What is the best way to make money in 4.0?

[Limamufu]

Well, I'm new in this game (10 hours) but I'm struggling to make some money. My goal is to make a giant battle fleet and go after anyone that want war. To achieve this, I thought that mining was a good way to make money. But so far I'm having a hard time doing it. I only managed to make one auto mining ship so far (M ship + Medium preset + full crew) but it takes too long to mine. Buying more mining ships to increase the income requires a lot of money and the way that I read in guides was to mining crystals. However, this is a pain... find crystal>>shoot>>loot>>repeat. It is not actually bad but each 15 crystal nodes, 14 are purple (1k). It takes hours to reach 700k (aprox price of the mining ship). Is there any other path to make good money or this is actually the best?

[R1B$]

well you seem to not be shy to reading guides--the easiest way to make early game money is to find one of the big abandoned ships in one of the sectors and sell it for a lot of cash

with that money, you can get a fleet of miners that make money for you, your next step should be getting a SETA drive, its basically a travel mode that puts the game in fast forward so you can earn lots of money by being afk

but all that takes away a bit of the fun i think. my recommendation is to do missions to get rep and follow the story, some story missions have some decent rewards like ships and other money makers

[Ariochaotik]

the guides telling you to mine crystals are outdated. Mostly you are going to find the least valuable crystals which are not worth the time it takes to mine them.

my recommendation for early game is this

you have one autominer setup already. let him loose in a sector that you want to gain rep with, and tell him to mine silicon. Choose a sector that has silicon to mine obviously. Set his behavior to escape when attacked, escape when harassed by pirates. Then ignore him. You will get around 150k ish per 15-30 minutes or so. Not much but you will also gain some rep every time he sells his cargo.

Get yourself a decent fighter, and do the missions that lead up to the player HQ.


When you feel comfortable, go find the abandoned oddysseus. it can be a pain to find but early game, a free destroyer is very nice.

The goal would be to unlock the player HQ, then begin to add modules to it starting with energy cell production, working your way up to having a full supply chain all on that station and eventually a wharf, and shipyard. Sell all the stuff that you are producing, starting with refined metals, silicon wafers etc. until you can make the more advanced materials like claytronics, and hull parts.

You can raise rep with most factions (not terran or segaris) by trading with them. Build a basic energy cell production station in one of their sectors, or an autominer or 2.

there are other ways to do it but if i were to start over again, thats how i would go about it.

[Daddy Shark]

If you're not above piracy, there's always that route. Get a freighter and load it full of marines. Disarm your turrets. Then scan targets like resupply ships or other freighters until you find one with a boarding strength lower than yours. Sneak up under it's belly, give the board command, then run like hell and wait for the 'rines to take the ship for you. Sell for profits or add to your own fleet.

[EPIC VOID]

Besides boarding, plundering building storages can be very profitable too. Park a L freighter directly at the building storage (the largest you can afford), make sure it's loaded up with cargo drones. Take some ship with a gun, shoot the storage, leave the sector immediatelly (best to teleport). Order the freighter to collect the drops.
It is even more efficient if you order couriers to transport the stuff from the freighter to the HQ build storage. From there, you can sell it (and it's safe from SCA attacks)

If you find a well supplied station, the faction will try to fill it up immediately ... ;-) Here, I will not suggest to directly sell it to the station again though, because that would be exploity, woudn't it? ;-)

[hurepoix]

There is some sectors where nividium is still profitable, but not for a long time. Nividium simply no more respawn. The void, second contact 2 and pious mist XI for exemple ( IIRC ) have enough nividium to make some money in early game.

What you need is just to have enough money to buy your first mining ship. I would say 400K cr. It is what you can hope to gain in one hour of crystal mining at faulty logic and atiya for example.

It may be enough to build ore refinery and silicon ones in sector where it lets silicon.

[blackphoenixx]

You can get some easy cash at the start by hunting lockboxes and using the Security Decryption Systems you find to do hacking missions gotten from scanning signal leaks.
400-500k per mission and all you do is fly to a station and use the SDS, zero risk.

Though you'll want to watch out for sector police. Just let an NPC pilot fly you around and police scans won't detect anything illegal in your inventory.

You can also buy a cheap ship and set it on repeat collect loot at the border sectors between factions at war (like the HOP/PAR or HOP/ARG border sectors).
You'll get a lot of drops, including SETA parts which sell for 100k or more each.
It's not uncommon to have 3-5mil worth of loot to sell after emptying out a loot collector in a busy sector after a few hours, depending on your dropluck.

