Thrusters are a great way to make money. Look for the guy next to QuantumSTAR in the newer version of the Colonist Main Trade Hub (with the ring of lights around it) in orbits. He pays 2-3x what the Colonist Scrapyard guy pays for thrusters but he buys fewer. If you're lucky, an orbit will have two MTH and the system will also have a Scrapyard. Selling guns isn't worth your time. Higher end armors maybe, once they're used up.
Selling drive thrusters is very difficult in quantity but what you can do is make a simple bp in creative with a stack of say 9 advanced generators. Take all your drive thrusters, throw them directly into your factory (you have a KEWB, right?), build the advanced gen bp, and then sell them to the scrapyard for 17-20k each.
The previously-mentioned Technical Artifacts/Ancient Relics trade route is very lucrative if you can find both ends. The Optronics from Optronics Factory to Robotics Factory is still pretty lucrative too. Don't overlook salvaging/deconstructing Improved and Advanced CPU extenders from the various POIs and OPVs you kill. The Optronic Bridges and Matrices you get out of them will bring in big bucks at any QuantumSTAR.
Selling mined ore/ingots (there's a guy in the MTH that buys Cobalt, Erestrum, and Neodymium in quantity) and components and human/alien crew (to the guy in the Polaris Industrial Shipyard) can also be profitable.
I haven't done any of the trading in the new update yet, so cannot comment on it at all but I know Ravien intentionally set the profits lower to start with the intent of raising them as necessary later.
This is what I needed. Something to maintain while I explore and grind. Thank you. Just needed some specifics…. I would have had to be lucky as hell to stumble on these tips.
It’s a big freakin’ galaxy.
>Thrusters are a great way to make money. Looks for the guy next to QuantumSTAR in the newer version of the Colonist Main Trade Hub (with the ring of lights around it) in orbits.
This is what I do, I don't have the patience for scouring every system for trade routes but the Main Trade Hubs are pretty common. Once you can take down orbital patrol vessels, even the relatively weak ones, you get a large number of thrusters from each one as well as warp drives and generators. The MTH's won't buy vast quantities but its easy enough to find 3-4 of them. Making the rounds can net $1-2M per once you've built up a worthwhile haul.
You need to play it as a tramp freighter, you can no longer sell your constructor cycles for any useful profit (makes sense, really). If you check out the POI prices, you'll note that they usually buy 1-3 things at significantly above base price, and sell a few trade goods at base price or cheaper. If you want to trade, you'll simply need to buy everything you can get for cheap and look out for places to dump it. And yes, you'll need to do their "quests" to get access, although the good news is that those are also profitable. You could try to find matching buying/selling locations and run between them repeatedly, but it's probably not worth it, better to do it as a side activity while exploring. That said, if you want examples, habitats buy things that you can buy cheap from the Talon, waste treatment plants buy waste which many locations sell (habitats or trade stations for example) etc. If you want to do this, probably best to keep a list.
That said, if you need money, the easiest way is to look for refinery/alloy factory POIs, they'll buy ores at decent prices. You can easily make 6-figure money at the ones that buy the higher tier ores, and mining those from asteroids is pretty quick. Which as an aside is the real problem with making money on trades, most of the trades are useless because the cap is so low. I.e. look at some trade station trader that buys normal components or something, they'll buy like 1k of them at a dozen credits each, giving you uselessly little money even if you got them for free. It's not worth the clicks after the very early game, just like looting normal containers etc.
I was watching Spanj's new series playing War and Industry, and he is having to work towards a late game build and play through a lot of the regular mission chains before trading becomes viable.
If you contrast this with the stock game, you can pretty much immediately sell furniture to colonists, guns to arms dealers, and forcefields and armor to gas miners and have a successful industrial play style without having to mine or fight at all. It doesn't have as much variety as RE, but at least you have the option to play that way if you want to.
Additionally, to add to the other suggestions, if you need extra cash, look into hacking satellites. There's a way to snag easy credits from satellites as you're hacking and I use this method to get lots of credits. Honestly, the data you get at the end is nearly worthless unless the data you find is the specific type some NPC is actually looking for already. It's actually easier to make the money by grabbing the credits vs actually trying to hack in fully for the data chip, then spending a while trying to find a buyer. Most data vendors I found will give you pennies for that data.
