I know that adding even a 2 ton extra cargo hold helps increase the number of courier missions available at most ports. Missions that exceed your cargo hold are automatically greyed (red-ed) out. Sell off your scanner if you’re not exploring, and/or your shields if youi’re avoiding all combat for the moment, and add more cargo space, and you should have a better chance at finding fedex stuff. You can always buy those items back later. If you get interdicted without shields, just throttle up and run for the hills!
EDIT: To clarify, I’ve done the first three tutorials inside the main game. I’ve gotten errors each time I’ve tried to download and install the Single Player Combat Training through the launcher so I haven’t gone through that yet.
I’m pretty sure those combat tutorials are identical, so you’re not missing anything. I know the first one is. And I still suck at combat, having played this since release day, so you’re not alone. I intend to get better at combat once I get tired of trading.
Recently I did a fairly routine ‘go find this commodity for us’ mission that was going to yield about a 10K profit. The interesting thing was the clock for the mission was only 39 minutes. I had 39 minutes once I hit accept to travel a shit-ton of light years (can’t remember how many, maybe 70K or so), buy the stuff, then get back and sell.
It was a race against the clock, and it was thrilling. I kept checking time left in the mission as I hypersupercruisejumped around. Getting to the system where I’d buy the stuff took about 15 minutes – so I had about 25 left to get back. Piece of cake! Except with the items in my cargo hold, and thus more weight, I had to take a different route back with more jumps along the way.
I was rushing like crazy. Arrived at the original system with about five minutes left, then had to supercruise to the original port, and was well aware that if I overshot the port I would run out of time. So the final arrival was spine-tingling, as the clock was ticking but I had to be careful not to throttle up too much before jumping out of warp drive. Then, at the port, I had about two minutes left, and managed to get through the mail slot and land. It was as ugly a landing as the universe has ever seen, but I did it, then immediately went to the mission screen and delivered the goods as time ran out.
My heart was pounding. Great fun.
I’ve tried the combat tutorial #4 (the one against an equally-matched Sidewinder) five times now, and get destroyed within what feels like a minute or two with only getting off maybe two or three hits on my target. My aiming is absolutely worthless with those pulse lasers and it feels like I’m missing something really big about the combat because it seems like I’m getting hopelessly outmaneuvered by a ship that’s identical to mine.
Combat using a controller is pretty sensitive and will take practice. Here are some things to keep in mind:
Situational awareness is key - be aware of the direction the enemy is travelling (directional arrow on HUD) and move to stay behind them. Some kind of head tracking makes this a lot easier…
Use pitch and roll to get a target in the area of your sights. Use roll to try keep your ‘up’ matching opponent’s forward vector. Use down/up thrusters as well to try move behind their direction of travel. Fine adjust your aim using pitch and yaw.
Make sure throttle is set in the ‘blue’ area for max manoeuvrability when turning. Constantly adjust, with judicious use of afterburners, to maintain engagement range. Try setting some buttons to ‘shortcut’ throttle values (+50% and -50% are good ones). Good throttle management is probably the biggest challenge with a controller as compared to HOTAS.
Constantly be using the power distribution. Power to engines when turning. Power to shields when being fired upon. Power to weapons when you get a clear shot.
Thrag
3785
General landing tip. You don’t have to land like an airplane. You can make your approach sideways or upside down so that you can keep visual contact with the pad. Once you right over the pad and fairly low then orient yourself right side up and drop the last few feet. In my viper roll left 90 degrees and line up by looking out my port side window until I am directly over the pad.
For landing inside a station, you can use the compass (it targets the assigned landing pad).
Roll until the dot is at 6 o’clock, and then thrust forward until it’s on the bottom edge of the compass. This means the pad is directly below, and you can thrust down to it.
When the solid dot turns to an outline, then the pad is behind you.
For example, in the below image the landing pad is to the left of me, and slightly behind me (dot is an outline). I would roll to bring it to 6 o’clock and reverse thrust a bit, before descending.
Why is almost every mission I get for a system that has “no route available”? What am I missing? How do I plot a course to these places?
Is it beyond the range of the current route planner? It only plans out to 100ly currently (increasing to 1000 soon).
Other thing is, there may be a point in the route that is beyond your current jump capabilities. You need to get a better frameshift drive.
That must be it - most missions available always either reference a system I can’t jump to or a material they require that no one in the known (to me) galaxy seems to be producing. It’s hard to get money when everything starts really far from your area.
For finding materials, you can use the Show Trade Routes in the galaxy map. ‘Clear’ all routes and turn on the thing you are looking for, looking for lines that indicate the good leaving the system.
