Guide: Fastest bounty hunting method

[ждун]

Stacking pirate massacre missions eventually from more than one system and hunt in hazres or near compromized beacon is the obvious well known standard way to do it and there is nothing wrong with it.

But I have developed a much faster way to do it. At least double as fast or even more. It has also a number of advantages over standard method.

The main idea is to hunt not in resource extraction site or beacon but in regular signal sources. With a couple of tricks you can make it extremely efficient. And it can be done in any system, which makes you more flexible. You must not hunt in systems with particular optimal parameters, such as availability of resource extraction sites, not too far from the star and perhaps rearming station nearby. You don't need all this, which gives you another advantage. Youre not competing in the BGS with too many other bounty hunters when you do your job in systems that have no resource extraction sites / compr. beacon. It also gives you much more systems to choose from when powerplay faction is important (bounty hunting bonuses).

Did you know that you can reset a signal source and farm it over and over again, after you have cleaned it? It works just like with high grade emissions farming. You clean a pirate signal source, logout to main menu, go into supercruise, turn around and enter same signal source again.

I guess you now get the idea right?

But there is more to know to lift efficiency even much further.

First of all, you must realize, that its only the number of kills that matters. Hence - you want to kill weak targets. The weaker the targets, the quicker you score your kills. Now in res you don't really have a choice, you take what you find and in hazres you will rarely find weak targets (harmless / competent) usually they are well mixed from harmless to elite in hazres, many of them also have some basic engineering. With a proper pve ship no problem of course, but consider if you would get only harmless and competent enemies without any engineering, often even without shields, that are destroyed in a matter of seconds. Consider you could have them delivered to you in a pack. You can have this in signal sources of threat level 3 or below. Mission signal source of TL 3 will spawn 7 units of very weak enemies that you can easily kill even with starter sidewinder.

So we want to aim for these mission signal sources of TL3 or TL2.

But, if you simply randomly collect your mission stack, and start abusing the first TL3 signal source (ignoring higher threat level signals) you will realize that after a few resets the signal source does not respawn anymore. The reason why signal source vanishes is because it belongs to certain mission. At certain point the mission is completed and it doesn't spawn its signal source anymore. You could eventually switch to next TL3 signal source (if you have any). But there is also a trick how we can milk same TL3 mission signal until the whole stack is completed.

The idea is, to make sure that the mission that generates TL3 mission source, is completed last. Now how to do this?

First of all it is important to know, that signal threat level is not mission threat level. Mission threat level is usually higher, there is a correlation though. For example if the mission says threat level 8 its signal will likely be of threat level 4 or 5. If it says the mission is TL 4 or 5, its signal will be TL3 or below. As a rule of thumb you can identify those missions that generate TL3 or below signals by the color stripe. If it is yellow, it will generate signal source with low threat level (3 or below).

Now it is also important to know that missions are completed in sequence for each faction in the stack. Knowing that we can make sure that the signal source we are going to farm, will not vanish until the whole stack is completed, if we pick it up on top of the stack for a faction with the highest kill count required. This is difficult to track manually with pen and paper when collecting missions, but fortunally we have a wonderful tool that can help at this. Its name is ODMissionStacker. Its a simple 3rd party tool, that runs in background and tracks your mission stack. It helps at collecting missions in a smart way and also keeps track on the progress. I can highly recomend this tool for bounty hunters.
So the mission stacker will have a list of factions that you have missions for. For each faction it will show how many missions are already collected and how many kills are required in total for this particular faction.

Now the strategy is following. You pick up missions as usual, but if youre smart use the tool to make sure that the kill amount is spread as even as possible among different factions. You don't want a stack where you have to do 90 kills for one faction and much less for all other factions. Then you would end up doing most of the kills for only one faction. Try to even the kill count as much as possible. Perhaps don't pick a mission for the faction where you already have too many kills required and favor another mission, maybe with lower reward but for a different faction with less kills. Do it until your stack is almost full (18 or 19). Leave one or two free mission slots for our low threat level mission that we are going to farm.

Now as your stack is almost complete, check the ODMissionstacker and identify a faction that has the highest kills required count. Now we need to find a low threat level mission for that faction. In the mission selection dialog filter by that faction and whatch for yellow striped non wing pirate massacre mission. If you don't find at your current location, its worth checking other locations in the system. Once you have it, youre done with collecting the stack.

Once arrived in the target system for hunting, scan the nav beacon and go into supercruise. Scanning the nav beacon reveals hidden signal sources and also reveals threat level of each signal source. Once in supercruise, next check the left hand list and make sure you have your filters set properly to see signal sources. Find the closest one of threat level 3 or below. If you picked up only one yellow mission, there should be only one and you know for sure that is the one that will last until the entire stack is complete. There could be more than one though, if you have picked up more than one yellow missions. Which is not a problem, it could just be that if you have multiple, that you make a wrong guess and the one that you start farming with may vanish, but then just fly to the remaining one.

Now fly to that signal source and enter it. You should see up to 7 targets, all extremely weak. Harmless, competent - master at most. They will all be paper hull and very easy to kill. They will be all in one pack so you don't have to search for targets. Just kill one by one quickly. There will also be no annoying authority vessels, no miners, no npc bounty hunters. Hence no any risk accidently receive a bounty yourself. In fact you don't even need to scan them, you know for sure they are all mission targets. They will at first all want to scan you. Which is great, they are coming all to you, you don't even have to chase them too much.

So now do your job, and when all are killed reset the mission source by logging out to main menu and logging back in. It takes you 15 seconds or something. When back in game, boost and go into supercruise but with throttle set to zero. When in supercruise check your left panel, you will find same signal source reset and respawn right behind you. Select it, turn around, rinse repeat.

With this method and a fully enginered pve build, you can easily score 3 or 4 kills per minute with almost no downtime in between. A full stack of 20 missions for 6 or 5 different factions can be completed in less then 30 minutes. Total stack value can reach up to 800k assuming kills are spread mostly even between factions.

Good luck, enjoy.

[Jean Rousse Coquine]

Thx !

[Synopse]

There is a guides section, where this would get more attention.