Commander Eventure has created a fantastic add-on trading tool called Trade Computer Extension (TCE) that is unique in that it is the first such tool that is both totally immersive and also "in the spirit of the game". If you play the trading aspect of Elite Dangerous even a little bit, IMO you should have this tool. What makes it different from every other trading tool so far?
Basically, TCE provides is the 34th century in-ship trading computer that many of us have asked for and wished that FD had been able to put in the game. It opens up an entirely new type of role-play: "trade exploration". TCE makes it possible to enjoy exploring star systems and stations with a tangible reward for each new discovery: A) You add to your growing personal collection of station data in game. YOUR data. And B) every new station you acquire this way adds to YOUR increasing income potential and trading options.
WHAT THIS GUIDE IS AND IS NOT
This guide, and its thread, is NOT technical support for TCE. If you are having trouble installing and using TCE, or you encounter bugs with any new version/update that Eventure puts out, DO NOT POST IN THIS THREAD. Post over in Eventure's [RELEASE] Trade Computer Extension thread instead.
This guide _will_ talk you through some common pain points of installation and learning to use TCE. But only as one-time "advice" with a little more detail than Eventure's instructions can provide.
This guide will also feature an entire section devoted to ways you can use TCE to approach trading per the methods and rules I espouse over in my other thread Yokai's guide to recognizing (and finding) a great trade route.
===== ALL ABOUT TCE ITSELF =====
FINDING AND DOWNLOADING TCE
Look in Eventure's [RELEASE] Trade Computer Extension thread.
Note that you must have a relatively current version of both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access loaded on your computer. TCE does not support other spreadsheets and databases. If you balk at the cost of purchasing both Excel and Access, note that you can effectively rent the latest version of Excel 2013 and Access 2013 for only $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year by purchasing Office 365 Home. Not sure you want even go this far just to try out TCE? No problem: that link to Office 365 also gives you to the option to try out Office 365 for free for a limited period.
THERE ARE TWO DATABASES YOU CAN CHOOSE FROM
This section is NOT true until Eventure releases the non-beta version of 1.36!
The default database that comes with TCE is located in the DB subfolder and it's called TCE.mdb. This default database comes preloaded with 150 registered stations. However, some commanders will prefer to start with an empty database and work only with station data that they've collected for themselves. So if you do not want 150 stations worth of data to start with, you can swap out the default database with an alternate database that comes preloaded with only 2 registered stations. I don't advise trying to completely remove the 2 preloaded stations: it's doable but tricky. My advise is simply swap out the two DBs and live with the two stations that you didn't collect for yourself.
INSTALLATION TIPS
Installing an "Installer" version of TCE is pretty self-explanatory. Installing a "Non-Installer" version of TCE (which is the only version sometimes, especially for newest beta releases) is a simple matter of:
To run TCE, you simply make sure ED is already running in "Borderless Windowed" mode at a resolution of 1920x1080 or higher, and then you alt-tab out and double-click the TCE.xlsm file in the TCE folder. Eventure provides an icon in the "Non-installer" version that you can use to manually make a shortcut to TCE.xlsm with a pretty icon to make it easier to find.
A note about the size you should be running ED at. It _really_ should be either 1920x1080 or 1920x1200, not so much because of TCE itself, but because of the EliteOCR tool that TCE runs under the covers. EliteOCR is not very accurate at screen resolutions smaller than 1920x1080.
When you run TCE for the first time, there are two pain points you'll run into:
So let's cover the Excel pain point first. When you start up TCE for the first time, you're just going to see an Excel spreadsheet with a SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled message in a yellow bar near the top, which displays only an Options button. At least, that's what happens in Excel 2013 that is running as part of Office 365 on a Windows 8.1 machine. You may see something _slightly_ different, or even have an obvious option in that yellow warning bar to simply enable the macro right then and there. The following steps are written for Office 365/Excel 2013/Windows 8.1. You can probably adapt them slightly to do the same thing in earlier versions of Excel. If these tips don't help you, please post your questions on Eventure's TCE thread.
Now let's cover the pain point of finding the ED Netlog folder and appconfig folder in the PRE-START CONFIGURATION PANEL of TCE. First, the AUTO-DETECT button probably won't do much good, because it requires you to find "Where ED is installed". Which is really not in an obvious place; you're likely to find only the _launcher_, not the actual game binaries and folders. Even worse, the actual game binaries and folders are probably inside a "hidden" folder that you'll never find unless you've set up Windows Explorer to show you all hidden folders on your system. So you're probably better off finding the right folder manually. Here are the steps that will get you close:
WHAT TO DO IF TCE CRASHES OR HANGS
The TCE interface comprises a bunch of Microsoft Excel macros in a single TCE.xlsm file. The TCE database comprises a single Microsoft Access database in a TCE.mbd file. When you see a WAIT message in a TCE panel, the Excel macros are updating tables in the Access database.
Most of the time, if TCE displays an error message, it means some logic in the Excel file got "hung". At this point, the data update it was trying to do to the Access database might have succeeded or failed. It's rare that you have to worry about the database being corrupted in any way. When Excel gets hung like this, it is ALWAYS best to perform the following steps, even if TCE seems to recover gracefully from the hang and seems to begin working again:
The reason you should _always_ shut down and restart TCE if you get an error message is because a hang can potentially cause other state-detection routines in the Excel code from working correctly. For example, TCE might seem to be fine after you dismiss an error message, but then you land at the next station and the CURRENT POSITION and AUTO DESTINATION panels don't update to reflect your current station. Stuff like that. Only closing and restarting TCE will fix this.
UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REGISTERED AND UNREGISTERED STATIONS
Starting with v1.36, TCE requires you to distinguish between a "registered" station and a "non-registered" station. The next section goes into more detail about this, but the concept is simple:
Note that you can enter commodity data only for a registered station. If you land at an unregistered station and try to add commodity data for it, TCE won't let you.
The general process when landing at a new station for the first time is to:
Again, the next section goes into this in more detail. One other nuance here is that if you go to the ADD UNREGISTERED STATION panel and the STAR SYSTEM name changes to some other system than the one you're really at, this means the star itself is not yet in the database. So first you'll have to add the star itself to the database before you can then ADD NEW STATION. To do this, in TCE click DATABASE > STARS, then go down to the section below "ADDING A NEW STAR SYSTEM RECORD WHEN TCE PROMPTS YOU" and follow the steps there to add the star to the database. Then click DATABASE > STATIONS, navigate to ADD NEW STATION, and fill out the panel (you might also need to select the star system that you just added).
ADDING DATA FOR A SYSTEM/STATION YOU'RE VISITING FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME
Notes:
ADDING A NEW STAR SYSTEM RECORD WHEN TCE PROMPTS YOU
When the STAR SYSTEMDATABASE panel automatically appears, it means that TCE doesn't already havethe star system's coordinates in the database. Without these coordinates, itcannot calculate distances to other systems/stations, so it's in your best interestto take a few simple steps to capture the correct coordinates.
DELETING STATIONS FROM YOUR DATABASE
TCE does not currently support doing this, and while you can make some very careful edits in the database if you know what you're doing, it's still tedious and time-consuming to do so.
On the bright side, the default 1.36 database comes with only 150 stations pre-populated, and some of the commodity info for those 150 stations was updated as recently as Feb 27, 2015. So it's only 150 stations worth of "clutter" or "starter data".
