With the recent Epic store giveaway, the starter zone - technically the Pilots' Federation District - has been a hopping place. Sidewinders galore! System chat full of new players filled with wide eyed wonder at the galaxy, as well as terror and confusion at the prospect of manual docking. One of the few stations placed in an inclined orbit to properly highlight the nearby ring system. (Seriously Frontier, do that more!) And the newbie cluster has one more curious property: it is the only location in the galaxy that you permanently lose access to.
But what if you don't want to? Whether you're setting up an account to help new players, or are just captivated by the view from Mawson Dock, I got curious what your options would be if one decided to just ... not give up access to the District. Can you make an actual career of it?
As a refresher, the normal mechanic is this: upon gaining any Pilots' Fed rank (i.e. advancing to Mostly Harmless/Aimless/Penniless) your permit for those systems becomes provisional. As soon as you dock at a starport outside those systems, the permit is revoked and you are irreversibly locked out. So the question becomes, what sort of career can you have without ever triggering a promotion? The thresholds are pretty low. Around 5k credits profit for the trade rank, which rules out doing any trade missions whatsoever. A few different things can trigger the exploration promotion, including selling cartographic data and picking up raw materials. And for combat the ranks are based on XP gained from destroying ships, and best I could measure you get promoted at the equivalent of 24 Harmless kills (or 8 Elites).
And yes, yes, of course you can use FCs to transfer money to an alt and buy whatever you want. In the interest of preventing the immediately obvious exploit, transactions at player Carriers don't award any rank progression. But suppose you're actually a new player, or at least don't have a wealthy main account or squadmates. Let's spin up a new game and see what we can do!
(For the record, the splash screen is pretty but I really don't think this can exist. You'd risk getting pulled into the station's reference frame and flying off the surface at high speed.)
So as usual, we find ourselves in a sidewinder with the usual starter mission, and make our first useful discovery. Data delivery missions apparently don't count as any of the three career activities, so no rank progression is awarded. Conveniently, there's lots of these to pick up without ever leaving the District - all those mission boards are programmed to spit out lots of low level missions.
Each of those data deliveries pays 10-20K, so it's a slow way to accumulate credits, but we don't need very many to get out of the starting Sidey. As a nice bonus, this exercise will give you a good tour of all the starting zone systems. Nothing there nearly as visually striking as Mawson Dock, if you ask me, but might as well know what you're going to all this trouble to preserve access to.
For the next step, we actually are going to use Fleet Carriers. But we're going to act like a pleb with no special access, so we'll stick to what we can find out in-game or from Inara. After all, they're not just for cheesy credit transfers - for our purposes the useful feature is that we can sell goods at Carrier markets without gaining trade rank. Now as it happens, we are doing this experiment right after the big Mining Rebalance, so folks are being a bit cagey about buying old standbys like Painite and LTDs. On the other hand, a quick search showed plenty of ships buying core gems nearby. Chalk up another win for Mawson Dock - that ring system around Dromi 1 is rocky, meaning that while there's no Painite or Platinum in sight, any core you find is guaranteed to be a valuable gem mineral. Fiddling with Coriolis, it looks like 600K credits should be enough to build an extremely janky Adder capable of exploding a couple of asteroid cores without blowing itself up in the process. Bonus being that you'll be practically the only core miner in that whole ring, since you can't buy the gear for it in the District. The Dromi system chat is acutely aware of this deficiency, by the way.
Thirty or forty data deliveries later - enough for an Adder and core mining gear, and not a drop of rank advancement! As for the silly ship name, well, I did this whole experiment in Open, but sadly nobody took the bait. At any rate, in a matter of minutes I was back at Dromi 1 and dropping into the ring. I didn't bother with the extra credits for a DSS (they cost a quarter million, a fortune I say!
) so we've just dropped blind into the ring near Mawson Dock. Good grief is it a pain to hunt cores in this build, what with the restricted cockpit view and the contortions needed to get the PWA to work, but we eventually found one just over 500 km from the station.
From there the bootstrapping is essentially done. Took a handful of gems to a carrier in a nearby system accepting them at prices hardly different from outright theft, but netted the million credits necessary to transfer the mining gear into a C-rated Cobra. Between the greater speed, better visibility, and larger cargo bay, it was relatively short work to crack a couple of asteroids and load up with gems. And with the somewhat less terrible jump range on that ship, I was able to net more like 16M credits from that run. Enough to come back to Dromi with the objectively best ship in the game and do what every newbie has surely dreamed of - buzz Mawson Dock with a fighter.
