I've been thinking about how to go about describing how I go about earning money. I know what I do is not the most efficient way to make money in the game. There are Rare trade runs etc for that, what I try to do is cram as much fun and diversity in to each game session in order to keep the game fresh and not make it into a money grind. I've done the grind before in other games, it becomes a job and you ultimately end up despising the very thing you chose to do for entertainment.
So how do I go about making money and keep it fun? I'll explain, it will take some time and I will most likely break this up in to several posts.
Tereshkova Dock Altair System
Having newly arrived at my new base of operations for the immediate future I go about checking out the scene for lucritive opportunities. I chose this Outpost for two very important reasons. (Important to me at least). Firstly; Tereshkova Dock has a Black Market and secondly its an Outpost which means no ship scans when you haul in your fresh load of "found" items.
There are multiple ways to go about getting illicit goods to sell to the Black Market. I typically utilize two methods and sometimes a third when it shows up. Both methods utilize the same tactics to achieve so work well in tandem together.
The first method involves running missions for a local faction by checking the Bulletin Board. Not just any mission though specific ones that ask you to go out and recover stolen.......um lost items. Actually they don't care how you get the items with the exception you cannot go out and buy them from the market to complete the mission.
These missions can be identified by the little cargo can icons next to the mission title. They ask for you to pick up say 1 Black Box from Altair system. So you go out and search USS (Unidentified Signal Sources) to find a Black Box.
Now while out searching USS for your Black Box you may have to drop in to several to find what you are looking for. The spawn in a USS is random although it is weighted towards the items your looking for "if" your searching in the system the mission asks you to look in.
You can find all sorts of random things in USS
Pirates ....
Traders.......
Other types of cargo.....
This guy again...
More random items......
Or even a guy who offers you a counter mission to deliver the goods to a different Station/System
Now I know your asking yourself how in the heck am I going to find one little Black Box out there among all this randomness. Well keep in mind that the spawn is weighted in your favor ( I have at most had to hit 5 different USS sites in order to find what I was looking for). And there is a fast and easy way to find USS sites.
Once you get to the system you are supposed to search in align toward anything other than the star (remember what happened to me .....) and set your speed as low as it will go while still in Super Cruise. Switch over to your Navigation panel and watch for USS to appear, when they do Lock them, switch back to main view, align toward the USS and drop out of SC. They alway appear under 1000km when you are going this slow so you can literally accomplish those three as quickly as you read it here. With practice switching between the panels to watch for "Hostiles" Locking and dropping out of SC becomes second nature.
Once you find what your looking for...
Its as simple as deploying your cargo Scoop, flying towards the item while keeping it in the center of the Cargo Targetting box and scooping it up. Keep your speed in check or you have a high likelyhood of destrying the container when it comes in contact with the scoop. If your scoop target box look like this:
With the red boxes around the outer edge you are travelling to fast.
With the exception of black boxes, (which I have only seen spawn one item) most sites usually spawn between 4 and 8 items. Now if you only need for instance 2 Rare Artwork don't just leave the other 2-6 items sitting there in space. Your smuggling anyway pick them up and haul them back! Now you have items to either turn in for a new mission asking for the same item (if one is available) or you can sell them directly to the Black Market for pure profit.
By picking up the extra items when doing missions you can double your money making most of the time for little extra effort. I have litterally accepted a mission, jumped to the system, located a USS, Scooped the cargo, Jumped back to my home system, docked, turned in the mission and sold my extras in under 10 minutes for 28k profit.
On the other side of that I have had some interesting adventures while looking for the item I needed and flying around with a half full cargo hold of stolen goods. Between Pirates and local Police it can get very interesting. Watch out for Police interdictions while flying back to turn in the items as getting caught means getting fined. Fines can be pretty expensive as they are based off the value of the goods you are carrying.
( The more you increase your faction standing with the local controlling faction the less likely you are to be interdicted by the local police for a "courtesy" check).
I will cover another tip for making money in my next post.
Hopefully someone out there finds a use for this information and passes it on.
Fly Aimlessly!
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