How to trade?

[Harmacist]

Most tutorials are broken, so I need to ask here. How do I buy stuff from a station, to sell elsewhere?

[DrSuperGood]

Kind of like XR, but even more simple.

First you need a trade ship. I would recommend one of the M container ships for a start. They sell for around 700k credits or if you are lucky one might be just left lying around near some trivial to do with generic mines. There are also L container ships but they are a lot more expensive costing several million credits and can be quite slow at times.

Next you need trade opotunities. You will need to fly near stations with trade system extension softwere installed to get a temporary (~5 real life hour) subscription to the trade offers of the station. One can send other ships remotly to find stations and refresh offers using the map. At faction rep 20 you can buy a trade subscription lisence from the faction representitive which will give you infinite duration of trade offer updates for all stations of that faction, well worth the cost in the long run.

Finally trading itself is done from the map. Select property view (second from top button on the left bar). Select your trade ship. Now you will want to find a good sale offer and make the trade. The buttons at the top right control the goods filters and one can make trades by right clicking the numbers in the goods lists that appear on the map. Then find a good sales offer and make the trade. The amount of goods left on the ship after the action will be shown on the map. A simple, but not really profitable, trade is to buy Hull Parts and sell them to a construction yard for around 90-110k profit, assuming good prices. Better deals involve high tech goods such as a load of Claytronics with 300k profit, if one can afford the 1-2M down payment.

Note that pirates will attack your traders at the start of the game. As time progresses the local police and millitary forces will keep down the SCA pirate numbers until they are no concern. HAT pirates will always be a concern because of their strange alliances, but unlike SCA they can be stopped by simply befriending the faction with a reputation of 10 so that they will ignore your ships and pirate your competitors (so nice of them!).

[Harmacist]

Infinite thanks for your detailed response, but I'm actuallt looking for something simpler:just started with a new ship. I want to earn some quick cash travelling from base to base to get the hang of the game. No need to go deep into trading barges, just yet. I thought it had to be done via this panel, but it's a bit confusing to me: http://prntscr.com/lp5a88

I want to buy small quantities of something (anything). I haven't played any other X games, but a lot of Eve and E:D

[king_spix]

Nice Guid But I have now discovered 30 stations or so the most profitable trade would be 88 credits per unit. That means to buy your ship I have to transport 7995 units with my starter ship. WTF and all Stations have the same Pricerange WTF