The Beginner's Guide to Commerce [WIP guide]

Ask any question about playing and surviving in the Transcendence universe. Newbies welcome!
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Won't medical stations also buy luxury food at a markup comparable to hotels? I would consider med stations and agricultural stations to be secondary stations rather than strictly sources or sinks.

The generic cargo hold seems to be much more common in Eternity Port, although I'm not sure if it's just because EP just has more low-level station types that sell equipment. It's hard to make money with illegals in EP because the basic Black Market stations and Commonwealth metropolises are both pretty rare and there are no guaranteed ones before St. Kat's (unlike in base where you have, at a minimum, Starton Eridani and the Rigel Black Market.)

Finally, a few comments on military equipment and illegals.
  • Before you get into rin economy zones it can be very lucrative to sell military gear at the Black Market. Normally you would want to save these for the Teratons but they show up pretty late in the game. Teratons only seem to buy weapons, ammunition and alien devices.
  • Damaged equipment can be sold to Tinker stations and to generic (non-manufacturer-affiliated) armor and weapons dealers. These stations become scarce after St. Kat's, though.
  • I believe that customs scanning is only performed at the following stations: Commonwealth Settlement, Commonwealth Residential Station, Commonwealth Drydock, the small residential habitats EXCEPT for ones that have been occupied by Centauri, Agricultural Station, Medical Station, Commonwealth Mining Setlement, Commonwealth Metropolis, St. Kats Arcology, the special monument stations in St. Kat's and Sol(?), Commonwealth Militia Station, CSC(?), Point Juno(?). Military and illegal equipment that is installed on your ship can't get confiscated.
  • The corporate-affiliated stations, Tinkers, Korolov, Battle Arena Maximus(?), Black Market stations, Ringers, Teratons, and Earth factions' stations will never scan your ship for illegal or military goods. Additionally, you can buy and sell military equipment at these stations if it is available, but only black market shipyards (and maybe certain teraton and Heretic system stations?) will install military equipment without a military ID. EP has opportunities to acquire Earth faction military IDs that function the same as the Commonwealth military ID.
  • Selling slave coffins has a chance to trigger an automatic arrest for slave trading the next time that you dock at a commonwealth station.
EditorRUS
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Selling slave coffins has a chance to trigger an automatic arrest for slave trading the next time that you dock at a commonwealth station.
Selling 50 coffins at once will trigger the even.

Code: Select all

							(if (ls (random 1 50) itemCount)
								(intCommonwealthCrime 2 "slave-trading")
								)
							)
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Conversely, selling only one coffin is safe, since (ls 1 1) is never true. That said, I prefer to hoard spare coffins (and luxury food) for the Teraton fabricator.
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EditorRUS
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The problem here is that you can sell every coffin one by one and never be arrested for slave-trading as this check is being made every time you sell coffins where itemCount means how many coffins you are selling rather than how many coffins you had sold before.
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Song
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EditorRUS wrote:The problem here is that you can sell every coffin one by one and never be arrested for slave-trading as this check is being made every time you sell coffins where itemCount means how many coffins you are selling rather than how many coffins you had sold before.
That is a bug then. Please repost it on the Ministry of Records, or in the bugs forum.


Slave trading won't be covered by this guide: there's more profitable ways to deal with them. Ripping off the militia will be.


In addition, I won't be doing specific Eternity Port stuff, because making money in that adventure is stupidly easy right now: farm cash for a bunch of quantum CPUs then hack the most expensive guns possible out of friendly stations and sell them back. When Eternity Port is more fleshed out in future patches, I will revisit it for commerce purposes.
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EditorRUS
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That is a bug then. Please repost it on the Ministry of Records, or in the bugs forum.
Lol, I thought it was a feature. I noticed this bug in ~1.1, I guess.
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Selling equipment contributes more to your bottom line than trading at most stages of the game. Here are the best places to sell equipment, as I understand it:

- Black Market stations and shipyards buy military equipment at 90% base price. They also ignore the price reduction that other stations apply to equipment manufactured by enemy factions, making them by far the best place to sell Ares and other high-level enemy equipment. They have unlimited money, but won't buy items above a certain price.

- Thor's Wondrous Devices buys equipment at 90%. They're fairly rare and mostly appear in the Ungoverned Territories.

- Generic armor dealers buy armor and shields at 90%. Generic weapon dealers buy weapons and ammo at 60%. They appear mostly in the early game.

