Guide / Tutorial The Smugglers Guide

outsidefactor

outsidefactor
Thanks for the great guide, Errantthought.

The better term for this guide is "How to Get Illicit Cargo Into a Station". Smuggling in traditional Elite terminology means trading in illegal goods, and implies you are buying goods at location A and smuggling it to location B to sell at a profit at a black market, and as far as I can tell, you can't make money doing this, or at least it's very hard.

It's not enough that a commodity is Illegal. You can buy Slaves at a lot of stations, and a lot of Federation stations have black-markets, but it's unlikely that you will make any money this way: just because it's illegal doesn't mean there's demand, and there's no way to gauge demand without running the Illegal cargo to see the sale price: you can't check the Black Market ahead of time.

I tried buying 1t of slaves and running to a bunch of stations with Black Markets, and not a single one had enough demand for slaves for the price to be above the purchase price.

What I'd like a guide to is how to make money from that type of trade. Anyone have any suggestions?
 

Legend

Legend
Really appreciate the guide - recently got into the game, and although the profits may not be the best, I have fallen for smuggling. Good work with the thread, came in handy.

Outsidefactor does raise a good point though, BBM are easy enough, but smuggling in the traditional sense is quite hard to do efficiently.
 
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Reprobator

Reprobator
profits were marvelous 3 weeks ago (you need to play with passive bonus on pp systems) but now i can not manage to fin any good smuggling route beetwen torval and delaine,
I don't ask for route just an information :
Do you guys still manage to find good profitable smuggling route nowadays (with 2k+ profits per ton) ?
 
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matemaster

matemaster
Reprobator said:
profits were marvelous 3 weeks ago (you need to play with passive bonus on pp systems) but now i can not manage to fin any good smuggling route beetwen torval and delaine,
I don't ask for route just an information :
Do you guys still manage to find good profitable smuggling route nowadays (with 2k+ profits per ton) ?
Click to expand...


yes I have found 3 stop route
1 stop includes illegal goods with 5000+ profit per ton
the other 2 stops include regular goods
I can do the roundtrip (3 stops) in 20 minutes with 2mil profit. I never made so much credits before:cool:
 

Jericho

Jericho
My current route is 4430/ton one direction and 300/ton on the return.
6 jumps and 1.15 mil in just over 13 minutes (roundtrip).

I have explored many routes in the Delaine and Torvul space this week (got bored of running the loop endlessly and was curious if I could do better), but I haven't found anything better yet. The Black Market is dead if you don't abuse the passive PP bonuses, which is silly if you ask me.

I think that there needs to be more risk for smuggling (fines, death, whatever), but the rewards should be hugely improved.

If not for the PP bonus I wouldn't even bother smuggling, I'd simply take my clipper and go chase Clean Market trades, the profits are better.
 

Reprobator

Reprobator
I agree with you and for the punishment i was thinking about a reputation system, the more you get caught : the worse your reputation can be and the more likely security's services would try to scan you / interdict you, on top of that i would add a marker on those cargo,not only you'll get fined as it is actually but your cargo would be marked as "scanned" and therefor would loose a good amount of its value.
and well if not... more profit than it is actually, i'll add another smuggling system too, like choosing customer like delaine (and any criminal organisation possible) to deliver smuggled cargo and having a good pay from that (like a bit it is in mission)... but if you miss you'll loose rep from them and even more you could be asked to payback the cargo value or to be hunted by the said criminal faction
 
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Jericho

Jericho
Ben Ryder said:
Is the only real money to be made from smuggling in slave trading?
Click to expand...

This seems to be the case for me, but I would love to hear otherwise.

Mind you, I don't want route details form anyone here, I would just like to know if its even out there to be found.... I suspect that its not.

This CMDR has some pretty good ideas for smuggling:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=170570&page=2&p=2609164&viewfull=1#post2609164


PS: My method for getting into stations without being scanned is simple:
1. Drop from FS.
2. Hit Silent Run.
3. Boost towards station
4. Drop 3 heat sinks (gets me to 0%)
5. Request docking at 7.5km
6. Continue towards station and drop heat sinks when heat approaches 10%
7. Enter station, Rig for normal running and land.

I have 3 Heat Sink Launchers on the "Heartless"

When interdicted, I simply hit silent run, drop 3x heat sinks and boost away...... works like a charm.

I haven't been scanned or hit by fire in weeks.
 
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