However, if having 150 stations you didn't collect yourself bugs you, Eventure also provides an alternate database with 1.36, which has only 2 registered stations pre-populated. (You need at least two registered stations for TCE to work.) So switching to this alternate database before you start using TCE in earnest can effectively make TCE "yours and yours alone". For more information, look above in the section THERE ARE TWO DATABASES YOU CAN CHOOSE FROM.
SETTING THE JUMP RANGE OF YOUR LADEN SHIP FOR USE IN ALL CALCULATIONS
Setting your laden jump range is very important. It controls the routing that the SEARCH ROUTE TO function will find. It also controls the CARTOGRAPHY panel's list of STAR SYSTEMS IN JUMP RANGE.
1. Figure out the laden jump range of your ship via the usual methods.
2. Round down to the nearest integer. For example, my Anaconda has a laden jump range of 19.14, so the nearest integer down is 19.
3. In TCE, open the TRADE panel.
4. Down in the middle, enter your integer from step 2 in the SET JUMP LIMIT field, then press Enter and wait.
SETTING THE TRADE RANGE TO CONTROL HOW FAR OUT TCE WILL SEARCH FOR GOOD TRADES
This setting controls how far out the TRADE panel will look for the best RECOMMENDED STATION to trade with from your CURRENT STATION. Note that it does NOT control how far from your current position in the galaxy the TRADE SCOUT panel will search for 2-way trade routes.
1. In TCE, open the TRADE panel.
2. In the SET TRADE RANGE field in the lower right, enter the maximum number of lightyears you want TCE to search for good trade stations (relative to your current position). Enter an even integer. Note that the greater the trade range, the longer the TRADE SCOUT searches will take
USING THE TRADE SCOUT TO FIND THE BEST 2-WAY TRADE ROUTE
Remember, the more station data you've collected, the better the TRADE SCOUT gets. Also remember that the more old and stale your last data collection for a station is, the more inaccurate the TRADE SCOUT results might be. Update your trade data every few days, and certainly update it if you haven't visited a station recently within the past week.
USING AND INTERPRETING THE TRADE PANEL
At first glance, the TRADE panel looks like all it tells you is the best commodity to trade from your current station (listed in the CURRENT POSITION box) to the recommended station (in the AUTO DESTINATION box). But there's a lot more going on in the TRADE panel:
The main limitation of the TRADE panel is that it does not display a "round trip" total profit for a 2-way trade route between the two selected systems. Eventure intends for you to use the TRADE SCOUT panel for this. But there _is_ a way to quickly figure out whether the two stations listed in the TRADE panel will make for a decent two-way route or not. Here's how:
SETTING THE CURRENT POSITION AND DESTINATION SYSTEM FOR THE TRADE PANEL
By default, the TRADE panel always changes the CURRENT POSITION to be the station you just landed at, and sets the AUTO DESTINATION to be the best possible 1-way trade from your current station, based on the SET TRADE RANGE value you last set in the TRADE panel. However, you can override this automatic behavior and manually set both the start position and destination position.
Here's an additional trick: to reset the destination to be the real best total profit from the SELECTED POSITION, just change the SET TRADE RANGE to a different number, and press Enter. This forces TCE to choose the best destination within that specified trade range. There is no way to reset the starting position back to your current station other than by manually reselecting it as described in steps 1-3 above. However, when you leave this station and land at the next one, TCE will resume its default behavior and automatically display the station you just landed at in the current position.
FUN TRICKS WITH THE CARTOGRAPHY PANEL
I really love the CARTOGRAPHY panel. At first glance it might appear somewhat useless for a trader, and might seem to be oriented more towards explorers who want to map entire star systems and explore every "unexplored" object. But in fact, it can be very useful for traders as well! The key to creative use of the CARTOGRAPHY panel is to understand that:
These attributes of the CARTOGRAPHY panel lead to useful tricks like the way I use it as a "trade explorer". I don't care about exploration in the typical sense: scanning every system, exploring every unexplored body in the system, and selling my cartographic data far away. But I _do_ enjoy exploring every system in my path to collect trade data and build my personal trading database. So I use the color system of the CARTOGRAPHY panel as follows:
So when I find a new station close to the ingress point and which has a very high supply of a really good trading commodity, I start exploring all surrounding systems within 1 or 2 jumps, and the CARTOGRAPHY panel helps me remember which systems in the area I've already explored or not. VERY handy.
===== HOW TO USE TCE WITH YOKAI'S TRADING GUIDE =====
If you've read all the above sections on TCE itself, and if you are already familiar with my Yokai's guide to recognizing (and finding) a great trade route, you probably already have a good idea of the points I'll make in this section. If you haven't yet read my trading guide, I strongly recommend you do so now before continuing, because I'm going to use terms and concepts from that guide in the following material.
WHY TCE FITS "THE YOKAI METHOD" SO WELL
My approach to trading revolves around finding strong 2-way trade routes, and around a clear notion comparing any two routes based on profit over time: specifically "how much cr/ton/hour will this particular trade route earn for me?" I always shoot for 14,000 cr/ton/hour or better. If my current route is earning less than that, I keep exploring until I find the next route that will earn at least 14,000 cr/ton/hour. When I find such routes, I keep careful track of them. If one dries up because of changes made by FD or a temporary (or permanent) spike in other players trading from the same system, I just move to one of my other "milk runs".
The trick, of course, is finding such milk runs in the first place. I used to do this by using Slopey's BPC tool (which is great) and spending a LOT of time filtering, sorting, and refining searches PLUS looking carefully at in-game System maps to find good candidates, then going out to each one and actually flying the route to time it, so that I could calcuate the exact cr/ton/hour potential of the route. However, there are two weaknesses to using crowdsourced tools like Slopey's:
In my opinion, using TCE instead of the crowdsourced trading tools, or instead of the other popular "private database" trading tool (Cmdr's Notebook), solves the above two problems:
Finally, TCE is a great fit for my approach to trading because it is squarely focused on finding 2-way routes. It can be tempting to spend lots of time in other tools looking for great 3-way or 4-way routes, but IMO this is wasteful and complex and too much effort for not enough gain over just finding some great 2-way "milk runs". So TCE keeps it simple, and prevents you from being too tempted to spend (usually fruitless) hours trying to figure out a 3-way route.
TCE FULLY SUPPORTS AND ENCOURAGES WHAT I CALL "NOMAD TRADING"
My trade guide hasn't yet detailed my approach to "nomad trading", because no tool so far has really supported easily doing nomad trading. Until TCE came along. The TRADE panel is squarely built to enable nomad trading, and the CARTOGRAPHY panel is squarely aimed at helping you thoroughly explore a web of trading destinations within a given "sphere" of space.
The idea behind "nomad trading" is simple: rather than endlessly grinding a 2-way "milk run" over and over and over and over, as fast as you can execute it for maximum cr/ton/hour, you instead simply jump around various stations in your network of trade data, one by one, by ALWAYS choosing the single best unit profit trade you can make from the station you're currently at. For example:
If you actually do this in game (and you've collected enough station data), you'll see that the process takes you through a endless succession of different journeys. Not the same old speed-grind between two stations like a trained monkey. Best of all, you can be confident that every single journey you make is the yielding the maximum profit possible (based on your total collected station data).