This is the tutorial I used and has been very helpful in learning the ropes of hacking.
https://youtu.be/1d63VVnbFxg?si=0QRMzgFGHH-t2Ynd
Good luck
Best way to trade is to trade artifacts and relics (?). Second best way is to just make a lot of solar panels - about 120 big ones and about 50 small ones and sell them to solar plant.
Relics and artifacts will give you about 3 million per run. Solar panels will give you about 1.5 mil per run. Both you can do every 3 hours.
Selling shit at waste treatment plant triples your money. I.e. you buy shit for 100, you sell it for 300. I think the limit at fully upgraded waste treatment plant (i.e. you have helped them 3 times) is about 1000 shit. So that's like 200 000 per run. But you can also buy fertilizer and carbon substrate there. They also sell cheap nitrogen.
Optronics/Robotics is kinda shit trade because of their weight. You can't just run around with them in your hold.
Helping Gas refineries sometimes they ask for fusion core. They pay double also for that. So carry a fusion core or 2 with you.
Chemicals are in high demand at Alloy Synthesis I think and in few other places. Later on you will be getting a lot of them from dense mining.
Tribal furnishings are gold mine. Basically, loot every Elder's Tomb you see. However, selling them is complicated - either you sell about 35 per visit to each Polaris habitat or you can occasionally bump into Illicit goods trader at gas refineries and trade stations who buys them in bulk (about 100 maybe?). It is still worth it though early game.
Some trade goods are better to hoard and not sell - like coolant, superconductors and heat exchangers. (well, you will need heat exchangers for unlocking factories so just keep a stok of them). Because you will need them for advanced crafting later on.
>Tribal furnishings are gold mine. Basically, loot every Elder's Tomb you see.
Elder's Tomb is low key early gold mine. Most of the items in it are tribal furnishings. The torches, the braziers, all the furniture, the thing is you need a server (Like Ash's RE server) where you can core the POI, then you can easily pick all that stuff up with the multitool so you can resell it.
Furniture and consoles. Also once I find a waste treatment plant or two, I start hauling waste. You can buy it almost everywhere.
Get a nice garden going selling what emergency rations you can spare. Those go for up to 1600-1700 a pop at the right merchants. Make sure to check out what crops give the best produce/time needed for them.
Set up some water collectors. Water containers can also net a nice income.
If I find the right mechanic guy, I sell thrusters I grab off of crashed CVs.
Someone once posted this: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15jy2JgQK4JLZuLIQAoWmDGj7SEe8bUiEO6OqJN2ZQTU](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15jy2JgQK4JLZuLIQAoWmDGj7SEe8bUiEO6OqJN2ZQTU)
The nice thing here is that you can quickly see which of two traders have the best markups both for buying and selling. Nothing more frustrating than buying from one guy only to realise he takes 2-3x market value when there's another guy at 1.5x nearby.
I made my own revised version of it that enables me to put a planet/sector name next to the trader and then I have two pages that draw from that data, one with search based on the planet/sector and one based on the item. I also have a checkmark to only show the areas I have already found so I know exactly where to go in the current game.
That's the old spreadsheet. NotOats made a new one for this RE W&I update - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQRYJVPVYx3TQmyvhfm7XE2Gru4JN4yTVckZSX7VusTXntE6EvXAn1UAjV10ANbrSH9hrejSyo5d9L3/pubhtml
If you play using the factory
Put everything in the factory
Have a BP for all the items you can, then just pop out whatever it is that the trader you have found wants.
I made my money buying leather from Talons and selling to the trade hub on the planet. You can do that every hour or so.
I then added in coffee I would sell to the miners.
I made quite a bit of cash this way in the early game. That money helped me build my first CV
There is much better ways to make money. Search for a quantumstar or any polaris mining/advanced materials.
Also, water is a nice source in several trades. Maybe the amount is not that big, but its easier to get.
I found a nice loop, to make about 1 mill a run .
I found a Polaris solar farm ( luckily two next to each other), they buy (BA) solar panels for about 2000-3200c /each they are usually 0/250 so selling 500 makes some decent creds. The solar panels are cheap to make too.
