Easiest way to get Money?

[Sabomoth]

Whats the easiest way to earn money? I am trying to get some cash to build some mines and stuff, but the best way i have found to get money is to claim and sell asteroids to get 250k or so everytime. Is there a better way? I haven't tried my hand on trading yet.

[Puppet #7]

Cargo hold and a decent trade route.

Platinuim to jewlery factories, Body armor to Military HQ's, or any other high profit ratio to cargo slot item really.

Its doesnt even have to be pretty- tack on an ungodly cargo-cube, and some extra trusters to your ship if its lacking the space and delete it once your done.

You can double your money with every trip if you happen to find a good route

[dakhar]

Selling the loot to stations or mobile-merchants is very profitable. It also boosts your status with the particular fraction.
So mount your salvage-equipment and go hunting;)

[Teralitha]

Kill pirate and aliens and salvage/destroy their wrecks to get modules. Sell the modules/turrets you dont want or need. Some modules are worth alot. There are trading routes of course, but even if you do find something prfitable, doesnt mean stations will have alot of stuff in stock or have room to buy stuff. Ive ended up dumping cargo because of that. Cheap stuff though.

Once you have saved up money though, you will want to keep some modules and turrets to use for research. Ive managed to get some pretty powerful turrets and modules from doing research at a research station. But I also lose alot of that cash I could have had from selling them instead, so you have to be careful how you research so you are not wasting the modules.

One of my recent successes was creating a hyperspace module that gave me +10 to jump range. However.. Naonite can also do that. Also made a legendary trading module for 10 sectors. The craziest turret I ended up with was a salvage turret that did over 500 damage but it also used over 10,000 power per second with an increaseed power used by over 10,000 also. I tried using it... haha... was only good for a few seconds. I ended up selling it for over a million credits though.

[Lightedchaos]

Originally posted by Sabomoth:

Whats the easiest way to earn money? I am trying to get some cash to build some mines and stuff, but the best way i have found to get money is to claim and sell asteroids to get 250k or so everytime. Is there a better way? I haven't tried my hand on trading yet.

Go kill some pirates, grind some and sell looted gear.
Those force turrets can go over 1 milion :D

[Ansehelm]

For early game, hunt for big asteroids (those with irregular shapes). You will need at least a common C43 Object Scanner in order to be more efficient in doing this. With the object scanner equipped, you will get notified with a message "Valuable object detected" when you warped into a sector, then you can check around for those big asteroids. Be warned that valuable objects might be referring to some hidden caches scatter in the map as well, so if you find none of those asteroids, just move on to another sector. If you happen to own an exotic C43 Object Scanner, then this task will be very easy for you, as the module will highlight EVERY valuable objects once you enter a sector regardless of range (while lower rarity ones only highlight the object when you are close to them).

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Once you got decent amount of money, improve your ship with thrusters, ample amount of cargo bays and a trade module, then go find a decent trade route as mentioned above.

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You can also equip yourself with some salvage turrets and visit scrapyards, salvage the wreckages for treasures. In the process you can gain yourself a decent amount of materials for your own usage as well, and sometimes better turrets and modules, which can be sold for a decent amount of credits should you have no use for them.

However be wary that some wreckage will have a small chance to drop illegal or dangerous cargos, that might get you into trouble if you happen to carry them and got spotted by local faction's military ships, unless you own the faction's licenses of course.

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When Xsotans, other factions or pirates attacking a sector, you can stay away and wait patiently or join local faction to fight the intruders (if the intruder is from another faction, of course it will severely worsen your relationship with them). Once the battle is over, rush to the battlefield and check for loots. You have to be fast as other NPC ships might *accidentally* loot those items. Always make sure that local faction has a good chance of winning before you decided to wait or help them in combat.

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Lastly, sorry for the long post and hope it helps

[Nomad]

Originally posted by Ansehelm:

For early game, hunt for big asteroids (those with irregular shapes). You will need at least a common C43 Object Scanner in order to be more efficient in doing this. With the object scanner equipped, you will get notified with a message "Valuable object detected" when you warped into a sector, then you can check around for those big asteroids. Be warned that valuable objects might be referring to some hidden caches scatter in the map as well, so if you find none of those asteroids, just move on to another sector. If you happen to own an exotic C43 Object Scanner, then this task will be very easy for you, as the module will highlight EVERY valuable objects once you enter a sector regardless of range (while lower rarity ones only highlight the object when you are close to them).