And perhaps best of all, it's just so seamless and easy and relaxing. TCE does all the number crunching for you. All you have to do is keep expanding your collection of new stations visited, and if you land at a station and see that the trade data is more than a few days old, you use the COMMODITY panel to quickly update the prices for that station. It's awesome, it's fun, it's in the spirit of the game. Your results are based on your own efforts and your own exploration; nobody elses. It's very rewarding and quite the relaxing counterpoint to tedious 2-way milk run grinding.
AND (lol) while you're doing this type of nomad trading, at any station you can choose instead to open the CARTOGRAPHY panel, pick a nearby system within jump range that you haven't yet visited and explored, go there, capture data for any new stations that may be there, and once you've saved the COMMODITY data, the TRADE panel automatically appears and gives you the option to resume your nomad trading from this new station. You always have the choice to "explore" or to "trade" with TCE and a "nomad trading" approach to things. And your credit balance just grows and grows throughout it all.
TCE FULLY SUPPORTS AND ENCOURAGES WHAT I CALL "REPUTATION TRADING"
Reputation trading is another simple concept. The idea here is that you are primarily doing bulletin board missions at a new station to increase your reputation with the local faction that controls that station (and thereby, with the major faction they have pledged allegiance to, and thereby also improving your chances of receiving another "naval ascension" mission within that major faction). But while you are doing a BB mission to go visit some other station, you might as well haul a full cargo hold of other commodities that sell well at that station.
And then when you land at that station for the BB mission, and it's time to come back to the first station and claim the reward, you want to haul back a full load of the best unit profit possible on the way back.
Again, the TRADE panel enables all of this seamlessly and easily. Sure the _first_ trip out to a new station that a BB mission sends you to, the TRADE panel will be of no real help. But after you've landed there once, registered the station, and collected the COMMODITY data for that station, now you have what you need to make the best profit possible every time the first station's BB missions send you out there again. (And they will: the BB missions always pick a cluster of nearby stations and repeat them often as you keep grinding BB rep missions.
Another way the TRADE panel can help with BB missions and rep grinding is when the mission is to go find X amount of some commodity and bring it back for a reward. You can use the FIND COMMODITY section of the TRADE panel to find the closest station (among your collected trade data) that sells that commodity, fly out there, grab those X units, fill the remainder of your cargo hold with whatever the TRADE panel tells you to bring back (you'll have to manually set the AUTO DESTINATION to be the station you're heading back to), and... max profit possible for the trip.
AND OF COURSE, TCE FULLY SUPPORTS FINDING THE BEST 2-WAY MILK RUN PER "THE YOKAI METHOD"
The "meat" of my trading guide revolves around how to find the best possible 2-way "milk run". This is grind monkey business, but it's the only way to go when you're really reaching for that next larger ship or that next expensive module upgrade or whatever. So how does TCE support this approach?
- It's a screen overlay on top of your ED game window that looks like a natural part of the game UI. No more alt-tabbing out of game to look at your trade/station info. You never need to leave the game! (Follow the yellow link above to see screenshots of the UI.)
- It makes capturing all of the commodity data for stations a breeze. You literally push one button when looking at the commodity screen and TCE runs EliteOCR perfectly in the background to just magically populate the TCE commodity list for the station. Again, no alt tabbing out of game and messing directly with the EliteOCR interface. TCE finally takes you out of the 14th century and the need for handwritten notes/ledgers. Visit a station, push a button, and your shipboard "trade computer" remembers everything!
- It maintains a private database for you, and you alone, by default. No more worrying that your market data will be leeched by other players, and no more worrying about whether you are "cheating" by using a crowdsourced data tool! Oh, to be sure, you can optionally pool your data with other players, but even then it's with a limited group of friends or "guildmates", so you can still roleplay it as "fair and in the spirit of the game" if that's an important notion to you.
Basically, TCE provides is the 34th century in-ship trading computer that many of us have asked for and wished that FD had been able to put in the game. It opens up an entirely new type of role-play: "trade exploration". TCE makes it possible to enjoy exploring star systems and stations with a tangible reward for each new discovery: A) You add to your growing personal collection of station data in game. YOUR data. And B) every new station you acquire this way adds to YOUR increasing income potential and trading options.
WHAT THIS GUIDE IS AND IS NOT
This guide, and its thread, is NOT technical support for TCE. If you are having trouble installing and using TCE, or you encounter bugs with any new version/update that Eventure puts out, DO NOT POST IN THIS THREAD. Post over in Eventure's [RELEASE] Trade Computer Extension thread instead.
This guide _will_ talk you through some common pain points of installation and learning to use TCE. But only as one-time "advice" with a little more detail than Eventure's instructions can provide.
This guide will also feature an entire section devoted to ways you can use TCE to approach trading per the methods and rules I espouse over in my other thread Yokai's guide to recognizing (and finding) a great trade route.
===== ALL ABOUT TCE ITSELF =====
FINDING AND DOWNLOADING TCE
Look in Eventure's [RELEASE] Trade Computer Extension thread.
Note that you must have a relatively current version of both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access loaded on your computer. TCE does not support other spreadsheets and databases. If you balk at the cost of purchasing both Excel and Access, note that you can effectively rent the latest version of Excel 2013 and Access 2013 for only $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year by purchasing Office 365 Home. Not sure you want even go this far just to try out TCE? No problem: that link to Office 365 also gives you to the option to try out Office 365 for free for a limited period.
THERE ARE TWO DATABASES YOU CAN CHOOSE FROM
This section is NOT true until Eventure releases the non-beta version of 1.36!
The default database that comes with TCE is located in the DB subfolder and it's called TCE.mdb. This default database comes preloaded with 150 registered stations. However, some commanders will prefer to start with an empty database and work only with station data that they've collected for themselves. So if you do not want 150 stations worth of data to start with, you can swap out the default database with an alternate database that comes preloaded with only 2 registered stations. I don't advise trying to completely remove the 2 preloaded stations: it's doable but tricky. My advise is simply swap out the two DBs and live with the two stations that you didn't collect for yourself.
- Use Windows Explorer to look at the DB subfolder inside the TCE folder.
- Rename the default TCE.mdb file to some name like "TCE_default.mdb".
- Rename the alternate file ???.??? to "TCE.mdb".
- Continue with the general process in the INSTALLATION TIPS section below if you haven't already done this.
INSTALLATION TIPS
Installing an "Installer" version of TCE is pretty self-explanatory. Installing a "Non-Installer" version of TCE (which is the only version sometimes, especially for newest beta releases) is a simple matter of:
- Unzipping the TCE.zip to a folder anywhere on your system.
- Downloading the latest version of Seeebek's Elite OCR, unzipping the contents somewhere temporary, and then moving the _contents_ of the unzip folder into the EliteOCR _subfolder_ of your TCE folder.
- Double-clicking the prestart.bat file in the TCE folder to create some security certificates that Excel will require.
To run TCE, you simply make sure ED is already running in "Borderless Windowed" mode at a resolution of 1920x1080 or higher, and then you alt-tab out and double-click the TCE.xlsm file in the TCE folder. Eventure provides an icon in the "Non-installer" version that you can use to manually make a shortcut to TCE.xlsm with a pretty icon to make it easier to find.
