The Early Trade Game

[Cai]

I've been poking about the discussion threads and I see several comments about people who say they just can't seem to wrap their heads around the trade aspects of the game or have trouble getting started. This is for you.

If you have the Expert Contractor (10 missions within 2 years) unlock, you'll have access to the Galtak Freighter. This thing is pretty sweet for learning how to trade since it starts with the most cargo space (75). If you don't have that unlock, check out the Paladin Cruiser instead (50 cargo). Both are priority C, so it doesn't change many other stats.

I'm including a sample template to get you started.

Attributes emphasize the right side, the mental side, especially charisma, though wisdom and resilience will help. I go 14 strength, 14 quickness, 20 fortitude, 30 charisma, 30 wisdom, 28 resilience.

I use skills for priority B to get some command abilities in there to help with the early skill tests, though it is lacking in intimidate. Here I use 2 tactics, 3 command, 10 negotiate.

Ship is C, for either the Galtak Freighter or Paladin Cruiser.

Contacts are D. I go with politician and intelligence officer since they tend to offer relatively easy missions early as well as buy intel. We'll be making new friends soon enough.

Experience is E. The Merchant gets an incredible ability in Market Confidant at level 1. If you max out charisma it's 43% chance to make a new contact when you make a trade, buying *or* selling, of $5k or more when this is off cooldown. The bad part of this is your entire crew starts at level 1 which will make the various travel checks a bit rough early on, but it can be managed.

For faction I play De Valtos for this but if you have a favorite faction play what you like.

Now you've made your character and you have to select your first talents for your crew since they're all level 1 and have 1 talent pick. Biggest thing is to pick Market Confidant for your captain. Beyond that I strongly advise skill saves where you can get them and picking up a couple escape talents (stuff like +20 escape or +15 range change/+10 Escape, range change helps you get out of combat). This will mitigate starting at level 1 and let you get out of unnecessary fights.

Finally we can look at the map. We'll see the beginning of the arbiter questline, to take her to Faen. You'll have some starting funds, depending on difficulty ($15k on normal/$7,500 on hard for example). Look at your starting location and your immediate destination. Look to see if there's an planets or stations in between or just a little out of the way. Look to see if any of those planets have the little person symbol to show you have a contact there.

You're trying to do two things right now. The first is to try to chart a path of profitable trades while you travel normally. When you land on a planet and look at the buy list, look for a few things:
1) The price of the item. - The letter rating is nice to look at, but you're more interested in the difference between the current price and the max price. A C- with a big difference is better than a A+ with only a $20 credit difference.
2) Where the good is wanted.
3) The permit level required (you won't be able to buy these immediately, but take notes). - We'll talk more about permits in a bit.
4) The legality of the item. The higher the legality, the easier it is to sell. If the legality is higher than the trade law, you can sell it. So a legality 9 items will sell anywhere trade law is 9 or lower. If trade law is, for example, 7, you can *not* sell a legality 6 or lower item on the main market. One difficulty you will have at the start is you don't know the trade law levels of anywhere else. That's inconvenient but you'll be working on that soon enough. So legality 10 items are best if you simply don't know. Legality 9 are pretty safe since almost anywhere will accept them. Legality 8 is reasonably safe to buy blind but has some risk. Below that when you simply don't know and you're risking trouble in the early game by being unable to unload something you bought.

You need all four of these elements to make profitable trades early on.

Now, don't be afraid to go a little out of the way to check out other planets on the way to picking up and delivering the arbiter. You need to know trade law and starport ratings anyway and it's potential profit. Do the same thing once you have the arbiter. Stop at places that will either make you a profitable trade based on where the goods should be sold or has a contact as long as they're mostly on the way. From contacts take missions that will have you travel around the system at first, from planets that offer you profitable trades you will make money from dropping off goods and buying more.

Finally, you will meet Faen. The narrative mission can be ignored for now, but feel free to stock up on easy court missions from Faen. After that, pick up the first two ranks of permits if you can afford it and have at least $10k left over. One rank is fine, but two is reasonably cheap (usually about $6k or less) and will help you make more money early from trading.

Permits

Permits are an additional restriction on what can be bought or sold at a place. Your permit rank needs to be equal to or higher than the permit level on an item to sell it within that faction or with independents (who ignore permits entirely). So a level 2 permit will let you buy and sell level 1 and 2 items within that faction *so long as the legality of the item is higher than the local trade law*.

