First Successful Mutli-Ship Cargo Run!!!

[Kowalski]

Hey y'all, long time.

For those of you like myself who have a couple ships with large holds, you've probably shared my frustration with commodities-trading and hauling in general.

Well, since acquainting myself with some new bigboi ships this IAE, and having experienced better server stability overall, I decided to do something risky to celebrate my wallet getting lighter this week.

I decided to run three full holds of metals in Hurston... a Carrack, a Caterpillar, and a C2. That's 1728 total SCU!! Some takeaways:

- Thanks to the implementation of 30K protection, this whole process has been far less stressful...best part is, the servers have been solid for me, so I never even got to test the recovery system!

- Trading still has a LONG way to go, especially now that large cargo holds are becoming more commonplace, I've noticed even the high-volume outposts are being bought out and killing margins (1.3M buy-in for 116K profit, less than 10%). To be fair, I'm part of the problem!!! Total time spent was about 45 minutes, so still a healthy ~155k/hr for when tracking group bounties or quant mining gets stale.

- Carrack is King this patch due to the fact that it has a Tier-2 med bay for respawning. As you can see at 3:48 in the video, it's still very easy to trip to death. I've died outside of the C2 previously and had the fortune of finding it on the surface when flying back in a light fighter, but I was at the mercy of cleanup the whole time.

Even though the profit wasn't the best (nothing beats the bounty grind), this was still incredible fun, and I urge you folks to try it if you have given up on hauling in previous patches!

Next up, bulk quantanium transport :)

Video here for those interested:

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

My 2 year old digs your song selection!

Cool video and great use of speed up where it's needed, many thanks for sharing :)

 

[Montoya]

Everything went according to plan!

 

[Kowalski]

My 2 year old digs your song selection!

Your 2 year old has great taste!

 

[Montoya]

What were you trading and where?

 

[Kowalski]

What were you trading and where?

Simple route this time: Arial -> Lorville CBD

Alternated between the two HDMS outposts and scooped a full cargo hold in this order: Laranite -> Titanium -> Tungsten. First two ships I re-docked at Everus Harbor (it shares inventory with Lorville), and went straight to Lorville on my last trip. Switched it up today, but normally C2 is what I use to land in Lorville due to its agility compared to the other two.

Margins for this particular route have gotten slimmer (I recall getting 80k+ profit in the C2 alone last week), in my opinion due to the calmness of Arial's surface (much less risk of tripping to death when there's no wind) as well as the amount of players renting IAE vessels and general increase in popularity due to stability.

Is there something else you've tried that got better results?

 

[CosmicTrader]

Nice to see a video that isn't pew pew all the time.

 

[Talonsbane]

Great job & congrats!

 

[BUTUZ]

Don't matter weather I go small:

Or go big:

Cant sell jack shit anywhere in the broken mess I call the PU!

 

[Deroth]

Awesome song selection and your edits were perfect, very fun video to watch.

I've been looking around, the cargo run you did is currently still the most profitable for the time spent by a decent margin, which is quite sad. Once it drops to around 60k for profits in a C2 then there are others that will be competitive with it. Which is all the more reason why the trade community really needs the cargo refactor to give cargo hauling a much better feel.

 

[Kowalski]

Which is all the more reason why the trade community really needs the cargo refactor to give cargo hauling a much better feel.

Given the current state of the game, I certainly understand why it's difficult to balance. Without the buy/sell limitations this could easily become one of the most busted money methods in the PU. Had I been able to fill all three cargo holds with Laranite and sell at the default margin, I would have made 550k in about 45 minutes, and that's taking a trivial route with relatively low risk (buy/sell points are both armastice zones, only about 60kkm apart).

There are two loops I've been hoping for to improve hauling:

1. Illegal cargo running: It simply isn't worth doing in it's current state, but if margins were higher, or if a mechanic was introduced to sell to shady characters in cities while sneaking around security, that'd be a great high-risk-high-reward activity that especially favors smaller cargo ships not currently useful in the PU.

2. Cargo Missions: Box delivery is already a thing...how about using those same kiosks for bulk cargo as well?? That would offer fairly-scaled payouts similarly to BH, starting with VLRC which is only a couple SCU and between two safe hubs, while ERC would be thousands of SCU total requiring multiple ships or players with large holds, as well as routes going through potentially dangerous areas where PVP may be popular or NPC pirates might hang out.

For now, the fact that hauling is no longer a total waste of time is progress in my book, but I'm definitely looking forward to what comes next, especially when the BMM and HULL series come out.