twice (doh!). This took another google to put right my stupidity
- Black holes and neutron stars aren’t fun (pre heat nerf)
- Super-cruise 100% until timer gets to 7-8 seconds out then throttle back to blue zone, saves a lot of time
- Stations always face toward the star or planet they orbit. Come from inside the ring and you’ll always be put back into normal space ‘roughly’ facing the 'letterbox'
- Submit to interdictions, that way you FSD isn’t on cool down and you can super-cruise back immediately. I simply wasn’t that good at avoiding it and this was quicker.
- ASP is expensive to repair (or was)
- Gaining federation rank isn’t well explained. From what I could gather they send you to a location with a permit. You then have to do missions for allied factions within that system (usually one specifically I think) and once maxed out you get an advancement and sent to another system? Who knows ED this wasn’t the easiest thing to grasp to be fair.
- Mining is profitable however due to the time it takes to collect resources and manage refinery bins it takes too long and is too ‘fiddly’ (only word I can think of to describe it)
- Cobra has been the most fun ship to fly in
- Flight assist off when doing 180 degree turns in combat when at your optimal turning speed. That way you can spin fast enough to catch the quick NPC’s that stay on your tail (worked for me anyways)
- Shield cells .... WOW took me 100 days to figure this little gem.
After a a long time I was burned out, 14million and a fully kitted Asp but no python. I quit for a about a month only to be drawn back like a moth to a flame….
Day 101-120
Returned after a month out, hoping to see if things had changed. Whilst ED had been pushing patches out nothing much had changed but community goals brought me back. After trading with a station with my Asp to drop off Copper (community goal) I decided to give hard core trading a shot …. Epiphany number 3.
My third purchased ship was a Type 6 and after some research I discovered how to find trade routes. I manually found these at first taking the time to understand the trade map and find out what was exporting what. This trading stuff was GREAT - I was earning lots of credits and once I discovered a tasty trade route I was earning more than rare goods trading.
What was disappointing, despite gaining from this personally, was that trade routes kind of stay the same. I was expecting supplies to run out but they never did (still haven’t) and I traded gold and advanced catalysers all the way to my python …..
Day 120+
Appreciate you’re getting pretty sleepy reading this so I’ll cut this bit short. I traded up to a python and then kitted it for combat. I’m now having fun exploring and killing things which is different from trading and it’s given me something else to do. Next will be reputation and I’ll perhaps expand on this later on, presuming anyone cares
I might even try a type 9 after grinding rep (be a fat cat (or space cow)).
Summary
It’s a good game but like so many it is a grind fest. I have found niches to keep me going and in my humble opinion it will be up to ED to keep this sandbox moving and perhaps become something akin to my favourite game of the past … SWG
See you out there CMDRs