And that's essentially the early game, going around doing easy missions, trading at various places on the way and finding out their trade law levels. The mission income gives you an early boost while you trade while also getting you better access to the services your contacts of choice offer. When you can, try to buy permit level 3 but that's a big bump in cost from levels 1 and 2. Along the way you'll make big trades that will trigger Market Confidant which may introduce you to new contacts nearby that may have missions you want to do or services to offer. If you can manage to trade across factions, do so, since you make more money that way, but keep in mind other factions generally don't honor each others permits.

A warning about trade permit 4: While there is a lot of money to be made from trade permit 4 goods with a faction, be aware that anything that causes 2 or more reputation loss with that faction will drop your trade permit down to level 3. If you're shaky on how reputation works, don't risk it this early.

I know that's quite a bit, and you can even go more in depth with trading, but that will get you started on your merchant journey.

[Trese Brothers]

Thank you very much for the helpful post! Hope it helps players who are not getting a good start of merchanting!

[rav]

Nice summary, thanks.

[Yosharian]

> Contacts are D. I go with politician and intelligence officer since they tend to offer relatively easy missions early as well as buy intel. We'll be making new friends soon enough.

This is AWFUL advice.

[Trese Brothers]

Originally posted by Yosharian:

> Contacts are D. I go with politician and intelligence officer since they tend to offer relatively easy missions early as well as buy intel. We'll be making new friends soon enough.

This is AWFUL advice.

Can you share a bit more "why"? For some playstyles that works quite well.

[Hayde]

This is great advice. I have quite a few false starts under my belt at 'Challenging' or higher and finally doing things along these lines have a game going with sea legs.

And yes, I'm a smuggler and still cut down my starting contacts in half. They weren't doing me any good spread out over the galaxy to begin with.

[❟❛❟ K4g4m1 ❟❛❟]

Have you considered making this post into a steam guide? I think it's a great primer on how to get started with trading and making it into a guide will make it more visible.

I do have one bit of feedback though: When you start as a new captain (on hard difficulty at least, i assume on other difficulties too) your faction will be engaged in a trade ban against another faction which means if you start trading on your faction exchange you will lose a lot of rep with the conflicting faction. This can definitely have repercussions for you later (such as being unable to deescalate an encounter and possibly dying) so it's worth addressing.

[Cai]

Originally posted by K4g4m1:

Have you considered making this post into a steam guide? I think it's a great primer on how to get started with trading and making it into a guide will make it more visible.

I do have one bit of feedback though: When you start as a new captain (on hard difficulty at least, i assume on other difficulties too) your faction will be engaged in a trade ban against another faction which means if you start trading on your faction exchange you will lose a lot of rep with the conflicting faction. This can definitely have repercussions for you later (such as being unable to deescalate an encounter and possibly dying) so it's worth addressing.

I'll be honest, I haven't played much of this game in about two years. I figured someone else would have it covered by now.

That said, I'm thinking about getting back into it a bit and will consider updating it.

As for the trade ban issue: Yeah, it's an issue. There are some ways to handle it:
1) The most obvious method is to not trade into the ban. That said I believe trade bans have a -28 limit on how low faction rep can go from trading into trade bans, so you could run into some trouble, but it's limited.
2) If you're looking to play more than just the trading game, spying can get you intel to sell to a faction and patrolling will help with rep. This takes time and some resources away from pure trade, though, so it's up to you. If you're willing to shoulder some extra expense buying a crew quarters one step bigger will give you 6 more crew you can commit to these things.
3) There's always the possibility of just buying a pardon once you're up in running.
4) One reason I recommend range change/escape abilities is for some crew is because one round in combat isn't *ideal*, but if you're using a trading vessel your ship is big enough your ship isn't going to blow up in one round.
5) If all else fails, a trader should invest in Skip off the Voids for a get out of combat free ability.

As for making a proper guide, if there's still a need for it, give me some time to try getting back into ST:F (I played when it was fresh out of early access) and I'll see what I can do. I don't know if they're still around, but there was an old guide about playing a totally pacifist trader on Impossible which was pretty high quality.

Hope this helps for now!