What about “unsanctioned” outposts that fly the skull flag? I think so far all of those have a black market (but they are few and far between in my experience). Better to not have illegal cargo on board till you KNOW where there’s a black market waiting. I think the forum thread on Frontier forums is the way to go.
I would strongly suggest trying to find an outpost vs. a full-fledged station that has the appropriate allegiance in order to pay your fine if it’s become a bounty. Why take chances (unless you have credits to burn, of course)?
Just had a good run while taking a bounty hunter mission with 4 targets. I sped to the nearest nav beacon and hung around there for a bit and then the action started and ramped up big time for about an hour straight. With some police support, I believe we took down 10 pirates before I finally got my credit for 4 and I had racked up like 26k in bounties along with the mission reward of about 13k. I had to go to a nearby station to turn the mission in with the Aquilae Green Party and found out that in their station they had the Class E beam lasers for 37k! Woot! Now I am rocking two new lasers and ready to go back hunting again in my upgraded Spidey.
I am far from a good pilot, but I pulled off a few moves that surprised me in some of those dogfights I had earlier and we even took down some expert and deadly pirates that were in sidewinders themselves. It is starting to get second nature knowing when to shift pips from system to engines to weapons and hitting boost at the right times to press any advantage you can acquire. This game can certainly be overwhelming at times, but as others have mentioned the feedback you get while burning through some poor sap’s shield is awesome. This game rocks!
Wait, you need to click and hold a button? In my starter Sidewinder, I’ve done a couple scans just by facing my target. Should I be activating something to get better data or something?
The facing target scans are passive and I don’t think you need the discovery scanner for that. You have to charge the DS and it will reveal sibling stars, planets and other stuff in a radius determined by the quality of the scanner. You still need to passive scan those objects for credit.
There are two parts. You’re talking about Part #2, vyshka is talking about Part #1.
There is a discovery scanner equipped on your ship, you fire it like a gun. Hold down the trigger to charge it up and then it blasts out a ping, revealing astronomical objects within 500Ls. These will show as “Unexplored” on your Navigation panel. This is Part #1.
Part #2 is selecting an Unexplored target from the Navigation panel, target it, and fly towards it until you start getting the scan you’re talking about. This is the valuable data you sell to Universal Cartographics (and things like detailed surface scanners provide more).
Ah, thanks. So I’ve probably been missing stuff and just scanning obvious stuff (like stars, mostly). I’ll try active scanning tonight! Thanks.
The game slowly reveals its layers. I’ve been taking it slow. I upgraded my starter ship per thread recommendations, got gimballed beginner burst lasers (8k a pop) and a Kill Warrant Scanner. With that I can go around and get some nice 5k - 10k per kill bounties. Then I swap out the discovery scanner for a 2 additional cargo when I see I can get 1k per Gallium with just one short 5k jump because its in high demand at a station I find. Bust out a couple of quick 5k profit jumps. I guess I’m well on my to saving up for a new ship.
When you get a mission to kill a certain type of dude, like kill 2 Pirates or kill 4 Traders, how do you go about finding them? Is it a matter of just hanging around a nav beacon and scanning everyone that warps in? How do I tell if someone is Pirate and not just a normal wanted dude.
I was like you, krayzkrok, and had an Anaconda scrapping with a federal police ship while I watched them shoot each other for a while with no visible effect. Eventually more guys came in and started fighting and I joined in. Man, that was one tough ship. I had to boost away a few times and come back in and when the Anaconda was down to 6% hull, I almost blew up and was at like 20% myself with my windshield all cracked up. My last shots came with 3% hull left on the Anaconda, but I was taking too much damage to stay close and the others ganged up on him and blew him up. All I ended up getting for it was a 900 credit repair bill, but it was quite a rush and a really long battle.
I am not sure how to know for sure which ships are pirates as far as the missions go, but in the safer main systems, they show up as wanted and I just kill all wanted dudes. In anarchy, it sounds like you need a special module of some sort to scan for whether they are a pirate or not? I really need to get one of those bounty scanners as a few tough skilled ships only gave a 300 credit bounty, ugh.
Speaking of discovery, I had a weird one last night. I was in a binary system that had maybe two or three stations around the primary star, and the secondary star was labeled as “unexplored,” yet two of its planets were not. So it was easy enough to find the star by aiming at the blips for the planets (around 350k LS away, ugh). I guess I don’t understand how the star (and it turns out, another one of its planets and one if its moons) were not. Kind of a head scratcher.
This bugs the hell outta me. Best info I found was on reddit - apparently pirates only have one name, like Prince, or Sting. Of course they don’t tell you that. Cmon, game, just tell me, somewhere on the contact screen, if he’s a pirate or not. Maddening.
Ah, that explains why on the stream yesterday that Brian did with his GF, they kept running into NPCs with names like Clown and Cheese.
Oh god, bounty hunting in asteroid fields/resource extraction zones might be the best thing ever.
That was a pretty cool stream today. What was your hull down to after that fight?
I had a pretty exciting session today. I wish I knew how to take screenshots in this game. (F12 does nothing! :P) Or better still, be able to say “Xbox Record that” to record the last 30 seconds of footage.
Courtesy of the Frontier Forum:
To take a screenshot press ‘F10’
That will then put a screenshot into
The Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous folder in your ‘pictures’ folder. I.E.
C:\Users[USER NAME]\Pictures\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous
Thanks man! And that Anaconda whittled me down to 6% by the time it was all done!
F10!!! Awesome! Thank you!
Good to know about F10!
I had a great time tonight. I’m still in my newb ship, but I now have the princely sum of 9000 credits, more or less, thanks to trading and a few missions. Also, I managed to evade my first interdiction by pointing at the evasion vector. I seem to get interdicted more when I’m carrying valuable cargo. Coincidence? Somehow I think not. I do like that the universe is dangerous. Heck, with me at the helm, docking is dangerous.
One question. How can I tell how much mass goods have before I buy them? Unless I’m missing something, mass isn’t listed in the commodities screen, not even in the details window with the flavor text. Tonight I bought 4 waste, and they weighed me down just enough to prevent me from making my route. When I got rid of one, I was okay.
Every unit of a good is defined as a ton of that good (even slaves, I guess, although that means that there are quite a number of them per canister).
You know about how to check on the galaxy map whether you can make a particular jump with a certain cargo mass, right? It’s a slider on the Navigation tab.