A note about the size you should be running ED at. It _really_ should be either 1920x1080 or 1920x1200, not so much because of TCE itself, but because of the EliteOCR tool that TCE runs under the covers. EliteOCR is not very accurate at screen resolutions smaller than 1920x1080.
When you run TCE for the first time, there are two pain points you'll run into:
- Excel will not allow the macros to run until you do some additional configuration, which is rather confusing, and you might have forgotten in the "Non-installer" version to run a special prestart.bat file that is necessary to create the security certificates that Excel will require.
- TCE asks you to specify a few paths to ED log files and other things. And finding the ED logs folder is a real pain because there are multiple ED folders all over your system, everyone's ED installation seems to look different depending on your particular version of Windows and when you first bought and installed ED, and the logs folder you need is probably inside one of the normally "hidden" folders in Windows.
So let's cover the Excel pain point first. When you start up TCE for the first time, you're just going to see an Excel spreadsheet with a SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled message in a yellow bar near the top, which displays only an Options button. At least, that's what happens in Excel 2013 that is running as part of Office 365 on a Windows 8.1 machine. You may see something _slightly_ different, or even have an obvious option in that yellow warning bar to simply enable the macro right then and there. The following steps are written for Office 365/Excel 2013/Windows 8.1. You can probably adapt them slightly to do the same thing in earlier versions of Excel. If these tips don't help you, please post your questions on Eventure's TCE thread.
- In the yellow warning bar, click Options.
- In the window that appears, click Open the Trust Center.
- In the Trust Center window, select the Trusted Locations tab.
- In the Trusted Locations page, click Add new location.
- In the window that appears, click Browse and select the TCE folder. Also select the checkbox for Subfolders of this location are also trusted.
- Click OK.
- Back at the Trust Center window, click OK again, and OK one more time to close the Security Alert window.
- You're now back at Excel and the yellow warning bar is gone, but the spreadsheet still says simply "If TCE doesn't start, macros are deactivated".
- Close Excel entirely. You'll get a warning dialog about whether to save changes to TCE.xlsm. Click Don't Save.
- Double-click TCE.xlsm (or the shortcut you created for it) to reopen TCE. This time the spreadsheet will appear briefly, disappear, and you'll now see the PRE-START CONFIGURATION PANEL for TCE (or the TCE itself if you've already configured it once).
Now let's cover the pain point of finding the ED Netlog folder and appconfig folder in the PRE-START CONFIGURATION PANEL of TCE. First, the AUTO-DETECT button probably won't do much good, because it requires you to find "Where ED is installed". Which is really not in an obvious place; you're likely to find only the _launcher_, not the actual game binaries and folders. Even worse, the actual game binaries and folders are probably inside a "hidden" folder that you'll never find unless you've set up Windows Explorer to show you all hidden folders on your system. So you're probably better off finding the right folder manually. Here are the steps that will get you close:
- Open Windows Explorer. The PRE-START CONFIGURATION PANEL will be obsuring the center of your screen. Just move Windows Explorer to the side as needed to work with it.
- On the View tab, select the Hidden Items checkbox.
- In the Search box, type elitedangerous32.exe and press Enter.
- Once the search results show up, right click EliteDangerous32.exe and choose Open file location. You are now looking at the "game directory". The folder you are currently looking at is the APPCONFIG FILE FOLDER that TCE is asking for. The Logs subfolder that you see there is the NETLOG FILE FOLDER that TCE is asking for.
- In the PRE-START CONFIGURATION panel, click the top two SELECT buttons and navigate to the folders described above in step 4.
- Now click the SELECT button in the ELITEOCR INSTALL FOLDER field and navigate to where you unzipped the TCE folder. Look for the EliteOCR subfolder in there and specify that for this configuration path.
- Select your languages and click START TCE.
WHAT TO DO IF TCE CRASHES OR HANGS
The TCE interface comprises a bunch of Microsoft Excel macros in a single TCE.xlsm file. The TCE database comprises a single Microsoft Access database in a TCE.mbd file. When you see a WAIT message in a TCE panel, the Excel macros are updating tables in the Access database.
Most of the time, if TCE displays an error message, it means some logic in the Excel file got "hung". At this point, the data update it was trying to do to the Access database might have succeeded or failed. It's rare that you have to worry about the database being corrupted in any way. When Excel gets hung like this, it is ALWAYS best to perform the following steps, even if TCE seems to recover gracefully from the hang and seems to begin working again:
- Click OK to close the error message. (Or, if a Debug button appears, you should first copy or screenshot the error message, then click Debug and copy or screenshot the lines surrounding the highlighted code line that failed. Reporting the exact error message and the code surrounding the failed code line to Eventure in their TCE thread will help Eventure squash the bug.)
- IMPORTANT: If Excel asks at this point whether you want to "save" or "don't save" your changes, always choose "don't save". Why? Because what you're saving changes to is the Excel file itself, which means something about the crash changed the Excel file itself. Which means if you "save" the changes, you are changing the default state of the macros in the Excel file, which can effectively break TCE until you replace the TCE.xlsm with a fresh copy that contains exactly what Eventure put in it. (Hint: you can always grab a fresh copy by re-downloading the most recent "update" file link that Eventure has posted in their TCE thread.
- If TCE did not automatically close, and appears to still be running, shut it down manually by selecting CONTROL > EXIT in TCE.
- As in the previous step, if you get a prompt to save anything, always choose "don't save".
- Restart TCE.
The reason you should _always_ shut down and restart TCE if you get an error message is because a hang can potentially cause other state-detection routines in the Excel code from working correctly. For example, TCE might seem to be fine after you dismiss an error message, but then you land at the next station and the CURRENT POSITION and AUTO DESTINATION panels don't update to reflect your current station. Stuff like that. Only closing and restarting TCE will fix this.
UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REGISTERED AND UNREGISTERED STATIONS
Starting with v1.36, TCE requires you to distinguish between a "registered" station and a "non-registered" station. The next section goes into more detail about this, but the concept is simple:
- An unregistered station is just a name and an associated star system in which the station is found. There are no identifying details such as the distance from the system's main star, the type of station design (which also tells TCE what the largest landing pad size is), the government allegiance, the economy type, and other attributres. The tool comes with a large list of unregistered stations already in the database to speed up data entry for stations you haven't landed at before, and also to prevent errors in spelling station names, which is especially important if you are sharing your TCE database with friends or guild mates.
- A registered station is one for which all the identifying information listed above has been populated.
Note that you can enter commodity data only for a registered station. If you land at an unregistered station and try to add commodity data for it, TCE won't let you.
The general process when landing at a new station for the first time is to:
- First try to ADD UNREGISTERED STATION and see if the station is already in the STATION NAME list. If so, you fill out all the station data there and save it.
- If the station is not in the STATION NAME list for ADD UNREGISTERED STATION, you must click the left arrow to return to the ADD NEW STATION panel. Then you must manually enter the STATION NAME and continue from there.
Again, the next section goes into this in more detail. One other nuance here is that if you go to the ADD UNREGISTERED STATION panel and the STAR SYSTEM name changes to some other system than the one you're really at, this means the star itself is not yet in the database. So first you'll have to add the star itself to the database before you can then ADD NEW STATION. To do this, in TCE click DATABASE > STARS, then go down to the section below "ADDING A NEW STAR SYSTEM RECORD WHEN TCE PROMPTS YOU" and follow the steps there to add the star to the database. Then click DATABASE > STATIONS, navigate to ADD NEW STATION, and fill out the panel (you might also need to select the star system that you just added).
