Super Noob Trader Tips - 1st hour of gameplay

[Prisner]

I actually have a 3 digit IQ, yet I really struggled getting off the ground with a handful of things. Of course, I just jumped right into the demo with no training whatsoever. Every 30 minutes or so I'd quit the game and go search a forum, google something, or watch a youtube video. For once in my life, I'm going to give back to the community. If this is your very first hour playing this game here are some tips.

CONTRACTS

Solar Arrays & Delivery - Fastest, easiest money.
Racing - Takes longer, burns more fuel, which costs you money.
Mining Diamonds & Clearing Asteroid Fields - Takes more time.
Mining Water & Air - Takes more time, burns more fuel, possible hull repairs.
Item Recovery - Sometimes a pain to find the crate.

Cleaning Solar Arrays - One of the fastest, easiest ways to make money doing contracts. Use 'B' (your mining laser) to clean every square. Use alt-B to switch the laser on and leave it running. There are 2 levels of clean. If you sweep super fast over the panels you'll get both levels on most but maybe not all of them. You get paid for this contract in the field right where you are sitting the moment every square is 100% clean. If you don't get a message saying you fulfilled your contract and received your cash, you still have a panel that is not 100% clean. (I did a fast sweep then flew back to the station to get paid and couldn't figure out why they weren't paying me.)

Delivery - Fly into the big green box and... jettison your cargo. A single left mouse click on whatever the station put in your cargo bay will do it.

Racing - The key is to keep your speed down to 800-1000. Racing is easier with better wings. Do this one time, then go get a wing upgrade to level 3 and try it again. In the straight-aways you'll have a tendency to keep your finger on the afterburners and not realize your at 3000, which makes it really hard to make your turns.

Mining - I approached an asteroid at about 300, fired up the laser and.... nothing. Quit the game... again. Watched the tutorial video on it. Turns out you need to be really close to asteroids for the mining laser to mine. Like 100 or so. You aren't mining until you see orange fire effects coming off the rocks. Dump the metal while your mining, to make room for more precious metals/minerals.

Water & Air - You have to enter a planets atmosphere and use your mining laser. The red [[[docking]]] boxes guide you in to the city for docking. You don't need that. Just fly straight toward the planet. If you turn on your laser it will harvest air as soon as it's available. Just fly around above the city/landscape until your cargo is full. Water is a PITA because you have to target the lakes, which you can't do w/out pointing down. When you fly pointing down for too long you lose altitude and have to fly back up. You can't really cheat with inertial because you need to keep IDS on inside the atmosphere. When exiting atmosphere, use the HUD's pitch ladder to orient your craft to 90 degrees for fastest way out. (Press H for different HUD displays). Also, if you stay on the edge of the envelope, speed-wise, in atmosphere (around 1400-1500), and you burn through your shields you will sustain hull damage. Without a repair computer you will have to pay for the repairs when you get back.

Item Recovery - Fly to the waypoint and look at the radar in the center of the control panel portion of your HUD. A small purple blip should appear in there, if not fly around abit until it shows up. Fly around to center the blip inside the grey fixed circle.



Shipyard - There's a tutorial video on this too. Mostly, the only part that's non-intuitive from just looking at it is that you need to drag-and-drop items from the left onto your rotating spaceship in the middle. Your starter boat comes with assembly points to spare, so you can make many upgrades pretty painlessly. Cargo bays are NOT additive. If you want 5 bays you don't need to add '1 cargo bay' twice. Grab the '5 cargo bays' item and drop it onto your ship.

This loadout on the Talon costs $22,000: engine 2, wings 3, cargo bay 5, fuel 2 (800).


Missions vs. Mining - I can't speak to which one is better for career advancement. On your own (no contract), you can mine diamonds and platinum inside the Sapphire system (in utter safety), easily, for excellent money. There is an asteroid field at about 8 o'clock on your Nav map (F1). Cargo bays max out at 25 units per bay, dia/plat sell for about $1,000 each. That's $75,000 per trip with just 3 cargo bays. My last run with 75 diamonds and 50 plat (5 cargo bays) netted $161,000. Early on, contracts pay about $7,000 - $10,000 each.

This is an excellent thread on making your millions from mining.
http://www.starwraith.com/forum/viewtop ... 2#pid91525

IDS engaged (spacebar to toggle) means as soon as you release the 'gas pedal' your boat drifts to a stop. With Inertial, if you're traveling in a straight line, you'll maintain your speed and just have to feather the gas pedal to keep moving (afterburners to keep moving fast). You'll save a lot of fuel this way. If you switch to Inertial before you jump back to a station you'll drift right in without burning fuel.

Failing contracts is uncool. It actually effects your reputation and the amount of money you'll make on future contracts. Do what you can to complete every contract you take.

Save frequently. You can press F2 to jump, and pretty easily fly into an obstacle and explode (like the solar array that you just finished cleaning). Or, you'll take a mission to harvest water and the waypoint you get is the actual planet. Sometimes you have to adjust the waypoint back a bit before you jump.

You can run out of gas in space. In single-player, restart from save.

[FinFoxx]

wow nice effort, buy the game and hit MP see ya!

FoxXxy

[Dingo]

Nice to see this kind of work put into an advice thread. Nice work Prisner!

[Maarschalk]

Hi Prisner, welcome to the game and forum!....Hope to see you out there some time!....

[Star King]

Welcome to the game but you forgot the O in Prisoner! Which this addicting game will do to you!!!!!:P

[Aliceblue]

To mine water:

just set your velocity 0 and slowly go down in altitude, surface will make you stop at a certain altitude just point down your nose and mine, you don't have to fly all the time that would be a pain in the ass.

About mining:

You can mine platinium and sell it to a technology economy planet which is like 95-85 K per 25. so just buy 3 cargo slots boom you will have 250k money easily. (just a tip)

[Edited on 2-2-2012 by Aliceblue]

[tsuki]

Actually, there's a better way to mine water - disc around a planet usually contains it . No atmosphere involved .