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?

[Dionysosss]

i extuatly did this way later in game
but i imagine it works wonders early

Build a station in jupiter, argon prime trinity

my version consist of a hexacon dock 1 liquid and one solid
and a luxary dock

and miners that only mine
and miners that only trade

set up a trade rule so your station doesnt buy in resources on its own.

i would recomend getting a minimal manager of 3 but with how abundent seminars are with missions and or drops it shouldnt be a problem and it wil level quite quickly to 4-5

giving you max range its basicly my version of expert mining but with out the hassle of buttload of level 3 pilots

[camus]

Below is what I would do from early to late game.

1) Fast + Easy Missions
Destroy Laser Towers / Mines / Criminal Traffic + Deploy Satellites

2) Gas Miners
Sector auto-mine in Silent Vision, Cardinal's Redress, etc.

3) Refined Goods Stations
Refined Metals, Silicon Wafers, Antimatter Cells, Graphene, Superfluid Coolant

4) Escort Miner / Khaak Attack Missions + Police License
Kill the Khaak ships that spawn and get paid from license, then mission success pays out 400,000 - 1,000,000+ Cr. Requires a decently equipped S fighter or M corvette to do though.

5) Guild Missions with reward of Magnetar or Chthonios
Cruise along the core sectors highway until one pops up, make sure difficulty is medium so you only have to use deployables or acquire pilots/engineers. Sell 2500x nvidium that comes with the ship, then sector auto-mine or sell the ship. Can potentially use pilot to auto-trade after giving 2-star training seminar.

6) Ship Tech Stations
Hull Parts, Claytronics, Advanced Electronics

7) Simple Build Missions
Look for ones that are just 1 dock, 1 medium container storage, and 1 production module.

8) Wharf/Shipyard
Should have enough for S/M bay blueprint at this point. Just buy a few S ship and Mk1 equipment blueprints to start with. If no one is buying you can build minimum spec ships and manually sell.

[Swiftbear]

My 4.0 start was easy missions like fixing satellites, destroying mines, criminal traffic and in between collected crystals and sold them.

Then i set up sector miners and repeat order miners.

And after many many hours went by discovering that mining is broken and could not get factories to run right because of that I just went to boarding SCA ships the rest of my game and did that till i had a few 100 million.

[hurepoix]

Publicado originalmente por Star Trucker:

The struggle ends when the entire galaxy is green.

X4 is not a very good 4X.

[Nagittchi]

Capping the Asgard that respawns constantly in The Moon. Turrets are always beams so they cant really kill your boarding pods.
Close to 100m per cap.

[EPIC VOID]

Publicado originalmente por Nagittchi:

Capping the Asgard that respawns constantly in The Moon. Turrets are always beams so they cant really kill your boarding pods.
Close to 100m per cap.

Yeah, before you sell, disable it and you can board it again ... ;-)

[S.C.]

Publicado originalmente por EPIC VOID:

Publicado originalmente por Nagittchi:

Capping the Asgard that respawns constantly in The Moon. Turrets are always beams so they cant really kill your boarding pods.
Close to 100m per cap.

Yeah, before you sell, disable it and you can board it again ... ;-)

You can't board it again, this is "fixed" in last patch.

[SirKnechtalot]

Publicado originalmente por S.C.:

You can't board it again, this is "fixed" in last patch.

Is the thievery the only way to get ur hands on it?

[Dervrak]

If you really want the hundreds of millions (really billions) of credits needed to build a formidable war fleet, the only way (well the only practical way, without taking hundreds of hours) is to build stations. Since the mining nerf and the increased raider attacks, it really isn't practical to just to solely rely on miners and traders anymore. You don't need dozens of stations, just 3 or 4 mega stations that build most of the trade items. Just steal or buy the blueprints and slowly build them up, Eventually you will hit a tipping point where profits start to snowball, I'm making 300 million credits an hour with just 3 megastations (and a handful of smaller more specialized ones, but the megastations earn 90% of the income. You can even build them in relatively "safe" areas like Argon Prime or Antigone Memorial, it doesn't seem to really matter, my stations in the safe areas seem to make as much , if not more profit as my one in a more dangerous frontier sector.

[Sungod1]

Publicado originalmente por Valhalla Awaits:

Publicado originalmente por Star Trucker:

The struggle ends when the entire galaxy is green.

When only you remain.

There can only be ONE...

[S.C.]

Publicado originalmente por SirKnechtalot:

Publicado originalmente por S.C.:

You can't board it again, this is "fixed" in last patch.

Is the thievery the only way to get ur hands on it?

You can also buy Asgard blueprint from Terran representative, and build it with massive cost. I don't want to pay that much, so I just steal every Asgard they produced.

[Xenomorph]

Publicado originalmente por EPIC VOID:

Besides boarding, plundering building storages can be very profitable too...

This is one of my favorite initial activities, and virtually risk free. Normally use those wares to build my own infrastructure and sell surplus.
I don't use ♥♥♥♥♥♥ cargo drones tho, instead a tractor beam. This is something i've had modded for forever, so it's sketchy remembering if vanilla has it too (i recall it does, but very short range?). The hotkey is O.

When shooting the storages, do one container at a time. Some might have jackpot amounts of stuff and it'll go to waste if you have no cargo space left.

[blackphoenixx]

Publicado originalmente por Dervrak:

Since the mining nerf and the increased raider attacks, it really isn't practical to just to solely rely on miners and traders anymore

Pirates and khaak are just another resource to be farmed. Repeat orders is your friend.
My loot collectors in Pious Mists IV and XI (lots of khaak in my game) actually make significantly more profit than the miners the patrols are protecting, just from selling off drops.
It's pretty common to go collect loot after a few hours and end up with a few mil worth off SETA parts and vendor trash from a single looting ship.

And that's before you factor in the other drops like mod parts or crafting mats. At this point i could probably mod every slot for every ship i own if i had the patience and still have plenty left.
As it is i'm at least modding the capitals, and i can easily afford to reroll mods until i get the modifiers i want.

[Graf Schokola]

I swear on computronics substrate. I need only energy and some miners. all races buy it at maximum price. that are 5.5 Million Cr per hour per station.

[[Vilu]]

For when you already have some credits; selling equipment to shipyards/wharfs feels really fast way to turn materials into credits. Namely the expensive stuff; i.e beam turrets, meson streams, mk3 engines.

Katana with mk2 meson steams, mk3 engines and shields de-equips all that stuff for around 20mil credits, based on the wharf storage levels.

Syn with max cost equipment (beam turrets, mk3 shields & thrusters, main batteries), de-equips all that for around 40-45mils, based on shipyard storage levels. Can also right-click-sell the empty hull for around 14mil if you don't want to fly it back to your shipyard.

You of course need to have fabricators/blueprints to do that, but it really turns materials, and fast, into credits. Plus it actually pays more than the factions buy ships for. For comparison (to the above Syn) the highest Terrans have bought a Syn for has been 26mil. Yeah, I think I'll stick to selling the equipment and you Terrans can build your own Syn's :P

edit:
Something you can do much earlier:
Boarding Asgards. I think those things right-click sell for around 80mil in their default equipment. Could also probably de-equip all their turrets/shields to gain few extra millions before selling the hull, but based on where you board them the shipyard could be far away.