They'll also collect mod parts, so once you've got the HQ and research weapon mods you can upgrade your miners with the mining laser one to increase their efficiency a lot.

Once you've got a little money in your pocket you can start boarding pirate destroyers for 10+mil each.
All you really need is a fighter equipped with burst rays to kill turrets and engines (they pierce shields so you can leave those intact) and a ship or two with high crew capacity to carry marines in after you've crippled the target.

[lPaladinl]

Best option is just to do missions or trade deals at first. Trades are harder to get into and require some capital to get started. Then use your excess income from missions to roll out more ships into your fleet to make money off of mining or trading.

Grabbing abandoned ships can help get you started but then you're stuck looking up where to typically find some or otherwise wasting most of your time exploring to find them. Time that could be spent doing missions or trades instead.

[Gregorovitch]

The are many mission types avaiable that make good money early game as others have pointed out, not to mention various nefarious activities.

Of the strictly business options, which I personally favour, my observations are:

1. Sector mining is still more than viable early game with the new resource distribution but requires more work to set up. The rate at which miners mine (and therefore the earning potential of sector miners) seems to be much more tied to yield concentrations than it was. Consequently it is vital to explore and drop probes all around mining areas to locate good deposits. You are looking for anything above around 5 per km^3 for ore and silicon and 1 per km^3 for gases. Such deposits are there to be found.

By way of example I found one methane deposit in The Void with a 1.9 per km^3 concentration. My sector miner working there delivers eight loads per hour @ 95k per load. That is insane profits. Just half a dozen well placed sector miners in prime locations will net you a very good early game grubstake.

However if place sector miners to work poor yield deposits their returns can be very meagre. Two or three miserable loads per hour.

2. The best stations to open up with IMO are mining stations that produce refined metal and silicon wafers. I have four with two metal refineries and two silicon wafer fabs each. They all make 2.5-3m Cr per hour, every hour, without fail.

Having built a few mining station you are off to the races.

[blackphoenixx]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

2. The best stations to open up with IMO are mining stations that produce refined metal and silicon wafers. I have four with two metal refineries and two silicon wafer fabs each. They all make 2.5-3m Cr per hour, every hour, without fail.

Having built a few mining station you are off to the races.

Seconding this. All the refineries are about that profitable and there's enough demand for at least one of each in pretty much every factions territory.
Graphene, Superfluid Coolant and Antimatter Cells make great money too.
They're also cheap enough to pay for themselves in an hour or two of production.

I have 4 refining stations like that set in Holy Vision, Argon Prime, Trinity Sanctum and Grand Exchange and they all rake in enough credits that any further production is just to supply my own shipyards, not for making more money.
I could probably expand them (their storage is always near-empty) but quite frankly i'm earning more money than i really need already.

As for good mining spots the hazard zone in the middle of the void has ore and silicon at 20/km³ and methane at 6-7/km³. It's insanely profitable for OOS mining.

[Limamufu]

Ty all for the tips :)

[Sungod1]

Money is meaningless... Resources and the Production to make everything is all that matters.

[arrak]

The first 20 - 40 hours are very laborous. I had two goals in those hourss.
Few small Thesys miners, to gain Faction Rep.
Minimum 3 Pegasus Vanguards, to lay open the Galaxy, explore sectors. Why???
The most money can be made with trading Products and Wares ;)
I am talking about High End stuff being generated in Hidden places that you can
sell needy places for millions of profits per sale. Recon and research your
universe, thats the only way to find what most do not see.
And have an open mind :)

Ore and Silicone does not make much money. But Silicone Wafers and
Refined Metals brings in the miiions. Scratch money together to build those stations and
to get fast Medium miners for them.
The Blueprints for those two Fabs and L containers and storage is cheap

The Strugle has No end....
Fly Safe Pilot :)

[Daddy Shark]

The struggle ends when the entire galaxy is green.

[Valhalla Awaits]

Originally posted by Star Trucker:

The struggle ends when the entire galaxy is green.

When only you remain.

[BXM]

mining sectors with at least 2 or 3 factories requiring the material your mining, and privateering are what i do, once you get enough saved start building factories for factions. I have not touched auto trading yet so not sure how good that is.