Elite Dangerous Sidewinder to Anaconda in a day

I ended my previous post with a 4-point list of activities that could be a path from the starter Sidewinder to an Anaconda in six hours. I have since then actually attempted this process and have completed it in around 10 hours. With better luck with the various RNG elements in the game it may be possible to drop that significantly, but 6 hours is very optimistic!

This method was done over several weeknight play sessions before and after the release of game patch 2.4.09. Testing after the patch indicates that the spawn rate of the relevant passenger missions is a lot slower but the payouts seem unaffected.

There are two stages to this method. The first is taking your starter Sidewinder into a High Resource Extraction Site and help the local police kill pirates. This stage should take about 2 and a half hours to earn 3.8 million credits. See my earlier posts on this site for details on how to do this. You then buy a Type 6 like THIS one, featuring D-rated internals except for Frame Shift Drive and many Economy class passenger cabins.

In Stage 2, the Type 6 runs bulk passenger missions from a source station to a system nearby that has a very distant orbital station or planetary base. A system that has a destination ~300,000 light seconds will earn you about 3-4 million per mission, whereas one that is 1.8 million light seconds distant can get 10 million + for the same number of passengers. This stage requires half an hour or so of searching the passenger boards, accepting relevant missions, then swapping game modes from open to solo or back to generate a new board. The 1.8 million LS trip is then about 40 minutes of flight time. You drop off passengers then return to your starting station. About 3 hours of this should net you enough to buy THIS Type 7 which again features D-rated everything except FSD and lots of passenger cabins. Filling up this baby should net you about 50 million per trip, so roughly 4 hours later you should have enough money to buy a shiny new Anaconda, again D-rated with passenger cabins. After than you can continue to print money for however long it suits you.


I used the following systems:

Start in LHS 3447 with the non-horizons sidewinder (No SRV bay). Ignore any mission offers and fly to LTT 15574 via Kini. Land at Haxel port to reset your save location. Fly out to the High Res near Yaping Dock and carefully fight pirates there. Be sure to let the police ships do most of the work!
Once you have about 3.8 million credits, upgrade to an A-rated FSD then fly to Kirk Ring in LFT 1103, which will take several jumps. Be sure to refuel, or fit a fuel scoop.
At Kirk Ring, buy the Type 6 linked earlier then fly to your new home system: 45 c Bootis at Ride Hub. Hand in any cartographic data to help boost your local reputation but even at neutral you should get SOME passenger missions on offer.
The main target is missions to Samos Depot in the Dea Motrona system, a 1.8 million light second journey to a planetary base - so this requires the Horizons expansion. There are two other systems nearby with stations at ~300,00 light seconds. Lovelace Terminal in LFT 1209 is probably the better option but missions to either of Pawelczyk Orbital or Nusslein-Volhard Station in LHS 371 are acceptable alternatives.

Note, some of the systems are initially undiscovered, so I have fit an Advanced Discovery Scanner on my suggested ships. You can get the same results by visiting the nav beacon right near the central star and targeting it, scanning it for data.

Some sample ship details. D-rated everything except FSD. Smallest viable shield is fitted. A minimum of 4 tons cargo and an advanced discovery scanner is also fitted. The type 6 and Type 7 are best bang for buck in their size range.

Ship	Passengers	Cost
Anaconda	176	176,692,690
Beluga	144	155,294,890
Python	132	67,174,060
Type-7	128	29,193,200
Type-9	116	99,495,710
Orca	84	57,444,120
Asp Explorer	56	14,021,500
Type-6	48	4,760,410
Dolphin	34	5,180,800
Asp Scout	28	7,739,690
Cobra Mk III	18	5,190,836

Swapping from Solo to Open game modes generates a new set of mission and passenger boards. A Private group board is the exact same as Open. Mission boards reset missions after 5 - 15 minutes anyway so if several swaps between boards isn't generating anything new, just do something else for a short time. Most of the passenger missions have 3 hour completion timers but there is no need to obsessively spam the boards until completely full. As your reputation with the local faction grows, and as your trade rank increases, your payouts per mission should improve. In my testing, this method was viable with neutral reputation and minimal trade rank to start with. Both improved fairly quickly but I had made my 240 million long before any local faction had improved relations much beyond cordial. Its painfully boring waiting for missions to spawn but is nevertheless a viable quick money method.

