Making money & friends: Becoming the ultimate merchant

A fairly detailed guide on setting yourself up for insanely profitable trade routes in Endless Sky.

Before we begin...

First off, this guide was written for the beta branch of Endless Sky, version 0.9.10, and may not be entirely relevant for earlier versions (or later versions when another update comes out.) Most of the information should still be relevant even for version 0.9.8.

Secondly, this guide will include minor spoilers. It doesn't reveal the ending of the story or anything, but it does include some information you might prefer to discover for yourself.

And lastly, thank you for checking out this guide in the first place, and may it help you make ludicrous amounts of credits.

Game time started

...And other references you probably don't get.

So, you've just stepped out of the bank with your loan of almost half a million credits. Unfortunately, you're about to blow almost all of that money on a new ship. Worse yet, by the end of the year you'll have coughed up almost a million credits paying the bank. Congrats, you just learned that holding onto your money is very hard for new pilots.

Clearly, you're going to need a way to make a lot of money, fast.

Well here's the good news: Those three ships in front of you? They're all money printing machines. All you have to do is print money faster than the bank eats it.


But which one do you choose? Let's take a look at their benefits...

The Shuttle:
The shuttle is... Well, let's be honest, there isn't much to say about it and I've never used one. But I do know that is has space for five extra passengers, meaning you can take bigger passenger transport missions than either of the other ships will let you, and bigger jobs means more money.

The downside? You are reliant on finding jobs to do. That little cargo hold won't be enough to sustain you on trading alone, not with the loan you're paying off.

Speaking of trading...

The Star Barge:
It's slow. Like, really slow. But on the plus side, take a look at that cargo space. Fifty tonnes worth and let me tell you this now, that's... To be honest, not that great. It is, however, still enough to make a profit off of trading if you find a decent route, even with the loan eating at you.

On top of this, the star barge has space for two extra passengers, and it can take jobs hauling cargo for a decent profit. Bulk cargo and rush cargo jobs pay very nicely.

Just pray you don't come across any pirates. This ship is a sitting duck in combat.

Speaking of combat...

The Sparrow:
Hey, this ship is actually fast! Not only that, but it's armed! You could probably take it and go hunting pirates, right?

Don't do that. No, seriously, don't. There's a reason why two out of three new pilots who buy a sparrow lose their ship in their first year. No, if you take the sparrow, you aren't blasting ships, you're blasting asteroids. I know, nothing glamorous, but neither is being a taxi driver or a trucker, and those are your other two options.

So now choose a ship.
Any of these options are viable, so go ahead and choose whichever one appeals to you the most. Once you've made your choice, be sure to talk to that nice old James fellow. It's your choice if you take up his offer or politely decline.

That is, unless you're flying a sparrow, in which case you don't take up his offer or you'll stuff this entire guide up.

The theory of making money

Throughout this guide, we'll look at three ways of making money: Jobs, trading, and mining. How exactly do they work?

Jobs:
For the most part, when I say jobs I'm referring to simple jobs that are go from point a to point b. Maybe there's a time limit, maybe you have to come back to a from b, but it doesn't get more complicated than that. So when I say jobs, I mean jobs to haul cargo or to transport people. Don't even think about taking that escort mission, sparrow pilots - I'll get to why later, don't you worry.

Anyway, jobs tend to pay more money the more cargo/people you are carrying and the further away you have to travel. This means the highest paying jobs involve taking up most of your space for passengers/cargo and travelling basically from one end of the map to the other.

Now here's the issue: You only make money off of jobs once you complete them, and if you're travelling a long distance, every jump between systems and every planet you land on eats away at your credits for as long as that loan is hanging over your head. In addition to that, when you first start out as a pilot you will have basically no space mapped out, so good luck taking that rush job from Sunracer to Zug.

Trading:
Probably the simplest way to make money, trading works by checking how much profit you can make off of trade goods from one system to another, then filling your cargo with the goods where it's cheapest and selling it where it's the most valuable.

The problems? Well...
A: You need to find a trade route that pays good money both ways, and
B: You need to find a trade route that makes a bigger profit than the money you lost travelling.

Yeah, again the loan is there to make your life as difficult as possible. Every day you spend travelling from one planet to another is going to eat away at your credits, so you best make the time count.

Oh, and then there's point
C: Large cargo holds attract pirates.

