ACTIVITY TYPE: TRADING

Trading

Rare Commodity Trading

[elite-dangerous.wikia.com]

Longrange Hauling

Smuggling

Pilot Federation rank: Trade is a summary of all delivery related activity. This rank increases with incoming profit from deliveries - you gain more progression by making profit from selling commodities legally or smuggling, and earning delivery mission rewards.To be honest, I could start to explain what kind of econmical information you can find and where in the game, but honestly it's a waste of time and a pain to rely on ingame information for trading. Use EDDB (). Set your current location, maximum cargo capability, your preferred maximum jump distance, what type of route you want to plan (loop, one way, etc.), and start to play Space Trucking Simulator!How profitable trading is, largely depends on your available cargo space. Below 100T of cargo I'd advise you not to try to make a living with trading just yet. If you are flying a multipurpose or hauling ship with a decent jump range and acceptable cargo space, go for rare trading. Once you have enough cargo space, you can fill it up with lower value but higher amount of commodities, that together will yield you more profit than transporting around a low number of high value commodities. What to buy, where to sell it? EDDB is your friend!Now this is a bit more interesting. Special stations in the game are able to produce Rare Commodities, that are unique to that station in the entire galaxy, thus have a massively increased price the futher away you transport it from it's source where you can pick it up relatively cheap. 120-150Ly distance seems to be the sweet spot. If you can think of an ideal circular route from one Rare Commody source to the other, you can create lucrative trading roads. This is primarily profitable for lower cargo capacity ships, newer players. Here is a list the the Rare Commodities and where to find them.Long range hauling is a mix of trading and rare trading. You are not buying anything, but you will transport cargo for immense distances every time. The idea of long range hauling is to find space stations that are outside the civilization bubble, separated and self reliant. These stations, given their distance from the rest of civilizations, offer massive payments for trivial missions such as deliver X amount of cargo from them, back to the civilization bubble's Y system.What makes this dangerous is the hundreds of lightyears you'll have to travel out in the wild, with no station anywhere near to refuel or repair your ship. If you get attacked out here, you are own your own. If you feel like you are running out of fuel, you have to find a scoopable star before your generator and engines eat up all of it and you freeze to death.Filter the galaxy map. Try to find the edge of the civilization bubble from each direction, and look for life outside the bubble. The most commonly used systems are 17 Draconis, Ceos, Sothis and Maia. These systems, given their vulnerability that comes from being separated, are often unstable and go on lockdown, civil unrest etc. states, thus their purpose for the player often changes. Be sure to check their status on the galaxy map before making a trip out there, and check the wikia for what each status means and how to change them (such as Famine, Boom, etc.).The point of smuggling is to avoid being scanned by local authorities, station gates, or in specific cases, anyone, while delivering precious cargo.Smuggling is an illegal activity. It can be long range or along a normal trading route. Smuggling is a type of delivery that does not involve using the market to purchase anything - you either do it for missions, or found something in space that belonged to someone else but you stole it. In case you stole something, for example commodities from a ship wreckage that belonged to it's late pilot and will be picked up later on by NPCs, or you simply bought something like alchohol or tabacco, that is prohibited in a different system you are headed to. You cannot sell these type of cargo (marked as illegal / stolen in your inventory) on the market, you must find a space station that has a black market. Independent starsystems / stations are more likely to have one: it is listed on the galaxy map when you select a station and read it's services. Alternatively, you can use Inara to find Black Markets.These are high payout missions, for with the greater reward comes greater risk. These missions usually require you to avoid any kind of scan, and go completely undercover until you are done with your task. There are 2 main things you need to watch out for:1) Being scanned by ships.2) Being scanned by station gates.1) Avoid being scanned by ships. With an active smuggling mission on you, there will be people trying to find you, scan you, and attempt to take your cargo. After a succesful scan mean failure of the mission, so feel free to drop the now worthless cargo after.* Do not allow NPCs to pull you out of supercruise.* If you are about to lose an interdiction minigame, give up, handbreak [X] ! Your FSD will recharge much quicker if you slow down and stop, than if you allow your attacker to cause a malfuntion at 100% usage. Boost away from your attacker as fast and often as you can. Target your attacker behind you by selecting him on the left panel [1] Contacts tab, and deploy hardpoints [ U ] .This will stop whatever scan they attempted to do and pull their weapons out instead. If you could put 3km distance between you and him, you are safe from their weapons. Giving up the interdiction minigame is usually the "meta" players do, not even trying to beat it.2) Avoid being scanned by station gates, simply slip though them as fast as you can without turning your ship into a wreckage on the other wall. BEWARE: The scanning range starts a minimal distance away from the station gate "cage", not at the blue forcefield. Having your landing gear deployed will limit your speed to a maximum of 100km/h (it's also a good "handbreak" mechanism), that is enogh to slip through undetected. Align your ship with the station gate from a good 7-10km away, so you won't need to worry about high speed turns, just boost forward. General advice: try to enter a station at the green lights side of the gate: that's where ships go in, and red is where they leave the station (it's obviously swapped once you are inside).