Any genuine newbies who find this guide should NOT follow it. It describes a mind numbingly boring method of grabbing credits that will destroy your enjoyment of the game. Go play in your small ships for a good while THEN come and use this to get money for mid-and high range toys.

Edit: Frontier Developments have nerfed the distance based payouts on passenger missions so this method no longer works quite as described. They MAY reinstate a distance-based payout but it is very unlikely to generate the large sums it has previously.

Elite Dangerous Fun per hour

Its been months since I've posted or uploaded a video. Today its time to rectify that! I've got a video uploading now that should appear HERE that has my newbie pilot Tamarid complete a combat Community Goal in a stock hauler, quite possibly the worst combat ship in the game. As in my previous couple of videos, its about spending an hour or so in a High RES site "assisting" the local police ships for bounties. If you watch the video you'll see a couple of failures and visits to the rebuy screen but I still managed to pull in ~850k credits under less than ideal circumstances.

I've flown many different ships in High RES sites both pre and post the release of ED patch 2.4 with fairly consistent results. If you get an instance with lots of the larger, higher ranked ships it is possible to pull in around 1.8 million per hour just following the police ships around and sniping their targets before they pop. With worse luck for ship spawns, its still easy to get 1 to 1.5 million per hour. These values are almost entirely dependent upon the type of ships that spawn and not at all on your combat prowess or the type of ship you fly.

Patch 2.4 seems to have changed spawn rates in High RES somewhat. It seems that the nicer, high value instances are significantly rarer than before, often requiring 4-5 instance resets to get a worthwhile one. As such my average credits/hour seems down a bit at the low 1 million per hour range rather than nearer 2 mil that I was consistently getting pre patch. Police spawns seem to be more frequent and often with larger ships which can both help and hinder things. It is not uncommon for 2 out of 3 ships from a hostile wing to be popped before you get a chance to safely engage them.

When I fly a combat focused, A-rated ship that can actually fight I am still making money within the same range - 1 to 1.8 mil. Survivability is a lot better in a proper combat vessel than in a hauler or a little toy Sidey but I'm not really seeing much increase in kill rate or the rewards that go with it.

Perhaps paradoxically, using a ship launched fighter slows things down. The added DPS is welcome but the micro management of the fighter actually reduces the income per hour. My npc pilots are still pretty green though so not too good in a fight.

All this stuff about RES sites is because it is reliably the fastest way to get started making money as a brand new commander. Missions at the early stage of the game tend to be less than 100k each so you could get something like 400k per hour if you are really lucky.  The forums and Reddit talk a fair bit about Road to Riches, which is an exploration based way to get 10-20million per hour early in the game - but you really need about 3 mil cash to get started.  Trading and passenger missions are both fairly rewarding but you still need something to get started with. The starter sidey, or any of the early ships smaller than the Cobra III simply dont have sufficient space to earn the big sums.

The current money making method seems to be running passenger transport missions. You need a ship with a lot of economy class seats and a pair of favorable systems. Rhea to LQ Hydrae was one such pair but has been significantly nerfed about a month back. It worked because the station in LQ Hydrae is a significant distance from the star and the mission system gives you a bonus payout for travel time. Before it was nerfed, a large ship could pull in about 200 million credits per hour.
The factors that made this work so well are still there, but you are instead looking for places that are more than 1 million lightseconds from the main star. Youtuber Down To Earth Astronomy has a video that details such a system and there are others listed in the comments.
The big money comes with big ships and high faction rep but there are other systems that can be done with smaller ships and less reputation.

I suspect it is possible to go from zero to a trade-fit Anaconda in about 6 hours. Once you have the anaconda you can make large sums per hour quickly.

1: take the starter sidey to a local High RES. Collect about 2 mil in bounties.
2: Buy a type 6, equip as many economy passenger cabins as possible.
3: fly to your pair of systems and board flip to get at least partially filled with decent paying missions.
4: upgrade ship as its possible. A type 7 or a python may be a slightly better ship than the t6 for bulk passengers.