Yeah, if you have a ship that can carry enough cargo to be profitable, you're a target for pirates (even if you're not carrying any cargo!). If you want to avoid pirates, you need to spend money both on cargo ships and escort ships. Trading costs you a lot of money.

Mining:

Oh, that's easy. You just shoot asteroids and sell the ore.

Yeah, not quite. What if I were to tell you that most asteroids don't even carry any ore? You're going to need to know how to spot the correct asteroids.

Let's take a look at this image.


You want to guess how many of those asteroids you can mine? I'll make it easy for you, and just tell you the answer.

Two. That's right, only two of them.


You see all those brown asteroids, and the weird grey spiky ones? Ignore them. Those asteroids can't be mined. You can spot if an asteroid can be mined if it, A: Orbits the system's centre in a neat circle, and B: Doesn't look like the brown asteroids or the grey spiky ones.

Fortunately, as of version 0.9.9, you can buy an asteroid scanner which makes things easier, but sadly they aren't sold on New Boston.

Anyway, once you've found the right asteroid, you blast away at it until it falls apart, and all you have to do is fly into the debris before it poofs into a puff of smoke. Believe me, it's easier said than done.

But the really nice thing about mining? If you're just hanging around in a system blasting at asteroids, that only takes a single day. If you mine a full cargo hold, then land and sell it, you can make money much faster than the loan eats away at it.

(also side note version 0.10.5 adds in mining lasers and tractor beams but they're not required just a convenience okay cool back to the guide)

Fine, but why did you make me read all of that?

Read the title of the guide for a second. This a guide to becoming the ultimate merchant, and you need to understand what that means, and why you should bother with this guide.

Now if you're a merchant, that obviously means you'll be trading. Jobs and mining? They're really nice for early game income, but here's the issue with them both: Limited scaling.

Jobs will get bigger as your capacity to do them gets bigger, but only to a certain point. I don't think I've ever seen a cargo job for 500 tonnes of cargo before. And mining? You can increase the size of your cargo hold and increase the power of your weapons, but that's as far as the scaling goes. You can't even tell your companions to go mining.

So the ultimate way to make money is to expand you ability to trade.

But here's the thing. You remember how I said that expanding your cargo hold makes you a bigger target for pirates? If you try and build up a fleet of freighters, this is going to become an issue really, really fast.

Read the title again. You see the bit where it says "Making money & friends"? You are going to have to make some friends with the pirates if you want to trade safely.

The goal

• STEP ONE: Pay off that debt. Seriously, as long as that's a thing, your life is going to be much harder.
  
• STEP TWO: Befriend the pirates. That is, unless you like drowning in an endless tide of them.
  
• STEP THREE: Build the ultimate merchant fleet. After all, being the ultimate merchant is hard if you lack the proper fleet.

This is where the fun begins.

Paying off the debt

Yay, you can finally start playing the game.

Your methods for paying off your debt is going to change depending on what ship you're using. Do jobs with the shuttle, trading on the side. Do trading with the star barge, taking a job when you find a profitable one. Do mining with the sparrow, and... Do more mining with the sparrow.

Whatever you do, one rule remains constant:

DO NOT, FOR ANY REASON, ATTACK A PIRATE AT ANY POINT.

Really. You reputation will plummet if you do, and that will make it near impossible to befriend them. That's why you're not taking any escort missions, sparrow pilots.

There's not much for me to say at this point. Find some nice jobs/trade routes/asteroids to mine, and go do them.

If you need more help than that, all I've got left to say is to pay off extra from that loan whenever possible - it saves money in the long run, and gives you a lot of breathing room. Just don't spend all your money on the paying extra at once, or you'll find yourself pressed to pay the daily interest.

Yarr harr, fiddle dee dee...

At this point, I'm going to assume you have paid off your debt. Nicely done! Now you don't have to worry about constantly wasting your money.

Now go make about a million credits, because it's time to waste more money - You've got a lot of bribing to do.

Go to a system where pirates constantly face off against other factions (Alcyone, a pirate system neighbouring syndicate space, is a good choice). Then bribe the nearest pirate - That should make all pirates friendly with you up until you leave the system. Then you sit back and wait for a pirate to be disabled.

When a pirate's ship is disabled, select them and board them. But instead of the boarding panel coming up like it normally does, you will instead repair the pirate... That is, assuming you made it to the pirate ship before somebody else blew it up. Seriously, most of the time they'll be destroyed before you can save them.