=================================

Once you got decent amount of money, improve your ship with thrusters, ample amount of cargo bays and a trade module, then go find a decent trade route as mentioned above.

=================================

You can also equip yourself with some salvage turrets and visit scrapyards, salvage the wreckages for treasures. In the process you can gain yourself a decent amount of materials for your own usage as well, and sometimes better turrets and modules, which can be sold for a decent amount of credits should you have no use for them.

However be wary that some wreckage will have a small chance to drop illegal or dangerous cargos, that might get you into trouble if you happen to carry them and got spotted by local faction's military ships, unless you own the faction's licenses of course.

=================================

When Xsotans, other factions or pirates attacking a sector, you can stay away and wait patiently or join local faction to fight the intruders (if the intruder is from another faction, of course it will severely worsen your relationship with them). Once the battle is over, rush to the battlefield and check for loots. You have to be fast as other NPC ships might *accidentally* loot those items. Always make sure that local faction has a good chance of winning before you decided to wait or help them in combat.

=================================

Lastly, sorry for the long post and hope it helps :happy_creep:

Thanks, this helped me out a lot. I'd struggled to get enough pay for my crew and start trading. I stumbled across scrapyard out of blue and this is where my whole experience change drastically: full titanium ship, ample cargo, better agility for combat and finally can afford my insurance.

Now rocking with 8 salvage lasers with beefy front for close quarter combat fun against pirates.

[Acheron]

Originally posted by Lightedchaos:

Originally posted by Sabomoth:

Whats the easiest way to earn money? I am trying to get some cash to build some mines and stuff, but the best way i have found to get money is to claim and sell asteroids to get 250k or so everytime. Is there a better way? I haven't tried my hand on trading yet.

Go kill some pirates, grind some and sell looted gear.
Those force turrets can go over 1 milion :D

Killing anything won't touch the credits you can make for trading. The easiest way to make cash is to find claim and sell asteroids. 60-90k.

The best way to make money is trading, by so far. It does take time and effort.

The second easiest is as others describe, just play as a wrecking ball and sell the pieces you pick up.

If you want to learn about trading, goto the trading section, I have a small walkthrough on how to start.

[Chaoslink]

I mean, I look around for two factions fighting one another where there is also a trading post station belonging to the hostile faction. Then you help kill it over the longest time, picking up multiple dozen modules and turrets, you also get a massive amount of cargo. Often have to wait a minute or two before you can pick it up and you don't always get to claim it all (maybe someone can clarify why) but if you're lucky, you can make tons of credits. My buddy and I took out about 3 of them and after selling off most (still have 15% of it left) we now have some 24 million credits. And probably 120 mods and turrets (literally 120 of both from stations and pirates combined). So plenty more credits from all that too.

[harmlesshamster]

Easiest way it to play Creative.
It takes away all incentive to mine.
The trading with stations is a rip off when it should be profitable the more you travel and risk.

[MadArkael]

Those asteroids go for 800k with good rep at center of map. dude telling you 60 - 90k hasnt even been to the ring yet, where you can make over 400k per asteroid per sell with a good alignment.

[Acheron]

I figured he was still in iron space xD

[Aunel]

Fight everything, target pirate swarms and take on alien fleets or warp around looking for station wrecks. Once you've enough money start using the piles of loot in research stations for big gear. Then go fight more bigger things. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about the barrier i can get 10+ mil in just turret and mod drops.