Elite Dangerous RES farming

I've been reading the newbie questions in various Reddit threads. There seems to be a common pattern amongst many of these postings over the couple of months I've been reading and that is the difficulties beginners face getting money early on. A Commander may post something like "I've been playing for a few weeks now, making good money trading in Eravate. I've now upgraded to an Adder and want to try some combat....". This and similar tales has me rolling my eyes.

OK, so the player is new and cant possibly know the various things that are wrong with that statement. I made much the same mistakes myself early on my first runthrough. So long as they are having fun and learning new things, its not even "wrong" - its just terribly inefficient and uninformed!

When Ol' Grandpa Cryptography first started, trade in the sidewinder with your starting 1000 credits may well have been a sensible option. I did a few runs in LHS 3447 before realising that the travel times in that system are terrible and moving on to Eravate. Even so, I'd be trading stuff between Ackerman Market and Russell Ring for ~200cr per ton. In a Sidey with at best 6 tons of cargo it took a LONG time to get anywhere. Back then, a few months after the game released, mission rewards were poor and bounty hunting combat was fairly unforgiving. Trade, on a decent sized ship, was considered the best way to make money. Not so now!

The very first newbie mission offered to a new player offers a 10,000 credit reward for a data delivery to a nearby system. This mission is worth doing, but more for what it teaches you about flight and travel than for the credit reward. There are far more lucrative missions available right at the start. My video series "A New Start"  (Part 1 here) shows several missions early on in the 70 - 100k range, all easily completed in the starter sidewinder. Later missions, with appropriate big ships and lots of local faction reputation, can run into the tens of millions but you wont get access to those for a while!

Missions are not the fastest way to start though. Earlier postings on this blog, over a year ago now, show how I started CMDR Maya Ulniian off with combat in nearby RES sites. All of that is still very much valid but there have been several rounds of game changes and nerfs since. Fdev also changed the layout of the LTT 15574 system somewhat too.

I've made another video where I take an almost stock standard Sidewinder into the High intensity Resource Extraction Site (High RES) for about an hour to collect just short of 1.8 Million credits, with almost no risk. I'm no great pilot either. If you can complete the first few combat tutorials from the game's start menu you should be more than capable of similar performace. That Adder mentioned above costs 87k for the base unit and maybe 200k for a decent set of upgrades - which you can get in a single lucky kill in the Sidey in a high RES.

The video is linked (here).
Start with the non-horizons ship, "at a random Federal system". Every time I've selected this, its started in LHS 3447.
Do the starter mission if you feel like it. 10k is useful, but not essential.
Fly to LTT 15574, usually via a jump through Kini.
Land at Haxel port. If you die, this will now become your respawn location.
Launch back out into space.
From your left panel, select one of the LOW RES sites. These are in the rings of the local gas giant. Fly out there in supercruise. See my year old blog post for some further information about flying in Low Res. 

Low RES sites have significantly less dangerous enemies, but the bounties are also much reduced. You are going there just to dip your toes into RES combat.

Keep the RES site targeted via the left panel and when flying around in the asteroids, stay within 15 - 20 KM from the beacon. This is the zone where ships spawn in. Beyond 20km, there will be few if any new ships arriving.

Use either the left panel, contacts tab, or keyboard/controler to cycle through nearby ships. Fly around to face towards them until a scan completes and you know if they are a valid WANTED target, or clean. Also try to identify the system police ships - usually called "Federal Security Service". Follow a WANTED target around until either it attempts an act of piracy against a mining ship, or gets scanned by the police. Either action will trigger combat between any nearby polcie and the wanted ship. Once combat is well established, you can start shooting at the wanted ship. There is no need to shoot a lot, just a few times to make sure you have landed a hit. The police ships will do most of the damage and hopefully will take all of the hits!

If you come under fire, put 4 pips into system and 2 into engines then boost past the hostile ship. Placing 4 pips in system very significantly strengthens your shields so should help you survive long enough to get out of the fire. Try to stay behind the hostile ship, and certainly stay out of the front arc of the ship where its guns can reach you. Bigger ships often cary turrets which have almost 360 degree fire so watch out for them.