You can also set the colour of the system to show Economy:
Again, turning off ones you are not interested in can help.
Set the Show by Size to population and boost ‘Min’ up a few notches and you have some good candidate systems:
Once you find a system, check the System Map and find a likely station, as the economies/exports vary within a given system.
1.) Try literally sitting still in space until an unidentified signal shows up. Investigate it. Repeat until you get a bounty for helping kill a pirate or an illegal cargo scooped up. Then go sell or cash in your bounty (stolen goods sell at platforms, never stations you have to go in).
To clarify, don’t sit absolutely still. Go into supercruise, then throttle down to the minimum.
schurem
3792
Then fuel up, and burn for a better area. The Lave area is great with tiny 2 to 4 LY jumps. Getting there is an adventure though. good luck ;)
As for shooting, keep trying the second mission, the one against the weak sidewinder. Target practice vs a moving target. Your lasers are hitscan, that is, you do not need or want to lead your shots like you would with a projectile weapon or star wars style ‘laser’ bolt. Like the man said, roll so your ‘up’ is aligned with the targets movement vector. That is, manouver so that he is flying ‘up’ towards the top of your screen. Aim in front of him and let him fly into your sights. If you can control pitch finely enough (and you bloody well should you console monkey you!) you should try to make a tracking shot; keep the dot on the spot and melt his sorry ass.
Learn to read that big round radar thing in the middle of the dash. Experiment with it. See what rolling does, and pitching. Try not to panic and be like a scientifically minded little fonzie about it. Observe. change. observe.
Exercise. This is a manual skill. I make it sound easy because for me it is. I have been using analogue flight sticks to outmaneouver AI craft and pwn them with beautiful tracking shots since the first time such things became available to home users. This shit seems impossible but it is not. You will fucking love yourself once you master it.
Early courier missions are definitely the early-game route to getting a foothold. If there are no missions at the station you land, fly to another, or another system altogether. Once you start gaining influence with a faction, even more missions will open up, and take the advice of expanding your cargo bay if you can manage it. I would’t get rid of your shields though; one moderate-speed incident into a stationary object and you’ll wish you hadn’t sold it!
You can also make decent coin in the early game from exploring, don’t discount it. Fly to a grey system on your galaxy map, trigger your discovery scanner (bind it to a weapon key on your right-hand menu, if it’s not already done) then fly within range of unidentified objects. You can make a few thousand per system very easily, remember to fly >20 Ly from that system to sell it under the cartographics tab in the station menu thogh. You should be able to get yourself up to 40-50 k fairly quickly doing this, and you’ll feel rich! Then you can start upgrading your weaponry, shields, power plant etc. Combat is a case of practice, practice, practice. You will get the hang of it.
I got a cargo space 2 module but I didn’t know what (besides shields) replace it with - advice?
Woops. Aye. Thanks for correction.
You could sell your scanner if you’re not now exploring.
Ran into a strange bug tonight-never seen it before. I try to run the game, and the client will auto-minimize. I can’t make it stay in focus. I hear the music and see the menu momentarily when I try to maximize the client, but it’ll just flicker back to showing the launcher or desktop. Any help?
The only thing that’s changed is that I cloned my C: drive to an SSD and now the SSD is my boot drive. Should I try reinstalling the launcher?
A possibility - this happens to me if I have nvidia control panel open in the background.
I reinstalled the launcher and no go. I don’t have the Nvidia control panel open in the background either. I guess I could reboot.
OK, I read that there’s some problem with the Samsung Magician software for the SSD–that it causes a bug with full screen games. I turned it off and the game worked.
Well, I put a lot more time into this over the last few days than I planned to. In that it’s 2:30am and I didn’t even realize it. I just realized if I’d played 15 more minutes I’d have lived up to the forum name! Honestly I was going to just putz around with Elite for a bit to get a handle on it so I’d know how I wanted to set up the joystick I ordered last week when it arrives! For the record, the 360 controller continues to work just fine though (if anyone was curious).
Now I have been able to complete a few more missions, though most of my money has come from scanning other ships and if they are wanted, opening fire on them and collecting a bounty. I’ve made probably 60K in bounties alone, and I want more. After completing a very lucrative Silver run I find myself with about 90K in CR, and my current Sidewinder has already got an upgraded shield generator (slightly), a much better 20K CR cost Power Regulator, a 2 ton bonus cargo hold (thanks for the previous advice, tylertoo!).
I’m looking for advice - what should I do now? I like bounty hunting, I think, the most - should I sell my ship and get an Eagle? What are some good things to put on it? Is this a terrible idea and a Hauler with some cargo space and maybe a refinery/mining laser be better until I can afford a better combat ship?
