5461

Just made my way back to Fehu. All those sweet long haul missions are now locked away to me. They all require a lot of cargo space now (50+ per mission, I saw one for 120), require higher trader rank (Broker or higher), and some of them are with illegal goods.

5462

The 50+ per mission may be solvable using the technique conVurt mentioned the other day – accept a mission, sell cargo, accept another, etc etc. Then rebuy cargo near to your destination. I have not tested this yet however.

But yeah, there were definitely some changes that is having downward pressure on my revenue :)

5463

What’s the payout now tho?

5464

Long-haul missions seem to have largely the same payout but with far more tonnage required per mission. Previously, a single haul in my ASP would net ~10M. Now I’m lucky to get 1.6M.

If this is indeed the new normal, I can definitely afford to be more selective in missions I accept. No more missions to ports 380k LS from the star!

5465

I would recommend mining now, been doing that and its a nice payout.

5466

Care to share any? I’m growing tired of long-haul trading.

5467

Check out this guide, been using it.

I’m mining with my python, not as much money as Fehu hauling but its decent

5468

Agreed. Also, what’s with the short time limits? I used to have days to kill off some pirates for a mission. Days! Now it’s 30 minutes if I’m lucky.

This is why I didn’t buy Horizons. The ability to putter around in my spaceship, enjoy the sights and do some questionably sterile gameplay tasks was worth £10 to me. It’s not worth £30+ or whatever it is they’re asking, and it’s not materially different if they add the ability to putter around on planet surfaces.

5469

Last time I checked, HIP 16607 was a high tech system where you can mine a pristine metallic ring pretty much next door to the station. Worth the travel, it’s been my fave mining spot. I found a python to be ideal, but no reason it shouldn’t work well with an asp.

5470

So I tested this and it appears to work fine. The ‘unique’ cargo modifier mentioned in the patch notes appears to be implemented using a [Mission Specific] tag next to the cargo name and looks to be a separate mission type. Huzzah!

5471

I went on an exploration mission the vey night Horizons was released. Scanning and landing and driving and gawking. And then i fucked up my landing (came in too steep and too fast) I bounced off with my hull barely holding together. I flew back to civilization. The nearest starport was on the surface of a moon. I came in too fast and too steep. made a fresh crater like one and a half click off the pad. stupid fucking me.

On a brighter note, i fixed my HOTAS set myself. Two of the wires in the throttle had abraded from being strung too tight and didnt carry signal from the buttons properly anymore. I took it apart, measured all the channels and tagged the culprits. Spliced them out. Soldered in replacements. Puzzled the thing back together, which was hard as hell it is obviously engineerded to be put apart by small, agile asian hands. And to my amazement all the buttons work! \o/

I read some guff on the forums that NPC’s got another change in loadouts and behavior. How is hunting these days?

5472

There have definitely been some improvements to NPC AI and outfitting. Spent a few hours at a Haz RES, and even the miners can hold their own against pirates (for a while at least). Saw an Elite T9 miner fend off an Anaconda and a Python simultaneously while I took care of them for him! Also took out a couple of FDLs, which I’ve never seen in a RES before. They are very valuable in terms of bounty (>300k apiece) and not too tough to kill, though it is a bit unnerving jousting with an FDL and having its laser barrage strip 2/3rds of my shields in a single pass. Yipes!

5473

So is there any trick to planetary search and rescue missions, or is it really a case of flying about, finding one of many blue circles, landing somewhere in it and then driving around aimlessly until something shows up on radar?

5474

I think it’s a bug. I couldn’t successfully complete one of them either.

5475

What are folks up to now that long-range trade has been nerfed? I’ve resorted to bounty hunting (made thankfully easier by having gobs of cash from Fehu to throw at outfitting a fighter), but I’m feeling unfulfilled. It’s going to take a long time to upgrade in any serious way doing this.

5476

The problem was that Long range trading was just too good at money making, i guess they bought it in line with everything else.

I have been mining a bit in my python for a change of pace, but im probably going to head back to Orcus for some bounty hunting in the next days.

5477

There are always Community Goals for money-making.

5478

I’ve reached the point where credits aren’t really a concern for me in the game. Running all those cargo missions out of Fehu left me with enough to buy and outfit an imperial cutter (and with the rank of prince, maybe now I’ll have a chance getting the attention of a princess or three, eh?) It flies like a beached whale, but as a bulk trader it’s basically a license to print money, and currently I’ve been using it to for that community goal out of Dahan that has you delivering evac shelters to a planetary port. (And believe me, the first couple of times you try to land something with a 22M CR rebuy onto a planet will get your adrenaline going!) At present, I’ve moved somewhere upwards of 15,000 tonnes.

That all said, if someone absolutely needs 720 tonnes of palladium for some reason, let me know–I can totally make that happen.

EDIT: Oh, and the absolute best thing about the cutter is that when you’re leaving a station with a full belly, you can effortlessly push back out even T9s and anacondas coming in to dock, it has so much inertia. And if you’re not speeding, you don’t even get fined. :P

5479

Speaking of CGs, is there a central place where we can learn what they are? There used to be a link from the launcher that would summarize all of the ones for a given week, but it’s not there in the new launcher. I know of the thread on the official forums though, but I wonder if there’s one official page to learn of them.

5480

Kinda. CGs usually start and end on Thursdays (unless they finish early), and there’s a section of the weekly Elite Dangerous newsletter devoted to the current ones running. The ones mentioned on the game launcher can be hit-or-miss as they don’t seem to be updated as well as they should (community goals that have finished early tend to still show there, resulting in no end of confusion for newcomers), but the Community Goals forum thread stickied on the Elite Dangerous forums has more useful information, is generally pretty well maintained, and at worst, about half a day out of date.