The Material Trader is a contact found at certain stations that offers to exchange one Material for a different quantity of another Material. There are three types of Material Trader, each dealing exclusively in one category of Materials: Raw Materials, Manufactured Materials, or Encoded Materials.

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Location information

Each trader type only trades in their type of materials and can be found in different economy types. Locations material traders can be found are: Raw Materials Trader : found at Refinery and Extraction economies, only trades in raw material found on planet surfaces and planetary rings. Manufactured Materials Trader : Found at Extraction and Industrial economies, only trades in manufactured materials. Encoded Materials Trader : Found at High Tech and Military economies, only trades in encoded materials.

Systems need to be mid to high security systems and have populations between 1,000,000 and 22,000,000.

Materials Traders will not show up in anarchy systems.

Materials Traders will not show up at stations that are currently controlled by a criminal faction.

Materials Traders will be unavailable when a station is damaged, under repair or put on lockdown.

Categories

Each of the three types of material can be further broken down into categories.

Raw

Can be found in systems with Refinery economy Section Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 3 Grade 4 Raw Material Category 1 Carbon Vanadium Niobium Yttrium Raw Material Category 2 Phosphorus Chromium Molybdenum Technetium Raw Material Category 3 Sulphur Manganese Cadmium Ruthenium Raw Material Category 4 Iron Zinc Tin Selenium Raw Material Category 5 Nickel Germanium Tungsten Tellurium Raw Material Category 6 Rhenium Arsenic Mercury Polonium Raw Material Category 7 Lead Zirconium Boron Antimony

Encoded

Manufactured

Conversion Rates

These are the rates at which all Material Traders exchange materials.

In summary:

Trading for a material that is one grade lower gives a 3:1 return.

Trading for a material that is one grade higher gives a 1:6 return.

Trading one category for another gives a 1:6 return.

Changing both grade and category, and/or changing by more than one grade, multiplies all the relevant factors together.

Same Category

This table lists the exchange rates used when converting between items of the same category.

Example: trading Open Symmetric Keys (Grade 3 Encryption Files) for Adaptive Encryptors Capture (Grade 5 Encryption Files), 36 units of input data are consumed to yield 1 unit of output data.

Conversion of a material to one of the same category Input Grade 1 2 3 4 5 Output Grade 1 - 1 → 3 1 → 9 1 → 27 1 → 81 2 6 → 1 - 1 → 3 1 → 9 1 → 27 3 36 → 1 6 → 1 - 1 → 3 1 → 9 4 216 → 1 36 → 1 6 → 1 - 1 → 3 5 1296 → 1* 216 → 1 36 → 1 6 → 1 -

Another Category

This table lists the exchange rates used when converting between items of a different category. Converting between different categories of material is more expensive.

Example 1: trading Adaptive Encryptors Capture (Grade 5 Encryption Files) for Peculiar Shield Frequency Data (Grade 5 Shield Data), 6 units of input data are consumed to yield 1 unit of output data.

Example 2: trading Open Symmetric Keys (Grade 3 Encryption Files) for Datamined Wake Exceptions (Grade 5 Wake Data), 216 units of input data are consumed to yield 1 unit of output data.

Conversion of a material to one of another category Input Grade 1 2 3 4 5 Output Grade 1 6 → 1 2 → 1 2 → 3 2 → 9 2 → 27 2 36 → 1 6 → 1 2 → 1 2 → 3 2 → 9 3 216 → 1 36 → 1 6 → 1 2 → 1 2 → 3 4 1296 → 1 * 216 → 1 36 → 1 6 → 1 2 → 1 5 7776 → 1 * 1296 → 1 * 216 → 1 36 → 1 6 → 1

Note that the conversions marked with an asterisk (*) in the table above are not possible to achieve due to the limitations on material/data storage.

Notes

Material Traders were added with Elite Dangerous: Beyond Chapter One (3.0) on February 27, 2018. Their services are only available to owners of Elite Dangerous: Horizons.

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