ADDING DATA FOR A SYSTEM/STATION YOU'RE VISITING FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME
- When you first jump into the system, stop immediately in near orbit of the star you emerged at.
- Use your in-ship Navigation panel to write down the ls distance to all stations your ship can land at. Don't bother with anything farther away than ~2000 ls, because it will take too long to fly farther than that each trip.
- Now open the System Map and click the stations you've marked in the previous step. For each, write the Allegiance type (Empire/Federation/etc) and the Economy type. Be sure to note a mixed economy correctly (Such as Industrial/Refinery).
- Now Fly to each of the stations you've noted in the previous steps. For each station, perform the following:
- Pay attention to the visual appearance of the station as you approach to land at it. If its an Orbis or Coriolis station, pay attention to what it looks like, because later you'll need choose from three different types of Orbis station or two different types of Coriolis when updating the station database.
- Go to Starport Services > Contacts and note whether the station has a Black Market.
- Go back to Starport Services and note the existence of Munitions, Repairs, Outfitting, and Shipyard.
- From the TCE menu click DATABASE > STATIONS.
- In the TRADE STATION DATABASE panel, click the right arrow until you see ADD UNREGISTERED STATION (We always check the unregistered list first).
- Click the STATION NAME field and see if the station you're at is already listed. If so, click it.
- If you don't see the station listed, or if the system name itself changes to something other than the system you're really at, use the arrows at the top of the panel to choose ADD NEW STATION. Then perform the following.
- Make sure the STAR SYSTEM name matches the system you're really at.
- Manually type in the name of the station.
- Continue with the remaining steps below.
- If you don't see the station listed, or if the system name itself changes to something other than the system you're really at, use the arrows at the top of the panel to choose ADD NEW STATION. Then perform the following.
- Click STATION TYPE and choose from the dropdown. Make sure the displayed image matches what you saw on the way in.
- Click DISTANCE TO STAR and enter the number of ls you recorded above in step 2. Just the number by itself.
- Click JURISDICTION and select Empire/Federation/etc.
- Click ECONOMY and select the specific economy type you wrote down in step 3.
- In Installations, check each box as appropriate. Note that "Rearm" means whether you saw "Munitions" in the Starport Services menu, and that "Blackmarket" should be checked only if you saw "Black Market" listed in the Contacts menu.
- Now click SAVE at the very top of the TRADE STATION DATABASE panel and wait until the panel disappears.
- Now open the Commodities Market window in the game, then move your selection over to the top right detail panel. The idea here is to ensure that no orange highlight/selection bars are visible in the list of commodities while you take OCR screenshots in the next step.
- From the TCE menu, click COMMODITY, then update the commodity list for the station as follows.
- Ensure that the in-game commodities list is at the very top of the list. Again, be sure to move your cursor to the right if necessary to remove all line highlighting from the commodities list. This makes the OCR results more accurate.
- At the bottom of the COMMODITY PANEL, click START OCR SCAN, then wait for the PLEASE WAIT message to go away.
- You should now see that the first category (chemicals) has been populated. Verify the numbers you see in the COMMODITY PANEL of TCE match what you see in the in-game commodity list.
- Click the right arrow for the CATEGORY selector in the COMMODITY PANEL of TCE to display the next category. These should already be at least partially populated. Verify the numbers match what you see in the in-game commodity list.
- Repeat this process until you get to a CATEGORY that is not fully populated. This is because some or all of the items in that category were not visible in the in-game list when you clicked START OCR SCAN.
- Move your mouse into the game window and drag the scroll bar down until you're at the next commodity _after_ the ones that were visible in the previous OCR screenshot. Important: make sure you don't make the next commodity too close to the top horizontal line of the GOODS list: you need some space above it for EliteOCR to read it cleanly. Again, move your cursor over to the right if needed, so that there are no orange highlight lines in the in-game commodity list.
- Click START OCR SCAN again, and then repeat this process as you walk through each remaining category in the COMMODITY PANEL of TCE.
- Once you're at the final WEAPONS category, click SAVE at the top of the COMMODITY PANEL of TCE and wait until the TRADE INFORMATION panel appears.
- Congratulations, you have fully populated the station data with everything that TCE needs! Now click HIDE at the top right of the TRADE INFORMATION panel.
Notes:
- Hanging out next to a star while you look at System maps, distances to stations in the system, etc. can sometimes be hazardous to your health. Especially in Open mode. So if the system has stations you can land at and were planning to land at anyway, you can avoid hanging out at the star itself and instead land at the closest station berfore doing steps 2 and 3 of the above procedure. Once safely in the station, you can open the System Map there to gather all the needed info about the station's allegiance and economy types, and you can open the Navigation panel (left ship UI screen) and look at the distance from where you are in the station to the parent star in the system (the top-most entry in the list of system objects. The distance from you to the parent star is the ls distance to the station that you would normally record in step 2.
- Some players have reported that after scanning and clicking SAVE in the COMMODITIES panel, when the TRADE panel automatically appears the commodities that you just added might not be visible in the panel. If this happens to you, try opening the COMMODITIES panel again, click any one comodity you see to force the SAVE button to appear again, and then try saving again.
ADDING A NEW STAR SYSTEM RECORD WHEN TCE PROMPTS YOU
When the STAR SYSTEMDATABASE panel automatically appears, it means that TCE doesn't already havethe star system's coordinates in the database. Without these coordinates, itcannot calculate distances to other systems/stations, so it's in your best interestto take a few simple steps to capture the correct coordinates.
- In the game window, open the Galaxy map, then open its Navigation tab.
- In the search box, enter SOL, then click the right arrow next to the search field.
- Note the "DISTANCE" number shown for SOL in the galaxy map, and enter this exact number in the STAR SYSTEM DATABASE panel of TCE, in the field to the right of SOL. For example, if SOL is 181.60LY away from your current position, enter 181.60 in the field.
- Repeat this process for the other three WYRD, VEGA, and LOGA fields.
- (optional) Add a SPECIAL NOTE like "NO STATIONS", and change the default STATE OF EXPLORATION from "VISITED" to one of the other possible values from the list. For example, I like to flag a system as COMPLETE if I don't have any more stations to investigate, regardless of how many "unexplored" points of interest might be in the system.
- At the top of the STAR SYSTEM DATABASE panel, click SAVE
DELETING STATIONS FROM YOUR DATABASE
TCE does not currently support doing this, and while you can make some very careful edits in the database if you know what you're doing, it's still tedious and time-consuming to do so.
On the bright side, the default 1.36 database comes with only 150 stations pre-populated, and some of the commodity info for those 150 stations was updated as recently as Feb 27, 2015. So it's only 150 stations worth of "clutter" or "starter data".
However, if having 150 stations you didn't collect yourself bugs you, Eventure also provides an alternate database with 1.36, which has only 2 registered stations pre-populated. (You need at least two registered stations for TCE to work.) So switching to this alternate database before you start using TCE in earnest can effectively make TCE "yours and yours alone". For more information, look above in the section THERE ARE TWO DATABASES YOU CAN CHOOSE FROM.
