Hello Firegor!

Tried to search up my notes about it but realised I deleted the a month ago 🙁 Anyway, as far as I can remember my start, I'd recommend you star to trade with energy-cells. Sure, they don't bring much, but everyone needs them, so you'll have choices on were you want to sell them - someone must buy them sooner or later. Or, if they really don't want to buy, then wait a bit - the price will go up once they're running low.

Empires Edge is a good place for sector traders, and what's good for a sector trader was good for me.

But I'd say stay with bounty missions and pirate hunting until you cab afford either a freighter and an MK3 Trading software, or a station and 2 freighters. Then things will speed up.

Oh, and buy a "best buy/sell locator" or what 🙂

Hi Firegor

I'am not a fan of the xgames myself but IIRC the xgames have a dynamic market based on supply and demand,like the real world.So the price of goods change all the time.IIRC there are some free ship to be found in the game,some where.

Thanks for the advice guys.

I've gone with it and now have 25k. I know its not much but its a start.

Ive most of this morning flying round the Ore Belt looking for the secret freighter. I know its meant to be past the North Gate near a big asteroid, but no luck yet.

IIRC you have to look on the sector map and find the ship which is not moving,then fly to it.

Spoiler alert!

Lost ships 🙂

Sweet, cheers for that.

Although i have wasted most of a morning looking for that damn freighter lol.

ok this will be a spoiler, but if you don't mind it can help you a lot

ok one way to get some credits a little faster is to get yourself a jump drive

now go into the iligal market

you will find a space fuel (wiskey) station on Herrons nebula

remember that this will be an iligal cargo so if you go into the core system you may be scaned by the police then you have to jump to run away, or you can jump and make your trip faster, remember you have to have some enegy with you for that.

so now were to jump, you have 2 places to jump

one is on Ore belt, the other on Atreus' Clouds

these 2 systems have pirate bases on them were you can sell the wiskey

the location of the pirate base on ore belt is behind the north gate to the right (if you just arrived in thru the N gate)

its off the map grid, so you have to zoom out

on Atreus' Clouds the pirate base is in right side of the system if you are looking at in in map view.

but when ever you can go to ore belt since you have a solar power plant there, and you can bring back energy cells to help our production

Hope it helps

Firegor,

Here is the way i started to make money:

First i started the easy campaign. That way i already have the buster and the mecury M. I do assume you know the basics of the game.

1) Dock both ships at the shipyard in Argon Prime. As soon as docked switch to the Mecury.

2) Undock with the merc and go get a full load of Cahoona beef at the free trading station for about 72. Sell them at a factory for 107 (look manually at the sector map).

3) dock with the shipyard and switch to the buster.

4) follow the campaign until you receive the jumpdrive. As soon as you have the jumpdrive, either buy some energy cells and jumps back to argon prime or fly back, whatever you like.

5) back in Argon Prime, dock with the equipment yard and sell (trade), your shields and your 4 guns (cant get on the name).

6) undock and dock at the shipyard. Now make sure you switch every(!) item from the buster onto you merc incl. the jumpdrive!

7) switch to the merc and sell your buster. (verify you transfered everything from the Buster to the merc.)!!

8) Now buy yourself a Mecury Tanker Medium. Small is also okay but it has less shields.

9) dock the tanker at the shipyard and switch every item from the merc onto the tanker.

10) Sell the merc.

11) Now undock with the tanker and head for the equipment dock.

12) at the equipment dock upgrade you engines and rudders to full. Upgrade the cargo cap for 50%. Buy everything you can except for the drilling and ore systems (expensive!)

13) Head for the satellite factory. Buy 10 satellites. In every Argon sector you come place a satellite high above all factories (1 per sector).

As soon as you have done that, you can look in every sector at factories, their prices and demands.

Tip: Go for the Ore Belt. Try to buy a full load of energy cells for 12 each. Then look via satellites were to sell them for 19 each. Jumpdrive to that sector and sell. You will make about 50.000 eachtime. Make sure to keep about 300 cells in your tanker eachtime so you have enough to jumpdrive. In 1 day i made about 800.000. I bought a buster and resumed the campaign.

This is just a way i figured out the hard way. Sure there are 100 other ways to make money. Suc6

I haven't played the game in ages, but it's amazing once you establish a means to make easy money how quickly things escalate, especially when you get many Universal Traders online.

Combat for me was always where the big money came from. I did one combat mission in TC flying an Osaka M2 and made over 100 million credits. I had read that some people made a lot more than that.

Personally I like the trading aspect and the occasional capping (capturing of ships). Capturing pirates was how I made my start and traded them off. Once I got a good universal trader going with a jump drive and begun exploring and placing advanced sats around, the game took off along with getting stations built up. Finding 'free' ships and floating crates help a lot in the beginning. Just be patient! 😀

Personally, I've shelved X3:Reunion for X3: Terran Conflict.

To answer that question more directly, coming from someone with many MANY hours trading in X3. This will help you to play without using exploits, item maps and cheats.

It works like this (and I'm surprised nobody seems to know). Every factory has a certain amount of their production materials in stock and a certain amount of their output materials in stock, and every few seconds (depending on item type, eg energy cells are made faster) some production materials are removed and turned into output materials. As the amount of prod materials runs out, the price that the station will buy it at goes up so you always want to sell to a station when it is empty or near empty to make a profit.

As you expect, as the stations created items near full, the prioce goes down as the station tries to sell off the stock before it can't make any more. This is when you want to buy.

Creating a truly good trade run would need you to find a station that is poorly supplied by the AI freighters, and a station that makes the goods it needs and is always full, or a bunch of stations producting that good that are local (so that you always have access to one that is selling at a low price)