Hopefully you've tagged the ship but not enough to attract its attention away from shooting at the cops. Be sure to hit the ship at least once more as its hull goes below 20%. So long as the final blow isnt done by another player not in a wing with you, you should get the bounty voucher credited to your name. Let shields regenerate then go on to the next wanted target. When you have gathered enough in bounties, head on back to the station to hand them in via "contacts" in the station menu.

When you are comfortable with combat in the Low RES, fly on out to Yaping Dock, land there to reset your respawn pont, then fly on in to the High RES at the local ring system.

Combat in the High res is the same as at the low, just generally with bigger ships with bigger bounties. A sidewinder is pretty much no match for any of the larger ships alone, so be very careful to let the cops take al the heat first! Police often fly in wings of 3 or 4 ships, often with an Anaconda and several vipers. Follow these guys around and the Annie will take most of the damage.
Bounties in a Low Res are generally on the order of a few thousand through to about 60 thousand per kill. Big ships in a High RES are usualy 140k through to 500k per kill.

Since every time you enter a RES site the types of ships spawning in can change, it is possible that you get poor spawns of smaller, weaker ships. If so, either log out to the main menu of the game, then come back in, or take a short trip back into supercruise fly out and then back in to the RES site to reset the spawns. A good value spawn will have type 7 and type 9 ships as clean miners, with bigger ships  as pirates. Look for enemy Pythons, Dropships, Anacondas and Fer De Lances. Imperial couriers are also nice but usually have turrets, so be careful.

I usually fight in a High RES for about an hour, or 2 million in bounties before flying back to the dock. Any longer and you risk making a mistake and losing the lot - bounty vouchers are lost if your ship gets destroyed. You have to periodically hand them in at the station to get the cash credited to your account. Dont get greedy and lose the lot with a stupid mistake.

Anyway thats enough for now. Go watch my video series for more!

Fly dangerous,
CMDR Cryptograpy
CMDR Maya Ulniian
CMDR Tamarid

Elite Dangerous Humbled

Inspiration came to me one day in the form of a cheap offer on www.humblebundle.com. Elite Dangerous with Horizons was only $40 instead of the usual $60. I initially resisted as I already had three accounts, but after I linked the offer into one of the Discord channels and a certain someone had difficulties redeeming their purchase, I caved and bought a fourth account.
There were difficulties activating it as Humble gave steam keys, but my main Elite account is already linked to steam and my Humble account email is already used for both Steam and Frontier. I ended up creating accounts on steam and frontier using an aliased version of my email and eventually got the codes assigned and all linked correctly.

I'd been planning for a while to make some form of tutorial, either blog posts or videos and this brand new commander could serve as a good platform for that. What I didn't realise was that the "certain someone" above had somewhat similar ideas with their account and was starting the very next day.

Commander Ascorbius (Youtube) was about to begin a series of 10 one hour live streams to demonstrate that Open play was viable for newbies. The main twist on this was that he was streaming AND doing it with an IRONMAN condition - any character death that took him to the re-buy screen instead earned a complete wipe of the saved game and a revert to flying the basic Sidewinder. Hes a far braver man than I!

Since I am about 10 hours ahead due to time zones, I had a head start and played about 3 hours on my Sunday evening on the new account. At this stage I did not know the details of what Ascorbius was planning so all I did was play in open. I figured I'd get a small head start and could then more or less parallel his experiences without the danger of trying to stream anything. It was Tuesday evening for me before I caught his first recorded stream (Link to session 1) and realised that I was roughly 3 sessions in already by equivalent game play. I forget some of the details now but in my initial session I had concentrated mostly on missions. I had fairly generous RNG and had multiple well paid missions to the same stations frequently so had enough money to go from the sidewinder to a mostly c-rated Cobra MK III before stopping. Net worth was about 2.5 million in that time.

Due to real life getting in the way, my next play session was only after Ascorbius had recorded his 5th 1-hour stream, wherein he'd had to invoke the Ironman clause and wipe his saved game. This time I was somewhat more ready and had installed OBS software to capture my game play session. The result is 5 roughly half-hour segments of video "lets play" crossed with tutorial as I also reset my saved game and started anew.

Part 1 covers the basics and first mission.
Part 2 Part 3 and Part 4 have plenty of information as I complete more missions.
Part 5 has some combat out in a High Resource Extraction Site.

