Some advice for beginner bounty hunters. Now, I’ve only done a little bounty hunting in the release version, but I did lots in the beta and my information should still apply. If anyone has better advice I’d love to hear it.
In any given system one of the best places to try and find bounties is the nav beacon near the star. At the start, before you can interdict, go to the nav beacon itself and just keep cycling through targets and scanning them to see if they are wanted. If you are in a regular system with some authority, your regular scanner will tell you if they are wanted, you don’t need a kill warrant scanner for that. I’ve found hunting at the nav beacon to yield more opportunities than flying around randomly looking for signals.
You will want a kill warrant scanner as soon as you can afford it. In a lawless system, scanning for warrants is the only way to know if someone is wanted. In a lawful system you still want to always scan opponents even if the regular scanner shows them as wanted. Often wanted pilots are wanted by multiple factions and after you scan them you can see and collect all the bounties. This will maximize your bounty revenue.
To use the kill scanner I recommend setting up one firing group with your primary weapons on the main trigger and the scanner on secondary, and a second group of just your primary and secondary weapons. Rather than one group of weapons and one group with only the scanner. Often you’ll have to complete the scan after the target has become hostile so you’ll be keeping that second trigger down while you start shooting. Once the scan is complete then switch to the other fire group so you can start using your secondary weapons. Once scanned you can see the bounty on a pilot when you select them in the contacts list of the left side UI panel.
A good system choice for bounty hunting is one that has stations belonging to multiple factions, and it’s even better if there’s a black market in one of them. Having multiple local factions means that when you take out someone wanted there’s a decent chance that more than one of the local factions will give you a payout. Having a black market nearby means you can also make a little side money selling off the cargo that is occasionally dropped by your prey.
That’s all I got so far. During my brief meanderings in the release version I’ve seen bounties around 5-12k. So if sidewinder trade runs are running ~$6k (I haven’t done any trading in release, I’m basing this on the prior poster’s info), bounty hunting seems like it should be a reasonably viable choice at the start.
Finally one question for people who have had more time in the pilot’s seat. Right at the end of my last play session I saw a mission to hunt a pirate for something crazy like $186k. I took it hoping to get to it tonight (as it had a 31h timer), but I wonder if I’m just going to get slaughtered by some uber ship I have no business taking on in my basic Eagle. Anyone have experience with these missions? I have seen other missions that were unavailable due to my lowly ranking, does that mean the game won’t give me a mission to go find a pirate that is going to completely outclass me?