GREETINGS DEAR SIR- Beginner's guide to getting filthy rich

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

One of the biggest hurdles for a beginning player is making money before St. Katherine's star. Towards the end of the game, every player can be rich beyond dreams of avarice, but at the start money can be tight. So here's my thoughts about how to make money:


1. Max out your cargo capacity ASAP


The more goods you can carry, the less time you will have to spend carrying them around. The freighter does not gain cargo capacity from a cargo hold but the Wolfen and Sapphire do. The Wolfen is more encumbered by having a full hold than the Sapphire is and can carry less in total. I favor the Smuggler's cargo hold for reasons I will go into in a later post.


2. Use smart selling strategies


As long as you have more of a commodity in your hold then a station has, you will be able to get the station's maximum price for it.


Example 1: You have 9 titanium barricades sitting in a salvager nomad wreck and you want to sell them to an armor station, but you can only fit 5 at a time in your hold. If you first sell 4 barricades and then sell 5, you will get full price for every single one (provided that the station has no barricades in stock already). If you sell 5 barricades and then try to sell 4, the station will either give you a lower price for the second load or refuse to buy them at all.

This is true for all commodities at all stations and also includes nonstandard sales like selling illegal goods at the Victorian Nightclub. If you're in a system where you know you will be able to acquire a lot of a single commodity- for example, in Eridani you are likely to get at least 10 barrels of Centauri rice from centauri warlord stations- it makes sense to acquire as much as you can and then sell it all at once rather than selling it haphazardly.

Stations have a single, finite "pot" of money that all purchases and sales are made from. If you make purchases at a station, that money becomes available for the station to buy stuff from you.

Example 2: You have 300 Helium-3 fuel rods in your cargo hold and you want to sell them to an Ice Farm, but the Ice farm only has 10,000 credits and can onl afford to buy 200 at 50 credits/rod. If you sell 200 rods and then buy 5,000 credits worth of the Ice Farm's luxury food, the Ice farm will have 5000 credits but will refuse to buy your remaining rods. If you first buy out all the food, the Ice farm will have 15,000 credits available to buy all of your rods, so you will depart with all of the Ice Farm's food and money.


3. Prioritize looting based on mass/value ratio


Example 3: You killed an armored freighter carrying a quad titanium barricade and a plate of plasteel armor. A quad titanium barricade will sell at an armorer station for 900 credits; a segment of plasteel armor sells for only 360 credits. However, the quad barricade weighs 20 tons and the plasteel only weighs 3 tons. Thus, you will get 45 credits/ton for the barricade and 120 credits/ton for the plasteel. If you plan to loot until your cargo hold is full and only then go sell your goodies, it makes sense to prioritize value-dense goods.

Other situations are less straightforward.

Example 4: You have just exterminated the Charon pirates and want to sell some pirate goodies at St. Katherine's Star before moving on to the ungoverned territories. You have to choose between looting 50 tons of KM100 Longbow missiles and 50 tons of He3 fuel rods (let's assume that you don't have enough patience to go back later and re-loot the wrecks to get it all.)

He3 rods have a base value of 25 and a mass of 0.1 tons
Longbows have a base value of 15 and a mass of 0.05 tons

The fuel is 'worth' 250 credits/ton
The missiles are 'worth' 300 credits/ton

so you might assume that the missiles are your best pick because they are worth over twice as much per ton. However, in practice, which you should choose depends on which stations are available to you.

You can sell everything at the Commonwealth station, but if you do that, you will get 90% value for fuel and 50% value for missiles. In practice, Transcendence rounds when units would have a fractional value. The missiles will fetch 140 credits/ton, while the fuel will fetch 220 credits/ton.

You will make 11000 credits from the fuel and 7000 credits from the missiles; fuel rods are a much better pick.

If there is a generic arms dealer station present, the situation changes slightly. The arms dealer will pay you 60% for the missiles, which bumps your profit up to 9000 credits/ton. This is pretty close to what you'd make from the fuel; you could really go either way.

The situation is muddled more if you actually want to use the missiles and fuel rods instead of selling them. The longbows will be significantly more expensive for you to buy than the fuel rods would be, so you may want to grab them instead of the fuel.

However, if there is an Ice Farm present in St. Katherine's Star, the situation changes. Ice Farms will pay 50 credits for He3 rods, so suddenly the fuel rods are a much better choice because your load will sell for a whopping 25,000 credits. The profit you'll make on the fuel will more then compensate for the extra 2000 credits it would cost you to buy 100 tons of Longbows from an arms dealer in a later system

To be continued...

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Reserved

[digdug]

this is a very nice analysis. I'm surprised that nobody commented.

What if I sell the missiles at a corporate weapons dealer ?
What if I sell the fuel rods at an ice farm ?

[Aury]

I'm not sure, but I believe that the rin-using stations don't decrease their prices; there are also a few others IIRC that either 'deplete' their inventories over time, allowing you to sell more, and some that always give you full price. (Or I might just be thinking of the rin stations. Pretty sure that there were some pre-st.ks that did that.

[Atarlost]

Rins are now a true currency and rin markets will get saturated just like credit markets.