SETTING THE JUMP RANGE OF YOUR LADEN SHIP FOR USE IN ALL CALCULATIONS
Setting your laden jump range is very important. It controls the routing that the SEARCH ROUTE TO function will find. It also controls the CARTOGRAPHY panel's list of STAR SYSTEMS IN JUMP RANGE.
1. Figure out the laden jump range of your ship via the usual methods.
2. Round down to the nearest integer. For example, my Anaconda has a laden jump range of 19.14, so the nearest integer down is 19.
3. In TCE, open the TRADE panel.
4. Down in the middle, enter your integer from step 2 in the SET JUMP LIMIT field, then press Enter and wait.
SETTING THE TRADE RANGE TO CONTROL HOW FAR OUT TCE WILL SEARCH FOR GOOD TRADES
This setting controls how far out the TRADE panel will look for the best RECOMMENDED STATION to trade with from your CURRENT STATION. Note that it does NOT control how far from your current position in the galaxy the TRADE SCOUT panel will search for 2-way trade routes.
1. In TCE, open the TRADE panel.
2. In the SET TRADE RANGE field in the lower right, enter the maximum number of lightyears you want TCE to search for good trade stations (relative to your current position). Enter an even integer. Note that the greater the trade range, the longer the TRADE SCOUT searches will take
USING THE TRADE SCOUT TO FIND THE BEST 2-WAY TRADE ROUTE
Remember, the more station data you've collected, the better the TRADE SCOUT gets. Also remember that the more old and stale your last data collection for a station is, the more inaccurate the TRADE SCOUT results might be. Update your trade data every few days, and certainly update it if you haven't visited a station recently within the past week.
- In TCE, open the TRADE SCOUT panel, then set the following values:
- MINIMAL TOTAL is the smallest possible profit you want to make from a 2-way trade run (round trip profit per ton). The higher the value, the fewer station pairs will be returned in the results, and the faster TCE will finish its search.
- MINIMAL PROFIT is the smallest unit profit you want to make from one leg of the 2-way trade route. For example, if you want to make at least 1000 unit profit in both directions, enter 1000 here.
- MAXIMAL DISTANCE is the greatest distance the two systems in the route can be from each other. Note that this is _not_ a radius search from your current position: the TRADE SCOUT will find _all_ station pairs that are this distance apart (or less) within your current collected station data.
- Click FIND ROUTE and wait. Be patient! TCE does not run on an enterprise SQL database and use optimized SQL queries. The more station data you collect, the slower the TRADE SCOUT will run. If you want the search to finish quickly, the best thing you can do is lower the MAXIMAL DISTANCE, and/or raise the MINIMAL PROFIT.
USING AND INTERPRETING THE TRADE PANEL
At first glance, the TRADE panel looks like all it tells you is the best commodity to trade from your current station (listed in the CURRENT POSITION box) to the recommended station (in the AUTO DESTINATION box). But there's a lot more going on in the TRADE panel:
- By default, the TRADE panel always updates the CURRENT POSITION to the station you just landed at. If the station is already registered and you've updated commodities for the station at least once before, then by default TCE always updates the AUTO DESTINATION to show the best one-way trading profit from your current station. The lower-left quadrant of the TRADE panel shows the best commodities to sell at the destination station, and the center bottom of the panel will auto calculate the best route to that destination station based on your maximum jump range (which you must manually specify in the SET JUMP LIMIT box).
- However, you can at any point change the start and destination stations manually, which allows you to look at the trade data for any possible one-way trade run. For more information, look below in the section SETTING THE CURRENT POSITION AND DESTINATION SYSTEM FOR THE TRADE PANEL.
- You can also use the TRADE panel to lookup the best place to buy a specific commodity, by using the lower right quadrant.
The main limitation of the TRADE panel is that it does not display a "round trip" total profit for a 2-way trade route between the two selected systems. Eventure intends for you to use the TRADE SCOUT panel for this. But there _is_ a way to quickly figure out whether the two stations listed in the TRADE panel will make for a decent two-way route or not. Here's how:
- Look at the lower-left quadrant to see the unit profit for the best 1-way trade from the station listed on the left side of the TRADE panel to the station listed on the right side.
- Now look at the two center sections in the upper middle of the TRADE window. These show the top 6 imports for the station on the left, versus the top 6 exports for the station on the right.
- If the same commodity is listed in both the Import and Export sections, you are staring at a potentially good 2-way trade route!
- Take the positive margin for the commodity listed in the Import section and add it to the negative margin for the same commodity listed in the Export section, but don't use the minus sign for the number in the Export section. This is the unit profit for the best possibly commodity trade on the return route from the station on the right coming back to the station on the left. For example, of the value in the Import section is +486 and the value in the Export section is -372, then your unit profit for bringing that commodity back is 858 cr (486 + 372).
- Add this unit profit for the return trip to the already calculated unit profit for the trip out to the station on the right that's shown in the lower left quadrant. The result is your round-trip profit per ton.
- If the Import and Export windows list totally different commodities, then you are NOT looking at a good potential two way trade route. It's that simple.
- If the same commodity is listed in both the Import and Export sections, you are staring at a potentially good 2-way trade route!
SETTING THE CURRENT POSITION AND DESTINATION SYSTEM FOR THE TRADE PANEL
By default, the TRADE panel always changes the CURRENT POSITION to be the station you just landed at, and sets the AUTO DESTINATION to be the best possible 1-way trade from your current station, based on the SET TRADE RANGE value you last set in the TRADE panel. However, you can override this automatic behavior and manually set both the start position and destination position.
- In TCE, click the CURRENT POSITION box that sits just left of the TRADE button.
- In the NEW POSITION panel that appears, click one of the orange column headers to sort the list in the order you like. For example to see all nearby stations, click the DISTANCE column header.
- Scroll to the station in the list that you want to set as the start point for the TRADE panel, then click anywhere in that row.
- Now click the AUTO DESTINATION box that sits just right of the TRADE button, and in the NEW DESTINATION panel that appears, repeat this process to choose the end point for the TRADE panel. Note that the NEW DESTINATION list works very different from the NEW POSITION list in some important ways:
- This list shows both registered and unregistered stations, so you must sort the list by the PROFIT column to move all the registered stations to the top of the list. If you see a PROFIT value of 0 cr or higher, it's registered. If you see NO DATA, that station is unregistered.
- The total set of stations you see is affected by the SET TRADE RANGE value on the bottom right quadrant of the TRADE panel. Increase this number to see more registered stations to choose from.
- Once you've set both the start and end stations per the preceding steps, click TRADE to view the best possible one-way trade from the SELECTED POSITION to the SELECTED DESTINATION.
Here's an additional trick: to reset the destination to be the real best total profit from the SELECTED POSITION, just change the SET TRADE RANGE to a different number, and press Enter. This forces TCE to choose the best destination within that specified trade range. There is no way to reset the starting position back to your current station other than by manually reselecting it as described in steps 1-3 above. However, when you leave this station and land at the next one, TCE will resume its default behavior and automatically display the station you just landed at in the current position.