So where can you go from here? Obviously it's possible to make essentially unlimited money by selling mined goods to player carriers, so buying ships isn't a problem. Even if mining dried up, you could also sell them Tritium without gaining rank, since you only gain rank points at time of sale, not purchase. I'll end with a few remaining Never Asked Questions:
NAQ List
Q: Can I ever buy a Cutter? A Corvette?
A:Maybe?? Yes! In principle you can build superpower rep solely through data courier missions. Needs testing, but I suspect donation missions also don't generate PF rank. The question would be if you can reliably find rank-up missions of those types. Remember, you can never take a commodity source or delivery mission.
Q: Can I use engineers?
A: Sort of. You can unlock some of the starting engineers. Obviously not the ones (like Farseer) who require attaining a given rank. But plenty of engineers need other things. Again, needs testing, but I suspect you don't gain rank by donating goods to an engineer. Big caveat though:you will become Mostly Aimless in Exploration if you ever pick up a raw material, so those blueprints are off-limits. EDIT: not entirely off limits, see below. Picking up manufactured and data materials seems fine though, so you can partially engineer many components (Increased range FSD to G2, for instance) and a few completely (Charge Enhanced PD). Like with superpower rank-up missions, in many cases you'll need to rep up with Engineer-connected factions using donations or data courier missions only.
Q: Can I do pew pew?
A: Not really. You get a very limited number of kills before being promoted to Mostly Harmless. Be thoughtful about how you use those. If you're careful you can engage in non-lethal combat all you want, though.
Q: Can I explore?
A: With some limitations, yes! You don't get Explorer rank from scans, just from selling the cartographic data, so you can certainly travel in undiscovered systems, although you can't put your name on them. However, you do get rank from some other activities: most significantly by picking up raw materials. The XP from picking up a single raw mat (at least the first time) is enough to bump you out of Aimless. Supposedly you also get Explo rank passively just from driving the SRV, so that might be ruled out. Together those mean no jumponium and AMFU refills, and so limited neutron highway use. Other things that would need testing to be wary of: do you gain Explo XP from entering new galactic regions? From scanning or sampling NSPs?
Q: Why in the world would I do this?
A: I dunno! Maybe for roleplay reasons or as a silly challenge. Maybe to be a hero to the newbies by fuel ratting in the District or giving away core gem minerals. There is one concrete benefit worth mentioning: so long as you retain the PF District Permit, you only pay 1% rebuy on ship destruction. Maybe useful if you planned to experiment heavily with befriending Thargoids, I guess?
Any other questions? Or something you want me to try before this account goes back to his regular duties? Let me know!
But what if you don't want to? Whether you're setting up an account to help new players, or are just captivated by the view from Mawson Dock, I got curious what your options would be if one decided to just ... not give up access to the District. Can you make an actual career of it?
As a refresher, the normal mechanic is this: upon gaining any Pilots' Fed rank (i.e. advancing to Mostly Harmless/Aimless/Penniless) your permit for those systems becomes provisional. As soon as you dock at a starport outside those systems, the permit is revoked and you are irreversibly locked out. So the question becomes, what sort of career can you have without ever triggering a promotion? The thresholds are pretty low. Around 5k credits profit for the trade rank, which rules out doing any trade missions whatsoever. A few different things can trigger the exploration promotion, including selling cartographic data and picking up raw materials. And for combat the ranks are based on XP gained from destroying ships, and best I could measure you get promoted at the equivalent of 24 Harmless kills (or 8 Elites).
And yes, yes, of course you can use FCs to transfer money to an alt and buy whatever you want. In the interest of preventing the immediately obvious exploit, transactions at player Carriers don't award any rank progression. But suppose you're actually a new player, or at least don't have a wealthy main account or squadmates. Let's spin up a new game and see what we can do!
(For the record, the splash screen is pretty but I really don't think this can exist. You'd risk getting pulled into the station's reference frame and flying off the surface at high speed.)
So as usual, we find ourselves in a sidewinder with the usual starter mission, and make our first useful discovery. Data delivery missions apparently don't count as any of the three career activities, so no rank progression is awarded. Conveniently, there's lots of these to pick up without ever leaving the District - all those mission boards are programmed to spit out lots of low level missions.