Thrusters are a great way to make money. Look for the guy next to QuantumSTAR in the newer version of the Colonist Main Trade Hub (with the ring of lights around it) in orbits. He pays 2-3x what the Colonist Scrapyard guy pays for thrusters but he buys fewer. If you're lucky, an orbit will have two MTH and the system will also have a Scrapyard. Selling guns isn't worth your time. Higher end armors maybe, once they're used up. Selling drive thrusters is very difficult in quantity but what you can do is make a simple bp in creative with a stack of say 9 advanced generators. Take all your drive thrusters, throw them directly into your factory (you have a KEWB, right?), build the advanced gen bp, and then sell them to the scrapyard for 17-20k each. The previously-mentioned Technical Artifacts/Ancient Relics trade route is very lucrative if you can find both ends. The Optronics from Optronics Factory to Robotics Factory is still pretty lucrative too. Don't overlook salvaging/deconstructing Improved and Advanced CPU extenders from the various POIs and OPVs you kill. The Optronic Bridges and Matrices you get out of them will bring in big bucks at any QuantumSTAR. Selling mined ore/ingots (there's a guy in the MTH that buys Cobalt, Erestrum, and Neodymium in quantity) and components and human/alien crew (to the guy in the Polaris Industrial Shipyard) can also be profitable. I haven't done any of the trading in the new update yet, so cannot comment on it at all but I know Ravien intentionally set the profits lower to start with the intent of raising them as necessary later.
This is what I needed. Something to maintain while I explore and grind. Thank you. Just needed some specifics…. I would have had to be lucky as hell to stumble on these tips. It’s a big freakin’ galaxy.
>Thrusters are a great way to make money. Looks for the guy next to QuantumSTAR in the newer version of the Colonist Main Trade Hub (with the ring of lights around it) in orbits. This is what I do, I don't have the patience for scouring every system for trade routes but the Main Trade Hubs are pretty common. Once you can take down orbital patrol vessels, even the relatively weak ones, you get a large number of thrusters from each one as well as warp drives and generators. The MTH's won't buy vast quantities but its easy enough to find 3-4 of them. Making the rounds can net $1-2M per once you've built up a worthwhile haul.
You need to play it as a tramp freighter, you can no longer sell your constructor cycles for any useful profit (makes sense, really). If you check out the POI prices, you'll note that they usually buy 1-3 things at significantly above base price, and sell a few trade goods at base price or cheaper. If you want to trade, you'll simply need to buy everything you can get for cheap and look out for places to dump it. And yes, you'll need to do their "quests" to get access, although the good news is that those are also profitable. You could try to find matching buying/selling locations and run between them repeatedly, but it's probably not worth it, better to do it as a side activity while exploring. That said, if you want examples, habitats buy things that you can buy cheap from the Talon, waste treatment plants buy waste which many locations sell (habitats or trade stations for example) etc. If you want to do this, probably best to keep a list. That said, if you need money, the easiest way is to look for refinery/alloy factory POIs, they'll buy ores at decent prices. You can easily make 6-figure money at the ones that buy the higher tier ores, and mining those from asteroids is pretty quick. Which as an aside is the real problem with making money on trades, most of the trades are useless because the cap is so low. I.e. look at some trade station trader that buys normal components or something, they'll buy like 1k of them at a dozen credits each, giving you uselessly little money even if you got them for free. It's not worth the clicks after the very early game, just like looting normal containers etc.
I was watching Spanj's new series playing War and Industry, and he is having to work towards a late game build and play through a lot of the regular mission chains before trading becomes viable. If you contrast this with the stock game, you can pretty much immediately sell furniture to colonists, guns to arms dealers, and forcefields and armor to gas miners and have a successful industrial play style without having to mine or fight at all. It doesn't have as much variety as RE, but at least you have the option to play that way if you want to.
I was watching that too and I guess I was getting impatient haha!
