With the best buys and best selling software I can trade a little faster but it’s still fairly slow with only one ship and not a lot of sectors to pick from. I decided to continue upgrading my ship with a Jump drive. I’m not sure this is a great idea but this is what I did. I think it might be better to do this a little later and save the money for a second ship. Since this is the second time I start out as a trader, I decided to do things a bit differently.
I decided to buy a new Discoverer at this point, to scout out some more sectors and maybe do some missions while my mercury is making money for me.
I quickly ran into a problem though…
The only Discoverer I could find was completely unequipped. The shield and other upgrades wasn’t a problem, but I seem to be unable to find IREs: the only weapon this ship can use. I do a few return ship mission to try to inprove my faction but I fail one of them, as well as a mission to follow someone. I continue to map out sectors, including Three worlds, Kingdoms end and a bunch of paranid sectors. I eventually make it into Taladi space and register at their stock exchange. I only have about 400K at thhis point but manages to make a 100K buying and selling some stocks (this might be a really good way to start making money if you know what you’re doing). Another great thing with this Taladi sector though, is that they sell the Explorer software. Since I can’t find any weapons for my Discoverer I realize I might as well let it map some sectors for me while I do some trading. There’s also a lot of freighter missions that pays well.
So, I head back to Argon prime, and jump into my Mercury again. While there I manage to add a third ship to my growing fleet. A mercury tanker.
The thing I do now is probably not very smart. I’ve done a lot of manual trading and want to focus on other things (finding weapons and doing missions). I also want to start leveling a trader early. So with about 600K I order my Mercury tanker to Home of light and spend 500K on turning him into a sector trader. For some reason, I can’t trade with the Paranids (maybe a failed mision?) , so I let him start in home of light and then move him once he is idle. He still manages to gain some levels and some money for me.
For some time I keep doing return ship and deliver goods missions to get money and faction. On a visit to Argon prime I run across this.
I don’t know why my fonts looks weird in this game sometimes, but if it’s unreadable, this is a Mercury Super Freighter 28.000 cr. I think the base price for these is 1.2M. This ship is in terrible shape, but half an hour of repairs will get it as good as new.
I repair and equip the new ship, this costs some time and money but it’s a really nice trading ship. I stick to 1 25MJ shield for it for now though, since they cost about 90K each.
I do this for some time, and soon reach a million credits. Now it’s time to decide what to do next…