[Jawa Jedi]

Starting out: Build (or download) a decent basic starter ship (using either just your starting resources or just what you can scrounge in the safe home system you spawn in). Equip a starting gun and mining laser. Jump along the safe systems (don't waste money on gates, but follow their path to stay in high-friendly-population systems) and mine what you can, pausing to shoot at pirates that jump in. You probably won't kill much at this point, but if you at least get a couple hits in before the system security wipes out the pirates, the faction will pay you for helping. Also, you will get weapon and system chip upgrades dropped by the pirates. Between your mining while waiting on pirates and the rewards for being a cute little helper cop, you will be able to upgrade to a solid ship design in short order. Use your new ship to push far enough to unlock Naonite (for shields and, less importantly, warp blocks), having shielded ships will cut repair costs from fighting to 0 if you build with integrity coverage and use hit-and-run tactics. Once you have shields, you're officially past "starter" and on to "Early Game"

Early Game: Follow the story quest to get the Lady Adventurous (or found a 2nd ship if on a server with story disabled). Build the lady as a harvesting ship. Cargo and unarmed turrets (maintained at your highest available material tier) are top priority. She also needs at least decent shields and combat weaponry. Then send the lady on mining missions while you use your flag ship to earn actively. For money, at this point, you can go either missions/pirate sector route, or become a merchant. I advise doing missions/combat until you build your salvage fleet. That leads us to the fleets. You have to build 8 total ships anyway in order to open the center of the galaxy, so I like to use that as my first goal. You should build a second mining ship first, then two salvage ships, sending them on missions in pairs. Mining will keep your materials high, and you can sell excess for bursts of credits. Salvage gives you some materials, but also credits, weapons, and system chips. Once you have 2 miners and 2 salvagers protecting each other on missions, you can either advance them to 3/3, or set up a pair of merchant ships to run trade routes. Merchant ships need to be a bit better armed/armored, as I find that they seem to get interrupted far more frequently than mining/salvage missions, and if you lose one of them, you also lose all the credits they spent on purchasing their current cargo. The 8th ship can reinforce whichever mission group you want to focus on (I'd recommend salvage group, as it gives credits, ore, AND equipment, the last of which you will need in order to get the II chip). Alternatively, you can set it up to be a wingman for your flagship. If you do this, I recommend setting it up as a scout/light-attack craft with long jump range, good shields, and high speed over raw weapons and hp. This way, when you meet a new faction that is yellow or friendlier, you can set your main to patrol one of it's safer systems (to get little bits of cash but mostly to build up reputation) and then use the scout to jump around and find asteroids, abandoned ships, and other goodies. If you find an "Abandoned Ship", I recommend tagging it on the map but not claiming it until you reach the really expensive ship-founding fees (like when it requires Ogonite but you haven't crossed the barrier yet).By the time you reach the barrier, you should have some mission fleets keeping you flush on general needs. I'd recommend assigning new ships on a rotating basis so that each fleet slowly becomes more and more productive. Also, until I cross the barrier, I put a prefix on the ship name of each ship that installs an artifact chip, so I know which ones to grab in order to open the portal (putting a number such as 4 instead of IV will make them easier to find using alphabetical sorting). Once you reach the barrier and have Xanion unlocked, you've made it to Mid-Game

Mid-Game: Now it's time to get rich. Make sure your combat fleet has plenty of cargo space (10k-20k+ per ship) and take it back out to the outer ring of the galaxy. Find a faction of jerks (red) or victims (any color relations that you don't mind slaughtering). Explore their space to find 1) a neutral or better smuggler system and 2) a nearby friendly faction with lots of different station types. In your cargo hold, enable picking up stolen goods (the mask icon), then go blow up a station. Repeat until your cargo holds are full. Go to the smuggler system, unbrand the highest value items to sell to the friendly faction, and just sell the rest directly to the smuggler outpost. Each run should gain you tens of millions of credits. The stations and their security fleets are a joke to your Xanion shields and ##k ohm firepower ships, they don't even HAVE shields . . . poor b*st*rds. Any time after your first pirate run, you should be flush on funds and resources to found a station or two. Set up some stations (there are numerous great guides on how to do this) to provide ongoing residual income, and just go do more pirating any time you need a surge of cash. I recommend setting up stations in outer-ring territories, as only traffic matters for income, and nothing out there can hope to kill a station with 1 turret and 1+mil shields.

Endgame: You shouldn't need money at this point. Your farming fleets can keep doing their thing, stations keep trickling in creds, and pirate when you miss the really juicy income. Set up a defense fleet in a 1,1 system and build your crafting stations there, then build a flagship with 15 processing power and equipped with custom-made 200+mil credit turrets, then clone the darn thing into a fleet of dreadnaughts