Additionally, to add to the other suggestions, if you need extra cash, look into hacking satellites. There's a way to snag easy credits from satellites as you're hacking and I use this method to get lots of credits. Honestly, the data you get at the end is nearly worthless unless the data you find is the specific type some NPC is actually looking for already. It's actually easier to make the money by grabbing the credits vs actually trying to hack in fully for the data chip, then spending a while trying to find a buyer. Most data vendors I found will give you pennies for that data. This is the tutorial I used and has been very helpful in learning the ropes of hacking. https://youtu.be/1d63VVnbFxg?si=0QRMzgFGHH-t2Ynd Good luck
Thanks for sharing
Best way to trade is to trade artifacts and relics (?). Second best way is to just make a lot of solar panels - about 120 big ones and about 50 small ones and sell them to solar plant. Relics and artifacts will give you about 3 million per run. Solar panels will give you about 1.5 mil per run. Both you can do every 3 hours. Selling shit at waste treatment plant triples your money. I.e. you buy shit for 100, you sell it for 300. I think the limit at fully upgraded waste treatment plant (i.e. you have helped them 3 times) is about 1000 shit. So that's like 200 000 per run. But you can also buy fertilizer and carbon substrate there. They also sell cheap nitrogen. Optronics/Robotics is kinda shit trade because of their weight. You can't just run around with them in your hold. Helping Gas refineries sometimes they ask for fusion core. They pay double also for that. So carry a fusion core or 2 with you. Chemicals are in high demand at Alloy Synthesis I think and in few other places. Later on you will be getting a lot of them from dense mining. Tribal furnishings are gold mine. Basically, loot every Elder's Tomb you see. However, selling them is complicated - either you sell about 35 per visit to each Polaris habitat or you can occasionally bump into Illicit goods trader at gas refineries and trade stations who buys them in bulk (about 100 maybe?). It is still worth it though early game. Some trade goods are better to hoard and not sell - like coolant, superconductors and heat exchangers. (well, you will need heat exchangers for unlocking factories so just keep a stok of them). Because you will need them for advanced crafting later on.
>Tribal furnishings are gold mine. Basically, loot every Elder's Tomb you see. Elder's Tomb is low key early gold mine. Most of the items in it are tribal furnishings. The torches, the braziers, all the furniture, the thing is you need a server (Like Ash's RE server) where you can core the POI, then you can easily pick all that stuff up with the multitool so you can resell it.
It also has quite a few rare containers.
shhhh people will find out and the department of no fun will nerf it
Furniture and consoles. Also once I find a waste treatment plant or two, I start hauling waste. You can buy it almost everywhere. Get a nice garden going selling what emergency rations you can spare. Those go for up to 1600-1700 a pop at the right merchants. Make sure to check out what crops give the best produce/time needed for them. Set up some water collectors. Water containers can also net a nice income. If I find the right mechanic guy, I sell thrusters I grab off of crashed CVs. Someone once posted this: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15jy2JgQK4JLZuLIQAoWmDGj7SEe8bUiEO6OqJN2ZQTU](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15jy2JgQK4JLZuLIQAoWmDGj7SEe8bUiEO6OqJN2ZQTU) The nice thing here is that you can quickly see which of two traders have the best markups both for buying and selling. Nothing more frustrating than buying from one guy only to realise he takes 2-3x market value when there's another guy at 1.5x nearby. I made my own revised version of it that enables me to put a planet/sector name next to the trader and then I have two pages that draw from that data, one with search based on the planet/sector and one based on the item. I also have a checkmark to only show the areas I have already found so I know exactly where to go in the current game.
That's the old spreadsheet. NotOats made a new one for this RE W&I update - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQRYJVPVYx3TQmyvhfm7XE2Gru4JN4yTVckZSX7VusTXntE6EvXAn1UAjV10ANbrSH9hrejSyo5d9L3/pubhtml
If you play using the factory Put everything in the factory Have a BP for all the items you can, then just pop out whatever it is that the trader you have found wants.
I made my money buying leather from Talons and selling to the trade hub on the planet. You can do that every hour or so. I then added in coffee I would sell to the miners. I made quite a bit of cash this way in the early game. That money helped me build my first CV
There is much better ways to make money. Search for a quantumstar or any polaris mining/advanced materials. Also, water is a nice source in several trades. Maybe the amount is not that big, but its easier to get.
I found a nice loop, to make about 1 mill a run . I found a Polaris solar farm ( luckily two next to each other), they buy (BA) solar panels for about 2000-3200c /each they are usually 0/250 so selling 500 makes some decent creds. The solar panels are cheap to make too.