How to start out?

[Combat Droid]

How should I get money?
What should I be doing?

[HappyGasmaskNoises]

claim and sell astroids is a good way to make cash

[Lazarus Long]

Make a small second ship (Three or four slots in size) and hire a captain to run it. Give it one weapon and two mining lasers then install a low level Mining upgrade. Give it orders to mine asteroids. As you explore sectors and do missions and fight pirates you will get more mining lasers. When ever you have a enough mining turrets make another mining ship similar to your other one and start it mining. Do this until you have four or five small miners in your fleet.

Keep enough ore to rebuild your personal ship (just in case things get bad) or upgrade it if need be and sell all of the rest. Use that money to buy better gear. Do the R-Mining tutorial when you get your first R-Mining laser and then start working on building an R-Mining fleet. Learn how to make turrets so you don't have to rely on trash drops from the mobs for 80% of your income.

A good mining fleet is the easiest, most reliable, and safest way to make money at all stages of the game.

It can be a long grind to learn what you need to know on your first play through. Have a browser tab open to https://avorion.gamepedia.com/Avorion_Wiki so you can get information quickly and flatten that learning curve.

EDIT: I uploaded the design of my starting mining ship to the workshop. You should be able to build it (as well as the ship you will fly yourself) before you even leave your home sector:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2277849386

[Combat Droid]

ty

[NF_Crenos]

It's a good idea to consider your resources as money as well. Selling resources and doing delivery quests can be a good way to earn early money. Large amounts of resources, relative to early game at least, can really line your pockets in early game.

If you get an "R-mining" turret, you automatically get a simple tutorial quest that rewards you with 2 R-mining turrets.
Even though the resources mined by R-turrets are limited by your cargo hold and you gotta refine them at a resource depot, you exponentially increase resource collection rate with these.

After a little while, you can build a second ship and give it a captain. On the galaxy map you can then order it to mine and refine, and you can loop that order, effectively allowing you to ignore manual mining for the rest of the game. The game also tells you when there's no more for the second ship to do, so you can give it a new order. And don't worry about the 15000 paycheck for the captain; you earn that back very quickly at this point.

[No Step On Snek]

The mining advice is solid. It takes a little bit to get used to the order chaining system in the game, but if you make miners that you throw a mining system and some mining lasers on as you play and set them to mine a series of system in a loop that ends where it started, the miner can mine forever. Leaving those behind as you go, progressing to r-miners as soon as you can (adding a stop to refine ores at a resource depot on their loop) will soon have your resources piling up. Selling those resources for early money will allow you to build mines on asteroids you claim as well, and those will also add steady credit income. I leave gold/platinum precious resource mines behind me as I explore towards the core, and while they're nothing like the most efficient way to generate cash I always end up with hundreds of millions of credits from the steady income, billions in longer games.

My current single player game I'm three hundred hours in and have a billion credits and tens of millions of all the ores up to xanion, all from mines (admittedly I have ~50 of them now, I built a few every session until it seemed silly to add any more) and AI-piloted miners on loops I never look at or touch. I do go back and get rid of the early ships and replace them with much improved miners closer to the core from time to time, though.