Newcomer / Intro Need some tips.

[CompleteNoob]

Hi all,

First of all enjoying the game it looks nice, plays nice and sounds nice, so why am I confused about certain parts...maybe I'm thick.

Anyway I started my Elite career on the 16th and first thing I did was go through the tutorials, simple common sense got on with it and completed them no worries.

So now I'm hungry for cash and new weapons and all the shizzle that will make me mighty and magnificent.

I decided my first attempt at making cash would be try a mission from the bulletin board, so i pick a basic track down some pirates type mission at location A, so off I go (fancy looking hyperspace) to said location and scan everything in that system in jump speed mode while flying around close to space stations, stars , planets hoping to track down something....finally I found ONE criminal killed it and then urgh i need another 4.

So there I am flying around getting close to "something unknown" dropping out of j speed scanning it, seeing its not what I want and back into j speed again.....needless to say after 2 hours I was becoming .....frustrated and bored.

So I decided to hell with tracking down pirates and lets go trade some stuff.....I go to a space station look at the commodities, then to make sure I check the galaxy map and see where they are trading too, i even used to filter to see specific items being traded, because surely if one system is trading to another then the other system needs what they are selling and are buying?, doesn't seem to work that way they both buy and sell for EXACTLY the same price even though on the galaxy view one is clearly trading the specific item to the other...for no profit ??? ,so more confusion, how the hell am I supposed to know who to trade with, I thought these trade routes showed the best places to buy and sell, logic would say follow the path in the galaxy trade routes and the final system would be paying more to buy it than the original place you bought it from because each step along the trade route they add commission or a percentage etc....NOPE not the case so far from what I am seeing....I think I am missing something here.

My only success so far has been bulletin boards sending an Item from A to B, kinda impossible to screw that one up unless I have to dodge police, avoid pirates or "something" remotely interesting, the the training, combat is easy, understanding the logic behind trading isn't making much sense to me at the moment.

Would love some solid advice about trading and tracking stuff down as I really want to get on in this game.

Thanks.

Thanks

 

[Richie_B]

To be fair, your best starter missions are the "Take items from here to somewhere else"...
As you say, they are hard to screw up, which is good, but if you scribble down the high supply and high demand articles in each station (these can be found from the commodities market screen in the station), you can get a decent idea of any local trade runs. (Gnenerally, the plan is to buy high supply items and sell them in high demand areas).
It's pretty hard to set up a good trade run without visiting places and the "Take items" missions are a great way to see the local surroundings whilst generating an income...
The tracking down missions are prob best left for now. Some are supposed to be bugged and others involve meeting decent opponents, so maybe waiting until you have an upgraded ship and the bugs have been squished would be a good plan...

 

[Brad Avidro]

If you select missions to deliver cargo, that's good, easy money! There are also missions to source commodities, these take a bit of practice but are good money making missions, you need to use the galaxy map and trading data to find where these things are but you soon get to know where to find things.

 

[Whiterose]

Its about supply and demand. If the station has a lot of supply (one of the last columns in the commodities screen) then it will be cheap to buy (compare buy to Galactic average). When you click on an item it usually states where you can sell it. Download the unofficial tutorial, it has a good section on trading.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=34437

 

[GibMeister]

Yes I had the same issues with trading last night, the drop down that lets you see the prices at other systems you have visited doesnt seem to work......it just says things are imported or exported doesnt show the price, I ended up writing stuff down..come on even nowadays stock traders dont write stuff down, the computer tells you what to buy and sell!

Frontier comeone make an in game trading tool that works we shouldnt be using spreadsheets created by players..should we?

 

[Epicurean Dream]

Galaxy Map Trade lines (and vividness) represent volume traded not profitable trade. It is also retrospective, so it is very likely that something that appears big and bright on the trade data, will actually be a pretty saturated market as a high volume of that commodity has been traded from one station to the other. It's like in RL. You can't expect to just follow the current market and expect to make a tidy profit. It's all about prospecting and reading trends. That's a whole book in it's self tbh so I'm not really going to go in to it right now. But I hope you get the idea that it isn't just a matter of following lines on a map.

Also check this piece I wrote about tracking down pirates just now.

cheers!

BTW you sound like a pretty decent bloke, I wouldn't mind hustlin' about in game with you for a bit sometime

 

[Traceracing]

Also, when trading, don't think "flip flop" but more a route... take x from A to B, z from B to C and y from C to A... even 4 / 5 leg milk runs can be fun.. takes some time to work out the best items to buy / sell, but I've done 10k /12k profit in a sidey before now with this approach

 

[CompleteNoob]

Thanks all,

Much appreciated.

 

[OrientalHero]

Yeah, definitely avoid the" hunt down a specific named pirate" mission.
The trick with these hunting missions is that whilst you are in Supercruise (SC) travelling about quite fast in system, whilst you can eventually detect and scan other ships moving in SC, the ones that are in normal propulsion mode show up as Unidentified Signal Sources.
So make sure you investigate them.
What actually appears to happen in game is that the server will detect your mission and generate the appropriate content in the normal space instance you arrive at when slowing down to investigate an "Unidentified Signal Source".
I was able to get 3 Unidentified Signal Sources that had System Police shaking down wanted ships so I assisted in getting shields down and waited until the last few percentage points and Multicannoned my way to get the kill.
Eventually accepted a named pirate mission as the bounty wasn't so high. So my named Pirate was only worth 48,000 and the leader of a rebel faction.
He appeared in one of the 5 or so Unidentified Signal Sources that I investigated in a particular system.
In a fully shielded Anaconda and killed me in my Free Eagle in one shot with some dismissive and disdaining remark!
Some of the named pirates are worth 100s of thousands and probably equipped much better!

Hint: To join a friend in a low energy FSD Wake (ie to investigate the same Unidentified Signal Source) I believe you'll need a frame shift scanner!