FUN TRICKS WITH THE CARTOGRAPHY PANEL
I really love the CARTOGRAPHY panel. At first glance it might appear somewhat useless for a trader, and might seem to be oriented more towards explorers who want to map entire star systems and explore every "unexplored" object. But in fact, it can be very useful for traders as well! The key to creative use of the CARTOGRAPHY panel is to understand that:
- It automatically updates to show a "Visited" status when you first land at a new star system for the first time (you might have to add an unknown star system that isn't already in the database, but once you do, it also updates automatically to "Visited".
- It displays systems you've never visited in brown, systems you've visited and flagged as Explored: NO in yellow, systems you've visited and flagged as Explored: PARTIAL in light green, and systems you've visited and flagged as Explored: COMPLETE in dark green.
These attributes of the CARTOGRAPHY panel lead to useful tricks like the way I use it as a "trade explorer". I don't care about exploration in the typical sense: scanning every system, exploring every unexplored body in the system, and selling my cartographic data far away. But I _do_ enjoy exploring every system in my path to collect trade data and build my personal trading database. So I use the color system of the CARTOGRAPHY panel as follows:
- Brown stars in the list mean I haven't yet explored them for possible trading stations.
- Yellow stars means I've visited them and found NO stations there. Yellow means "not useful for trading". So basically, if I fly to a system and see no stations when I get there, I set my nav point to the next nearby unexplored system and don't do anything special. Behind the scenes, TCE has already turned this system yellow in the CARTOGRAPHY panel.
- Light green stars in the list mean the system has only outposts in it, OR that the only large stations are all further than ~2000 ls from the ingress point. I trade in an Anaconda, which cannot land at outposts, and I won't fly farther than 2000 ls from the ingress point for ANY trade route; the flight time is just too long to be profitable in terms of reasonable cr/ton/hour. So light green also means "not useful for trading" to me, but might be useful for bounty hunting resupply in a smaller ship.
- Dark green stars in the list mean the system has large stations that are less than ~2000 ls from the ingress point. Perfect candidates for trading!
So when I find a new station close to the ingress point and which has a very high supply of a really good trading commodity, I start exploring all surrounding systems within 1 or 2 jumps, and the CARTOGRAPHY panel helps me remember which systems in the area I've already explored or not. VERY handy.
===== HOW TO USE TCE WITH YOKAI'S TRADING GUIDE =====
If you've read all the above sections on TCE itself, and if you are already familiar with my Yokai's guide to recognizing (and finding) a great trade route, you probably already have a good idea of the points I'll make in this section. If you haven't yet read my trading guide, I strongly recommend you do so now before continuing, because I'm going to use terms and concepts from that guide in the following material.
WHY TCE FITS "THE YOKAI METHOD" SO WELL
My approach to trading revolves around finding strong 2-way trade routes, and around a clear notion comparing any two routes based on profit over time: specifically "how much cr/ton/hour will this particular trade route earn for me?" I always shoot for 14,000 cr/ton/hour or better. If my current route is earning less than that, I keep exploring until I find the next route that will earn at least 14,000 cr/ton/hour. When I find such routes, I keep careful track of them. If one dries up because of changes made by FD or a temporary (or permanent) spike in other players trading from the same system, I just move to one of my other "milk runs".
The trick, of course, is finding such milk runs in the first place. I used to do this by using Slopey's BPC tool (which is great) and spending a LOT of time filtering, sorting, and refining searches PLUS looking carefully at in-game System maps to find good candidates, then going out to each one and actually flying the route to time it, so that I could calcuate the exact cr/ton/hour potential of the route. However, there are two weaknesses to using crowdsourced tools like Slopey's:
- Everyone else using the tool can also find that juicy trade route you just found, and in many cases the unit profit and cr/ton/hour for the route will go down rather quickly if too many other people are farming the same route. It doesn't help that too many users of the crowdsourced data just leech off the efforts of the people who actually update the data frequently and add new stations regularly.
- The data is often old and stale, so what looks like a great trade route with a good unit profit ends up having much less unit profit when you actually get there to check it out.
In my opinion, using TCE instead of the crowdsourced trading tools, or instead of the other popular "private database" trading tool (Cmdr's Notebook), solves the above two problems:
- Because your database is private to yourself, there's less risk of other traders finding your good milk runs unless they legitimately explored those same two systems for themselves.
- Because it's your route in an area of space you are currently running around in, the data will be fresh and accurate (because it's so easy and fast to update the station data every few days when you next land at the same station. If you've recently relocated 200 Ly across the galaxy and are working/exploring a new trade area, it won't matter if your old trade data from those stations 200 Ly away are getting a little stale.
Finally, TCE is a great fit for my approach to trading because it is squarely focused on finding 2-way routes. It can be tempting to spend lots of time in other tools looking for great 3-way or 4-way routes, but IMO this is wasteful and complex and too much effort for not enough gain over just finding some great 2-way "milk runs". So TCE keeps it simple, and prevents you from being too tempted to spend (usually fruitless) hours trying to figure out a 3-way route.
TCE FULLY SUPPORTS AND ENCOURAGES WHAT I CALL "NOMAD TRADING"
My trade guide hasn't yet detailed my approach to "nomad trading", because no tool so far has really supported easily doing nomad trading. Until TCE came along. The TRADE panel is squarely built to enable nomad trading, and the CARTOGRAPHY panel is squarely aimed at helping you thoroughly explore a web of trading destinations within a given "sphere" of space.
The idea behind "nomad trading" is simple: rather than endlessly grinding a 2-way "milk run" over and over and over and over, as fast as you can execute it for maximum cr/ton/hour, you instead simply jump around various stations in your network of trade data, one by one, by ALWAYS choosing the single best unit profit trade you can make from the station you're currently at. For example:
- You're at station A. You open the TRADE panel and TCE tells you exactly the most profitable thing to haul from your CURRENT POSITION to the AUTO DESTINATION. You can specify exactly how far you want to look for an AUTO DESTINATION (how far you're willing to travel from where you are) by setting the SET TRADE RANGE value in the lower right of the TRADE panel. The exact commodity and unit profit you'll make on that haul is shown in the top row of the TRADE ADVISOR section in the lower left of the TRADE panel.
- So you fill your cargo hold with that commodity shown in the top row of the TRADE ADVISOR section, and then you make sure the SET JUMP LIMIT field in the center of the TRADE panel matches your fully laden jump range, and then you press the arrow to the right of the star system name in the SEARCH ROUTE TO section in the bottom middle of the TRADE panel.
- Now you follow the path to the destination station as shown in the SEARCH ROUTE TO section.
- Now you've landed at station B and sold off your cargo. You pop open the TRADE panel and repeat the above process to find the best single trade you can make from station B.
- Now you've landed at station C and sold off your cargo. Rinse and repeat.
If you actually do this in game (and you've collected enough station data), you'll see that the process takes you through a endless succession of different journeys. Not the same old speed-grind between two stations like a trained monkey. Best of all, you can be confident that every single journey you make is the yielding the maximum profit possible (based on your total collected station data).
And perhaps best of all, it's just so seamless and easy and relaxing. TCE does all the number crunching for you. All you have to do is keep expanding your collection of new stations visited, and if you land at a station and see that the trade data is more than a few days old, you use the COMMODITY panel to quickly update the prices for that station. It's awesome, it's fun, it's in the spirit of the game. Your results are based on your own efforts and your own exploration; nobody elses. It's very rewarding and quite the relaxing counterpoint to tedious 2-way milk run grinding.