All you have to do is rinse and repeat until you have positive reputation with the pirates. But believe me, this is going to take a very long time. Be sure to save often, as it's easy to be killed by friendly fire or being too close to a ship when it blows up.

OH GOD WHY ARE THE FREE WORLDS TRYING TO KILL ME

Because that's how the endless sky reputation system works. When you help an ally or harm an enemy of a faction, you gain rep with them. Unfortunately, this works vice-versa. So when you repair a pirate, you gain rep with the pirates... But loose rep with almost everyone else.

The good news? The reputation gain for repairing is more than the reputation loss with other factions. So what does this mean? You're going to go out and repeat the process with the pirates with every faction you just turned hostile against you.

But at this point, you may be wondering... How do I know my reputation with different factions?

There are three ways to do this...

One: Be in the same system as a member of that faction. If they try to kill you, they're hostile to you and you need to bribe them.

Two: Map out a system that faction controls, and change the map mode to friendly/hostile. If it's a shade of orange/red, they're hostile and you need to bribe them.

Three: Look at your save file. This is handy as it tells you the exact reputation with that faction, but some may consider it cheating, so don't do it if you don't want to. How it's done varies depending on your operating system, but on windows your save files are stored in C:/Users/*username*/AppData/Roaming/endless-sky/saves, and the save file will be the same name it is in game. From there, you just need to read the file and see what it says your reputation with the different factions are.


Anyway, from here you have fun bribing anyone trying to kill you and repairing them when they're down. It's going to take a long time, but it's well worth the effort...

Addendum: The "I do not want your money" Problem

This section has been added after the initial writing of this guide in response to a problem I did not initially encounter when writing it.

So, since this guide was initially written, there have been reports of being unable to bribe ships, and instead only being told "I do not want your money" when you try. Unsurprisingly, this can be a bit of an issue when you're going around with the express purpose of handing out bribes.

I recently started another playthrough of Endless Sky and thought I may as well check to see if this guide is still relevant. Things were going quite swimmingly until I tried to bump up my relations with the republic after repairing a gajillion (at least 20! The horror!) pirate ships, where I suddenly learned that the authorities started doing their job while I wasn't looking and no longer accept bribes.

So, what can be done if you encounter this issue?

Well, the good news is that it turns out the solution is remarkably simple - instead of going around specifically repairing free worlds ships or republic ships or the like, you just... repair merchants instead.

In fact, it turns out repairing merchants is incredibly effective, as in the end I only repaired like, maybe five of them before my relations were back to being positive with everyone. UPDATE: Sadly, this is no longer the case. Other factions relations with merchants got drastically reduced in a patch, and you are now required to repair quite a few merchants to repair relations.

It does still work, or at least did for me when I tried it, but it's slow work (it took me a few hours to do), and you have to be very careful not to "overdo" repairs with pirates - the more pirates you repair, the worse your relations with everyone else, the longer it takes to make amends.

Unfortunately, I do have to repeat that this works for me. A report from WASHED (and, by the way, thank you for bringing this issue to my attention in the first place) states that even after repairing ~50 merchants, relations remained unchanged. Sadly, I have exactly zero idea what's going on there, that number should be plenty.

(screenshots below of relations slowly increasing, dated 23/07/2024, version 0.10.8)

The ultimate merchant fleet

You've paid off your debt. You've befriended the pirates, and managed to keep everyone else from trying to kill you at the same time.

The time has come... Or, at least, will come when you've built up enough money to afford a freighter.

What you really want to be doing is putting together as many freighters as you can. How you equip them is up to you, but I personally like to use this guide as a starting point for how I equip them.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=548041288

Do everything you can to make money and assemble a bigger fleet. As your merchant fleet grows in size, you can start to change tactics...


Metal to Delta Velorum, luxury goods to Alphard, and you can make a profit limited only to the size of your fleet's combined cargo space.

Keep making money, keep expanding your fleet, and you can start making millions of credits in a single trade.

How about a little more?

And thus it was said, "But wait, there's more!"

EDIT: Actually no, there is not in fact more. The information here is no longer relevant as of v0.10.3, September 2023, due to an update giving an honestly quite justified nerf to trade prices in Hai space due to its relative safety (IE, no pirates, excluding unfetter Hai). I might see if I can suggest an alternate trade route in the future, but you and I both know future promises in steam guides never come to pass. Thankfully, with enough cargo space in your fleet almost any trade route can get you more money than you'll ever practically need - finding particularly good ones is merely just in exercise in big numbers make the happy brain chemicals go. (Also, thank you Ninetailed for pointing this out, you get a specific mention in the guide by the sheer virtue of steam deciding to refuse to let me comment on my own guide)

That trade route I suggested earlier? It's good when building up your fleet, because it pays a decent amount and isn't too far from systems you can buy freighters in.

However, it's not the most profitable trade route. The best trade route isn't found in human space, but in Hai space...


And my god it's a good trade route, netting over 700 credits per tonne of heavy metals. Multiply that by the cargo space of your fleet, and if the answer is less than one million credits you seriously need more freighters.

With a large enough fleet and this trade route, it won't take long to make all the money you could ever want.

Unlimited power!

You've befriended the pirates, made the ultimate merchant fleet, and found the ultimate trade route.

At this point, you have all the money you could ever want. Now all you have to do is ask yourself, "What do I spend this money on?"

Well, one option is to continue to expand your fleet with freighters and make even more money, but I personally find it tedious equipping every single freighter I buy, and when you can afford hundreds...

Really, what you should do is what you want to do. Personally, I bought three vanguards, equipped them all with seven plasma cannons, and went farming korath ships near the core for their jump drives in an effort to equip all forty of my freighters with jump drives.

Whatever it is you want to do, at least you won't have to worry about not having enough money.

And to finish off...

Please smash that dislike button and leave hate mail in the comments.

(I admit to not coming up with that joke myself.)

But in all seriousness, thank you for reading this guide until the end, and I apologise for the general low quality of it, seeing as this is my first guide written. EDIT: I also apologise that I can't actually reply to comments anymore (thanks steam), but if you point out a flaw with the guide I'll make an effort to fix it - still true as of 23/07/2024.

So, thank you, cheerio, now go off to make money and friends!

[LeBron]

I repaired 50~ merchant ships after dropping into the red with most factions from repairing pirates and relations have not improved. I believe that merchants have now been patched to be their own independent faction.

[Ninetailed]

As of v0.10.3, September 2023, the Hai trade route mentioned here has been made a lot less profitable.

From the patch notes:

* Reduced the profitability of commodity trading in Hai space by about 40% by bringing trade prices closer together, as the lack of piracy in Hai space makes it an easy place for trading.

[Rebel Fleet Pursuit]

Alright, I just encountered that "I do not want your money" thing that's been mentioned before, and I was forced to find a work around. Thankfully, I found one! It's even more effective than what was initially instructed, wow!

Anyway, the guide has been updated accordingly with a new section - and apparently I have the right to say this guide still holds up today, so hurrah for that!

[Rebel Fleet Pursuit]

@User5876

...I've looked over this guide so many times I can't believe I missed that. Thank you!

[User5876]

Hey dude. Awesome guide. I think you missed something, though:

"The good news? The reputation gain for repairing is less then the reputation loss with other factions. So what does this mean? You're going to go out and repeat the process with the pirates with every faction you just turned hostile against you."

I think that should be the other way around. Losing rep with someone else more than you gain with the person you help results in a net loss of rep overall, meaning if you do that repeatedly eventually everyone will hate you, instead of the other way around.

[gymnoitan]

Huh. I was pretty sure that the Republic (Navy) vessels had a bribe rating of zero. It's been a long time since I played though.

[Rebel Fleet Pursuit]

@gymnoitan I see, thank you for the info.

I went and checked the files of the game, and the only factions you're likely to encounter in human space with a bribe value of 0 (outside of specific missions, at least) are "Author" and "Parrot". Unless I really missed something, there should be no reason why anybody would refuse bribes.

[gymnoitan]

The thing is, some of the bribe values from various nations is zero, which means that they will not accept bribes. Instead, they are going to kill you on sight. No quarter will be given or accepted. That is what "We do not want your money." means.

[Xubs]

Ill check it later and update you here. Thx for the reply btw.

[Rebel Fleet Pursuit]

I just did some quick testing, and of all the factions I tried bribing, it worked every time.

I tried bribing merchants, republic, and militia at -100 relations. The story hadn't progressed to where the free worlds gets involved, so I couldn't test with them. I also tried testing syndicate at -10, because I apparently set the values for testing wrong.

If I were to guess (I haven't tested this so I don't know what happens) you might not have enough money. Some of the bribes can be quite expensive.