Here are some tips I've picked up after trading for a week. Hopefully this will help people avoid some of the pain of early shipping.
Know the market:
- Versemate.com is your friend, easy to use and tells you how to cut a profit.
Understand your landing zones and persistence mechanics:
- NEVER logout with cargo in your hold unless you are on a landing pad at a landing zone listed below. If you do, when you come back your ship will be in an "unknown" location and you very likely will have to reclaim it and lose your cargo.
- The absolute best place to logout is Port Olisar, especially with a big ship as you don't have to first escape atmosphere to get space-born. Behind PO, is anywhere with Habs (Grim Hex, Levski, Loreville). If you don't logout somewhere with player Habs, when you login it will put you somewhere that does, which will require you to use another ship to fly out to where your cargo vessel is stored.
- When landing ALWAYS request clearance, land and then logout. Log back in and you should still have a safely stored ship at the location you parked it.
- Be very careful leaving your ship while on bases where you cannot spawn a ship, it may get stored in the base (with your cargo in it) and you cannot respawn it, you have to reclaim it. (Thanks! u/DASK)
Be ready for crashes and have a disaster recovery plan:
- If ANYTHING starts to feel "weird" or "desynced" get to the closest landing zone with habs. You may be about to crash, which very likely will be not recoverable and you lose everything.
- If you do crash, when you relaunch the game, from the main menu (the first screen you can interact with, before you choose to go into the Universe), on the right hand side you might see a message telling you that you can recover your instance. YOU WANT TO DO THIS, do not click the wrong button "[" will get you back to where you just crashed, thus saving all of your cargo and ship, and the "]" less than an inch away will take this option away and ruin your evening. Choose wisely.
- YOU WILL CRASH and YOU WILL LOSE EVERYTHING. This will happen at least once, if not a few times a week. PLAN ACCORDINGLY, never ever ever ever spend all of your aUEC on cargo, spend 50-60% at most. It won't take long til 50% of your aUEC will fill your hold up completely anyway.
Trade terminals and the game itself are buggy:
It's an alpha, so you'll have to work around some things and that's ok.
- Make sure you toggle back and forth on buy/sell tabs, sometimes they boot up weird
- If things continue to not work, try a different server, then try a different ship (everyone should have a cutlass this week I think)
- There are issues when selling large quantities of goods. I am pretty sure this has to do with an upper limit on what a given landing zone will buy from you. Rather than a good error message, it just throws undefined. To deal with this, try first to sell everything, if you get undefined, then try selling less and less until a transaction goes through, then close the terminal and wait 60 seconds before trying another sell of approximately the same amount.
- Occasionally servers will just get screwed or your presence within them is screwed, this can cause nothing to be buyable/sellable no matter where you are. If this happens, fly to PO/Loreville/Levski and logout/log back in.
- Sometimes what you actually have in your cargo and what the terminal shows in your cargo are not the same, this will result in undefined errors. Close terminal and reopen it, toggle buy, then toggle sell, then select your ship. Make sure you don't see "undefined" anywhere on the terminal, if you do, close and open it again.
Go learn about Jumptown:
- Understand it's risks and rewards.
- You need to bring them med-supplies so they can cook your widow. Agricultural supplies work too. Do not go empty handed or you probably can't buy anything. They buy both med-supplies and agricultural supplies at a premium, so just the trip out is profitable as well.
- Figure out how to get there this will help:
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/9y8sk4
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/9y8sk4/33_live_jumptown_location_picture_goby/
, you should be able to find it at night as it's the safest time to go, there are also youtube videos. You start the run at Grim Hex.
- Learn to avoid pirates, if someone is there when you arrive, just burn right on through. DO NOT LAND, with a full cargo of med-supplies on a cutlass you're out 78k aUEC, it's not worth trusting someone to do the right thing.
- If anyone is airborne in a non-trading vessel, they are probably going to kill you, so keep your afterburners on and get back to orbit as quickly as you can, then QT to safety.
- If someone offers to not kill you in exchange for a few thousand credits, do it, this is a good deal.
- Running a Cutlass Black fully loaded with med supplies, then returning with Widow/Altruciatoxin is 35k profit
- First sell Med-supplies, then buy as much widow as they will sell, then buy Altruciatoxin to fill your hold, then get the hell out of there and burn to orbit
- Go to Ghex, get inside the safe zone and land/sell your stuff. You will have terminal sale problems, refer to the section above for handling this
- When you have your hold empty, return to PO and repeat.
- (repeated below in surviving pirate encounters) If you are coming into Jumptown, BURN at a high altitude and make a pass-over to ensure no one is nearby. The higher up you are, the harder you can burn. Any pirates lying in wait in ships will be radar detectable within 4-5km and will have a hard time catching you if you do a flyover at 800m/s.
Beware Pirates & Ship Jackers (thanks u/killerkram)
- People will try to get onto your ship when you are at a landing zone. Check the exterior of your ships before opening doors.
- Always close your doors when you get out. You don't want people sneaking on while you are inside. It sucks to get outside armistice and have your brains blown out by a stowaway. (This happened to me with a fully loaded caterpillar with about 250k in commodities on board. Don't be dumb like me.
- If someone DID get on your ship, don't try to kill them by flying outside armistic, protect your investment. Leave your ship on the pad, log out, get another server.
Surviving the inevitable pirate encounter:
Based on some comments, I'm adding this section too.
- Take a Cutlass, your survivability goes way up in a pirate encounter, you can, and sometimes will die but you at least have some options.
- If jumped in-atmo, don't try to fly straight up, engage boost/afterburners and go at about a 30 degree angle slowly shift up and to one side or another. This will let your engines work to your advantage and while you are definitely slower than most fighters, your shields might hold up til you can reach atmosphere. Hopefully the pirate pilot will struggle with in-atmo afterburner speeds and fail to keep damage on you before you can reach space and QT to safety.
- When running, throw your power to shields/engines, I am not sure if it does any good whatsoever, but it sure FEELS good to be micromanaging your power output to maximize your chances of escape
- If you get jumped while on approach to Armistice Zone, don't get tempted into a dog-fight, you will lose against a decent fighter. Just Afterburner into the AZ, speed is your best friend.
- Don't get greedy, If you are going out in something bigger than a Cutlass, bring a friend to provide you some cover
- Don't fly a big ship into a gravity well, you're pretty helpless
- Spend some time in AC and get comfortable with your ship. Even flying against the horrid AI pilots in AC will give you a feel for how your ship performs
- If you are coming into Jumptown, BURN at a high altitude and make a pass-over to ensure no one is nearby. The higher up you are, the harder you can burn. Any pirates lying in wait in ships will be radar detectable within 4-5km and will have a hard time catching you if you do a flyover at 800m/s.
Good luck out there.