AND (lol) while you're doing this type of nomad trading, at any station you can choose instead to open the CARTOGRAPHY panel, pick a nearby system within jump range that you haven't yet visited and explored, go there, capture data for any new stations that may be there, and once you've saved the COMMODITY data, the TRADE panel automatically appears and gives you the option to resume your nomad trading from this new station. You always have the choice to "explore" or to "trade" with TCE and a "nomad trading" approach to things. And your credit balance just grows and grows throughout it all.
TCE FULLY SUPPORTS AND ENCOURAGES WHAT I CALL "REPUTATION TRADING"
Reputation trading is another simple concept. The idea here is that you are primarily doing bulletin board missions at a new station to increase your reputation with the local faction that controls that station (and thereby, with the major faction they have pledged allegiance to, and thereby also improving your chances of receiving another "naval ascension" mission within that major faction). But while you are doing a BB mission to go visit some other station, you might as well haul a full cargo hold of other commodities that sell well at that station.
And then when you land at that station for the BB mission, and it's time to come back to the first station and claim the reward, you want to haul back a full load of the best unit profit possible on the way back.
Again, the TRADE panel enables all of this seamlessly and easily. Sure the _first_ trip out to a new station that a BB mission sends you to, the TRADE panel will be of no real help. But after you've landed there once, registered the station, and collected the COMMODITY data for that station, now you have what you need to make the best profit possible every time the first station's BB missions send you out there again. (And they will: the BB missions always pick a cluster of nearby stations and repeat them often as you keep grinding BB rep missions.
Another way the TRADE panel can help with BB missions and rep grinding is when the mission is to go find X amount of some commodity and bring it back for a reward. You can use the FIND COMMODITY section of the TRADE panel to find the closest station (among your collected trade data) that sells that commodity, fly out there, grab those X units, fill the remainder of your cargo hold with whatever the TRADE panel tells you to bring back (you'll have to manually set the AUTO DESTINATION to be the station you're heading back to), and... max profit possible for the trip.
AND OF COURSE, TCE FULLY SUPPORTS FINDING THE BEST 2-WAY MILK RUN PER "THE YOKAI METHOD"
The "meat" of my trading guide revolves around how to find the best possible 2-way "milk run". This is grind monkey business, but it's the only way to go when you're really reaching for that next larger ship or that next expensive module upgrade or whatever. So how does TCE support this approach?
- Filter the VIEW of your Galaxy map per the guidelines in my trading guide. You want to focus on high population systems of some very specific types at first: Hi Tech, Industrial, and Refinery.
- Jump from one system to the next based on the visible stars in your Galaxy map after setting the filters correctly (and verifying that there are stations in that system you can land at, and which are closer than ~2000 Ls to the ingress point, as discussed in my trade guide). Collect station data on every landing, by registering each station in TCE and updating the station commodities using TCE.
- IMPORTANT: At every station you land at during this process, look closely at the SUPPLY quantity of all the "best trading commodities" available at that station. (The ones that cost >5,000 cr each).
- If you find any such "best" commodity with a SUPPLY quantity larger than 100,000 units, continue to step 3.
- If you don't find any "best" commodity with larger than 100,000 units of supply, repeat step 2, and keep repeating step 2 until you find a station that finally pushes you on to step 3.
- IMPORTANT: At every station you land at during this process, look closely at the SUPPLY quantity of all the "best trading commodities" available at that station. (The ones that cost >5,000 cr each).
- Now that you're sitting at a station with >100,000 supply of a "best" trading commodity, you are sitting at a strong candidate for one end of a good milk run. Let's call this station "the candidate hub". You're now going to shift your exploration tactics as follows:
- Change your Galaxy map filters to display EVERY star: MIN population slider all the way to the left, MAX population slider all the way right, and every type of system economy selected.
- Pop open the CARTOGRAPHY panel in TCE and look at the list of unvisited SYSTEMS IN JUMP RANGE.
- Travel to each one of these systems identified in step 3.2, methodically, one at a time. ALL of them. Register the stations you find and collect the commodity data.
- Now go back to the candidate hub station and open the TRADE panel.
- Does the AUTO DESTINATION box list one of the stations you just explored in step 3.3?
- If the answer is "no", go to each one of the stations you visited in step 3.3 and treat it as a "jump 1 hub" by opening the CARTOGRAPHY panel and exploring every unvisited station from that particular jump 1 hub. What you're doing here is expanding the range of your collected trade data out to TWO jumps from the candidate hub you found in step 3.
- If the answer is "yes", look closely at the two IMPORTS and EXPORTS sections of the TRADE panel.
- Do you see the SAME commodity listed in the top six lines of both IMPORTS and EXPORTS?
- If "yes", proceed to step 3.5.
- If "no", go explore all the "jump 1 hubs" as described above.
- Do you see the SAME commodity listed in the top six lines of both IMPORTS and EXPORTS?
- Does the AUTO DESTINATION box list one of the stations you just explored in step 3.3?
- In step 3.4, you explored all the systems out as far as 2 jumps from the candidate hub. And two conditions are possible at this point:
- You found NO stations within two jumps of the candidate hub that yielded the SAME commodity in the top 6 rows of the IMPORTS and EXPORTS section. This means that you couldn't find any station within 2 jumps of the candidate hub that would offer a decent unit profit on the return trip to the candidate hub. So you do NOT have a potentially good 2-way "milk run" based on the candidate hub as one end of the trade route. What to do? Go back to Step 1 and repeat until you find a new candidate hub.
- You found at least one station within 1 or 2 jumps of the candidate hub that had the SAME commodity listed in the IMPORTS and EXPORTS section of the TRADE panel when you are docked at the candidate hub station. This means you are looking at one or more "strong candidates" for a 2-way milk run from the candidate hub. Proceed to step 4.
- Add up the numbers shown in the TRADE panel when you are sitting at the candidate hub station:
- For the commodity that is listed in the top 6 rows of BOTH the IMPORTS and EXPORTS sections, add the two MARGIN numbers together. Ignore the negative value on the right side in the EXPORTS section: treat it as a positive number. For example, if the import margin is +643 and the export margin is -539, then the total is 1192. This is your unit profit for the return commodity from that station.
- Add the return unit profit to the PROFIT value from the top row of the TRADE ADVISOR section in the lower left of the TRADE panel. The result is your round-trip unit profit.
- Now go fly the route between these two stations a few times, with a stopwatch and buying/selling the respective commodities each time. Fly three full round trips and keep the stopwatch going while you by and sell each time. Stop the timer after you've launched from the candidate hub station 3 times. Divide the total time by 3. This is your average round trip time.
- Now divide 60 by your average round trip time, then multiply that result by your round trip unit profit. This is your cr/ton/hour metric for the route. For example, if the average round trip time is 10.5 minutes, and your round trip unit profit is 1873, then (60 / 10.5 ) * 1873 = 10,703 cr/ton/hour.
- If your total cr/ton/hour figure is LESS than 10,000, go back to step 1 and keep looking. You can do better. If your cr/ton/hour is 14,000 or higher, you have found a GREAT milk run and should keep track of it. If it falls somewhere in between 10,000 and 14,000, it's still a solid run you can grind for maximum cash flow, but you might want to keep looking for those tasty >14,000 trade routes when you get bored of the monkey grinding on this route.
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