Each of those data deliveries pays 10-20K, so it's a slow way to accumulate credits, but we don't need very many to get out of the starting Sidey. As a nice bonus, this exercise will give you a good tour of all the starting zone systems. Nothing there nearly as visually striking as Mawson Dock, if you ask me, but might as well know what you're going to all this trouble to preserve access to.
For the next step, we actually are going to use Fleet Carriers. But we're going to act like a pleb with no special access, so we'll stick to what we can find out in-game or from Inara. After all, they're not just for cheesy credit transfers - for our purposes the useful feature is that we can sell goods at Carrier markets without gaining trade rank. Now as it happens, we are doing this experiment right after the big Mining Rebalance, so folks are being a bit cagey about buying old standbys like Painite and LTDs. On the other hand, a quick search showed plenty of ships buying core gems nearby. Chalk up another win for Mawson Dock - that ring system around Dromi 1 is rocky, meaning that while there's no Painite or Platinum in sight, any core you find is guaranteed to be a valuable gem mineral. Fiddling with Coriolis, it looks like 600K credits should be enough to build an extremely janky Adder capable of exploding a couple of asteroid cores without blowing itself up in the process. Bonus being that you'll be practically the only core miner in that whole ring, since you can't buy the gear for it in the District. The Dromi system chat is acutely aware of this deficiency, by the way.
Thirty or forty data deliveries later - enough for an Adder and core mining gear, and not a drop of rank advancement! As for the silly ship name, well, I did this whole experiment in Open, but sadly nobody took the bait. At any rate, in a matter of minutes I was back at Dromi 1 and dropping into the ring. I didn't bother with the extra credits for a DSS (they cost a quarter million, a fortune I say!
) so we've just dropped blind into the ring near Mawson Dock. Good grief is it a pain to hunt cores in this build, what with the restricted cockpit view and the contortions needed to get the PWA to work, but we eventually found one just over 500 km from the station.From there the bootstrapping is essentially done. Took a handful of gems to a carrier in a nearby system accepting them at prices hardly different from outright theft, but netted the million credits necessary to transfer the mining gear into a C-rated Cobra. Between the greater speed, better visibility, and larger cargo bay, it was relatively short work to crack a couple of asteroids and load up with gems. And with the somewhat less terrible jump range on that ship, I was able to net more like 16M credits from that run. Enough to come back to Dromi with the objectively best ship in the game and do what every newbie has surely dreamed of - buzz Mawson Dock with a fighter.
So where can you go from here? Obviously it's possible to make essentially unlimited money by selling mined goods to player carriers, so buying ships isn't a problem. Even if mining dried up, you could also sell them Tritium without gaining rank, since you only gain rank points at time of sale, not purchase. I'll end with a few remaining Never Asked Questions:
NAQ List
Q: Can I ever buy a Cutter? A Corvette?
A:
Q: Can I use engineers?
A: Sort of. You can unlock some of the starting engineers. Obviously not the ones (like Farseer) who require attaining a given rank. But plenty of engineers need other things. Again, needs testing, but I suspect you don't gain rank by donating goods to an engineer. Big caveat though:
Q: Can I do pew pew?
A: Not really. You get a very limited number of kills before being promoted to Mostly Harmless. Be thoughtful about how you use those. If you're careful you can engage in non-lethal combat all you want, though.
Q: Can I explore?
A: With some limitations, yes! You don't get Explorer rank from scans, just from selling the cartographic data, so you can certainly travel in undiscovered systems, although you can't put your name on them. However, you do get rank from some other activities: most significantly by picking up raw materials. The XP from picking up a single raw mat (at least the first time) is enough to bump you out of Aimless. Supposedly you also get Explo rank passively just from driving the SRV, so that might be ruled out. Together those mean no jumponium and AMFU refills, and so limited neutron highway use. Other things that would need testing to be wary of: do you gain Explo XP from entering new galactic regions? From scanning or sampling NSPs?
Q: Why in the world would I do this?
A: I dunno! Maybe for roleplay reasons or as a silly challenge. Maybe to be a hero to the newbies by fuel ratting in the District or giving away core gem minerals. There is one concrete benefit worth mentioning: so long as you retain the PF District Permit, you only pay 1% rebuy on ship destruction. Maybe useful if you planned to experiment heavily with befriending Thargoids, I guess?
Any other questions? Or something you want me to try before this account goes back to his regular duties? Let me know!
Last edited:
