Bounty Hunting for professionals

If you are a veteran bounty hunter and think you have already mastered it and know everything about it, i will prove you wrong. I wont bore you with the basics and instead reveal secrets that can double your income.

Introduction

Hello commander!
This is not a beginner and not an advanced guide. If you are not yet familiar with the basics I advice to refer to beginner guides and youtube tutorials first, there are plenty around.

But if you think you know everything about bounty hunting and there is nothing for you to learn? Let me surprise you. Mostly basic and also advanced bounty hunter guides and youtube tutorials cover the basic approach, im going to skip this and instead reveal the top secrets.

The "wrong way" to do it

Mostly experienced bounty hunters will teach you to stack up on non-wing massacre missions in certain source systems from multiple factions and then head for resource extraction sites in the target system grinding the mission target pirates. While this is considered the "best way" to do it, there is a number of problems with it, that you certainly already faced.

The resource extraction sites are not the best place to do it when it comes to max out the profit, as they are quickly degrading on mission targets. When you arrive at RES there may be plenty of targets to kill in the beginning. But once you have cleaned them up, after about 10 minutes they become rare and you lose too much time searching for next mission target. There is no way to reset the res sites. Once cleaned it takes hours for them to recover on mission targets.

Also the mission targets in RES are often spread over wide range, so you are often forced sometimes to fly more then 10km to the next target. That costs downtime and therefore effects profit.

Another problem is that the strength of the targets in RES sites is usually random. You may be facing easy kills and highly engineered hard nuts too. But if you want to max out the profit its only kills per time unit what matters. You want to kill as many easy mission targets per hour as possible and not lose time fighting some deadly anacondas wasting your time.

Doing a complete stack of 20 massacre missions in RES can take up to two hours or more even for experienced bounty hunter. Read next chapter to learn how to do it in 30-60 minutes.

The "right way" to do it.

Now as we have pinned down the problems with RES, which let you waste too much time and therefore reducing your income per hour, lets now see how you can greatly improve number of mission target killed per hour.

Forget about RES.
The much better way to do it, is abusing easy signal sources.

You want to do as many kills per hour as possible. Therefore you want to focus on easy ones.
So when you arrive in your target system,
1. scan the beacon.
2. pick up next signal source of threat lvl 3 and enter it.
3. You will find a pack of about 6 or 7 easy pirates, they will be mostly harmless to expert lvl and can be killed in no time one after another. They will all be mission targets you don't need to scan them. Kill them quickly don't waste time and let them spread all over the place.
4. Now reset the signal source and repeat.
After you have killed the last mission target, just quit to main menu and log back into the game.
You will still be in the area that you have cleaned up. Now enter supercruise with throttle cut off. Use boost instead, throttle must stay cut off, this is important.
Once in supercruise keep throttle at 0% and check your left panel. Notice that there is "unknown signal source" at your location, usually right behind you. It is the same signal source that you have already cleaned, but now you have reset it.
5. Turn around in supercruise and enter the same signal source again.
6. Rinse repeat.

Things to consider:
This works mostly but not always. Sometimes if you are lucky, you can reset same signal source over and over again until you finish all 20 missions. Then it will take you only about 30 minutes at max. However signal sources are removing themself as you progress with the missions. At certain point you may complete a mission that has generated the signal source that you are abusing. Then it will vanish and you can't abuse it anymore. In this case just pick up next signal source and continue abusing that until it vanishes too. Usually for 20 missions you have to switch to another signal source 2 or 3 times. Then it takes you maybe 40 minutes maybe 50 minutes in total. This is still more then double as fast as grinding the RES.

You can also take lvl 2 signal sources and lvl 4 signal sources but keep in mind, that lvl 2 produces less targets even though they are even weaker (instant kills) but it means you have to relog more often. Lvl 4 signal sources produce same amount of mission targets, but they are a bit harder to kill. Aint one hit kills anymore, and this can cost you some extra time to clean up these. But if there are no any lvl 3 signal sources left, lvl 4 is fine too but try to stick with lvl 3 first. This is more efficient as the targets are weaker.