- Commonwealth stations buy weapons, ammo, armor, and shields at 50%, and everything else at 90%.

- Corporate Trading Posts pay slightly less than Commonwealth stations for everything, and Adventure Outfitters buys things at 50%, so they're last resorts.

- Teratons buy Level 6+ weapons, ammo, alien devices, and resources for rins. Selling them weapons is the main way to get rins except in Eternity Port. They also sometimes have fabricators, which have their own guide.

- Ringers buy Level 4+ resources for rins at a better rate than Teratons, and buy certain crystals for a lot of rins.

- In Eternity Port, Asian Pacific stations buy things at the equivalent prices of Commonwealth stations (2 yuan per credit), but due to the favorable exchange rate (sell 100 yuan for 62 credits), you get 24% more credits by selling to them and converting the yuan to credits at a trading post. This makes them the best place to sell equipment other than weapons, ammo, armor, and shields. It's slightly more efficient to sell resources and non-luxury foods to them than to a Corporate Enclave or hotel, and you can even make a very slight profit (1.45% return on investment) by buying commodities and equipment (other than weapons, ammo, armor, and shields) from Commonwealth stations and selling them here.
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Song
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Eternity Port trading is currently so broken that I'm not putting it in this guide (seriously, it's absurdly easy to get up past 700K credits, mostly by using the jettison hack + goron farming). Equipment stuff will be in a later bit.
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Teratons buy level 5 weapons and ammo too.

Oh, and CDM archives and death cubes.
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Teratons buy any item with the '+Soul' designation for a flat 1000 rins. This includes the two previously mentioned items plus Abbasid thanograms, slave coffins, and one other item that escapes me at the moment (hierolith crystal?).
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Watch TV, Do Nothing wrote:Teratons buy any item with the '+Soul' designation for a flat 1000 rins. This includes the two previously mentioned items plus Abbasid thanograms, slave coffins, and one other item that escapes me at the moment (hierolith crystal?).
one more: "human cadaver" has a +Soul attribute.
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Selling "soul" items for 1000 rins is a joke. It is much better to feed that soul item to the fabricator (for +1 disposition per item level) and use the disposition gained to craft a high level item that you can either use or sell for much more than 1000 rin.
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digdug wrote:one more: "human cadaver" has a +Soul attribute.
Well, that has frightening eschatological implications
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Inertialess Drive: This completely useless alien artifact removes inertia from your ship while activated: You will only move while thrusting forward, and will stop as soon as you stop thrusting. You also accelerate to top speed immediately. This is usually a waste of fuel and makes combat very hard. Avoid at all costs.
I know PM has refuted this before, but the drive is more useful than you think it is.

Ejecta from mining doesn't send you flying.

Artillery doesn't send you moving backwards, and the Drive makes these things easier to aim. While not drifting is suicide against a Phobos or perhaps the Xenophobe Ark, you can crack any stationary base even more brainlessly as opposed to other drives.

You can use planets as invincible shields without fear of being AOE'd out of them by someone with a Thermo or Blast.

Keeping yourself locked in place uses 0 fuel, as opposed to re-positioning when you drift off or are sent flying.

The best part of the Inertialess is that when its on, you decelerate immediately to 0 no matter what your cargo hold has. So if you are fast on activation while drifting, you don't accidentally go flying into the AOE of a Penitent Shrine, or getting to close to a Slaver Camp before you intend to rescue anyone.

Acceleration to max and crazy turn angles aren't so bad. Maybe unenhanced on an EI500 it has limited use save for outmanuvering the Dragon Slaver, but FEW CAN KEEP UP if you are on a Sapphire or Wolfen. Those that can keep up are typically not strong enough to take your shielding down. >_>

There's a damn good reason I kept using mine in my LP, although I wanted it +Enhanced as soon as possible.
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 In addition to what Ultimate Chicken said, using the inertialess drive to start and stop in irregular bursts while trying to get away from something that’s a little nastier than you can handle right at the moment makes it almost impossible for them to keep a positive lock on you if you’re more than a few light-seconds away. Also, if you absolutely need to be able to drift when you have it equipped, you can always deactivate it and go back to the built-in drive.
 That’s for a different strategy guide, though. For a strictly commerce-driven run? Yeah, probably not the most cash-efficient choice of engines to be using.
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