I had less generous RNG luck with the mission boards and was heavily distracted by recording everything so had a net worth under 2 mil by the end of these videos.

My next encounter with Ascorbius was during his 9th stream where I actually got to watch live.  I believe he invoked Ironman again at the end of the 8th session so I again reset my save to follow along, this time "live". I was watching and occasionally commenting on his stream on one monitor while playing elite on my other. I thought I was recording as well but that wasn't the case unfortunately. In just under an hour of play, mostly involving combat in the High RES site, I earned 950,000 credits. Its a lot easier to do this when not streaming for sure!

I have since tinkered with my settings on OBS and I think any future recordings should have a lot better sound quality especially as I've now filtered out all the ambient sounds.

Enough for now,
CMDR Cryptography

Elite Dangerous Session 10 to Session N

Hello again. CMDR Maya Ulniian here. Its been almost a year since I graduated from pilot school and took up a mysterious offer of a sidewinder starship and a career as an independent pilot. I had meant to detail each of my exploits along the way but that has clearly fallen by the wayside.

So, what have I been doing? Well, a lot of the time, I've been living vicariously through watching CMDR Cryptography. He's been working as a pilot for a lot longer and has amassed a significant fortune as well as a large fleet of different ships so has a lot more fun options than I do. This makes the motivation to advance my own position somewhat low, especially as I am also now essentially financially independent. For quite a while now I have been flying an Asp Explorer, configured for general mission running and trade. I still have my Diamondback Scout and Vulture but truth be told I've moved on from combat as the primary money making method.

For a time I was running anti-skimmer missions in a couple of systems. The missions were relatively common for a while and the particular systems I was working from tended to target the same planetary factions so I was able to stack up many missions for which the same targets counted for all different employers. Someone on Galnet pointed out that simple dumbfire missiles made killing skimmers even easier than doing it the "right" way in my SRV, so I blew through quite a lot of missions pretty quickly this way. All the factions that I was working for soon had me at allied status and the payouts were often in the several million per mission.  I did lose a couple of ships due to poor piloting near the ground but that barely made a dent in the progress I was making.  Somewhere along the line, the bases I was attacking hired some muscle and I often had to evade a defending fighting ship. Fighting them close to the ground was generally not wise, but a quick flyby was often enough to get them to follow me away from the base and I then lost them in some nearby canyons. There would then be enough time to come back to the base and nuke any remaining skimmers in relative peace.

Eventually, the economic conditions in the systems changed and skimmer kill missions dried up. I looked for similar opportunities elsewhere for a while but gave up after a few false starts. There are other places offering stacked skimmer destruction missions but I was fairly bored of them by now. By chance, I ended up in the Eleu system, which is the home system of the Social Eleu Progressive Party, a minor faction of pilots who support initiatives for exploration. They took part in the Dangerous Games back when I was a young pilot but unfortunately lost out to EG pilots, who became the 11th major powerplay faction. Perhaps worse, EG pilots were installed in systems very close to Eleu and that caused a certain amount of disruption to SEPP's control of local systems. I started running missions for SEPP and reached out to their public comms channel for guidance on how best to work for their interests in the region - or at least not muck it up! 

I have basically made the Eleu region my home for several months now. I am allied with SEPP and most of the other local factions so mission running in this small bubble of systems is pretty lucrative. Probably two-thirds of my net wealth has now come from running missions in this area.
My money generating capacity now is such that I feel no pressure to really work on it in any concerted fashion. I can get more money in an hour or two than the cost of a ship capable of generating money at a decent rate, so its pretty much self sustaining. This means I have no fear of losing ships and can do fun things like race an Eagle through planetary canyons or inside stations.

As mentioned before, I now spend a lot of my time watching CMDR Cryptography instead. He's got a selection of big ships and swarms of smaller ones. We have both been grinding out Federation rank as part of mission running activities and have only got a couple more ranks to go before being able to get access to the Corvette. The grind is real, and harsh, so this is only happening as a side activity to whatever else we are doing. I still intend to go on a longish exploration voyage, probably to Sag A* via Colonia sometime soonish but that is a time commitment I've not yet been able to do.

Until next time,
CMDR Maya Ulniian, 30th March 3303.