The proper build

Im not going to tell you what vessel to use and how to outfit it, this is up to you, basically anything works. I will just give you some tips that may help you to optimize your favorite build for this technique.

Damage Output is everything.
You will mostly deal with very weak single targets, that will barely scratch you. Proper defense is not really required here. Its nice to have some decent shield but you can save on the hull. You want to kill weak targets as quickly as possible, therefore weapon selection is more important. Focus on maximum damage output. This can be achieved in many ways, its up to you, but a frag build is a good idea for this, as you can abuse frags to their maximum efficiency because unlike hunting in RES the targets in signal sources are not maneuvering until you attack. You can sneak up on them from behind very close and fire the frags making sure that most projectiles hit them which can instantly kill weak targets in lvl 3 signal sources.

My favorite for this is anaconda with 3 pacifiers (double shot + incendiary rounds) and the rest with multicannons (short range autoloader). I sneak up on them from behind closer then 1000 meters and then release the pacifiers. Often it is an instant kill or at least it certainly instantly strips the shields and leave them with damaged hull. Then if they survive the pacifiers i quickly finish them off with the MCs. Even if its not instant kill, it shouldn't take more then a few seconds per kill. Usually not even enough time for them to realize what's going on and start boosting and maneuvering.

After a bit of training it is possible to clean up all 6 targets in a lvl 3 signal source in a matter of a minute or two with a frag build.

OK, so commander. I hope you like this method. Feel free to post your feedback. Good luck.

[ждун]

@Gaele_38
я не знал что ру плееров больше. Обычно общаюсь в игре и на форуме по английски как то думал что это стандарт. Русскую речь встречаю крайне редко.
На самом деле мне оценки и не важны. Просто хотел поделиться этим методом со всеми.

[Ryan Gosling]

я знаю и понимаю инглиш, но все равно, у тебя ведь и оценок было бы больше, и помог бы ты намного большему кол-ву игроков, даже мне например приятнее ру читать, чем инг

[Ryan Gosling]

друг, у этой игры ру плееров всегда было больше, чем англоязычных, почему гайд не на ру?)

[ждун]

that is what im saying. you have to kill all wanted, not just mission targets, otherwise you see the amount of mission targets degrade.

[HughJardon]

I don't have any problem resetting the spawn. I've been doing it every night for 6 months and a lot more before that.

Shoot every wanted ship, not just mission targets. generally, half are mission targets. none of them take long to kill in a low RES. If you're doing it right, you should kill at least 60 mission targets per hour.

[ждун]

I tried reseting it by flying out and in. This only works if you leave it for some time. If you jump back immidiatly it seems not to reset. Still no mission targets and no spawns. One need wait until some non mission targets leave, or kill some of them.

[ждун]

Until you kill some more non mission targets.

[ждун]

The problem with spawns is that NPCs spawn with random factions until certain amount is reached when RES is considered full. But you are hunting only one particular faction their number will naturaly degrade. Consider the situation where there is only one slot left until RES is full and nothing spawns anymore. And then, because its random by chance the last slot is occupied by some other faction that is not your mission target. Then you won't find any mission targets and no any will spawn anymore.

[HughJardon]

The first ships that spawn give a good indication of what will follow. A correct spawn will give more or less continuous targets, maybe with a short pause after around 9 kills to let you get your breath before the next wave. That's about 120 to 150 targets per hr of which 50% to 65% will be mission targets. Once you start shooting, you must watch the radar all the time so that you can see what your next target will be. You have to learn the NPCs behaviour a bit to see how and where they come in, first with square tops, then triangular. To an extent, you have to memorize where the miners are, so you can tell where the pirates are so that as soon as you have killed your target, you're straight on to the next. You must shoot wing-ships first because they will often try to run away after you kill the main ship. That's about it - practice and learning to get the best.

[HughJardon]

I made a beginners video that has all the basics. To make the most money at it, you need a fast ship that has good lateral thrusters - FAS or Chieftain. You must fit at least 2 long-range lasers and long-range A-class sensors. Weapons should be all lasers unless you want to do short play sessions. It's very important to change the instance by jumping out or logging if you don't get the right spawn. You have to do it for a bit to see what a good spawn looks like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToQcJ-9jVao&t=1s