I thought I was deep in the grind sauce last week... well let's just say the sauce pool gets deeper.
This past weekend, The CrewTM was determined to have all of the members reach Elite rank in at least one of the 'career paths'. These rankings track your activity like an EXP system.
For example, you can increase your Combat ranking by destroying other ships. The game also tracks Trade, Exploration, and with the most recent expansion, Mercenary and Exobiologist. You can level all of them independently of each other, at any time; you are not locked into choosing one over the others.
Elite rank is the highest rank achievable in every career, and very prestigious in lore. We wanted to reach Elite rank because only pilots with Elite rank get access to a station that has every ship and every module (i.e. guns, cargo racks, anything that you put inside a ship) in the game, and at a 10% discount. This is incredibly useful! The easiest role to achieve Elite in is Trade.
To reach Elite in trade, I needed to make just over 1 billion credits in trade profits. Seeing as the most amount of credit I had was abut 32 million, and that was from a combination of exploration (on my own) and bounty hunting (with friends) in my 120 hours of game time, this seemed like a tumultuous task. But fear not! Having access to a fleet carrier opens a lot of doors.
We travelled to a system with station selling the commodity 'Agronomic Treatment' (some kinda agriculture supplement?) for about 3,000 credits per unit (tons?), loaded up our Type-9 Transporters with ~780 units, and sold it to the fleet carrier. The commodity is now in the fleet carrier's cargo hold. We filled it up, and travelled to another system that has a station that was buying it for 31,000 credits. We would buy from the fleet carrier to load up our ships, then fly over to sell it for MEGA profits.
Weird thing is that the demand for this commodity shows up at 0, which should mean that they do not want it at all, but for some code-bug-possibly-underflow-error reason they are buying it at a price that is the highest in the galaxy. It was a tourism station so there should be no reason for it to buy this many crop medicine!
We loaded the carrier 20,000 units at a time. So we would load it up at the 'buy' location with 20,000 units of Agronomic Treatment, then leave for the 'sell' location to unload it and rake in the money. Loading up ~10,500 units by myself took about 120 minutes since I can only move about 788 units at a time.
We transported a total of 50,000 units over the weekend. We were 3 people though, and two of us are chasing that Elite rank. After a weekend of low-brain activity activities, we had both reached Elite in trade with a bit of cargo to spare.
I will spare you the details; the main thing is that I flew a big, heavy ship to and from stations many, many times and made a bunch of money! NPC pirates tried to stop me and get at my cargo, but due to a bug where buying from the fleet carrier would not put the cargo in your inventory (it would show up once you sell it though), they were fooled into thinking that I had nothing. With the new rank in hand,
I immediately went to buy a new, better, faster combat ship for myself (at 10% discount!). The Krait MkII is agile, durable, and packs a mean punch. With 3 large and 2 medium hardpoints, I was able to outfit myself with 3 gimbled burst lasers and 2 railguns. Then we went pirate hunting.
Meet COLDSNAP, named after a flamboyant sharpshooter with a friendly deposition. (Lowkey wish I took a better picture of him, but at least the lighting is... plentiful)
It turned out that having a nicer ship doesn't make you instantly better at fighting??? I was still shit. I hated the railguns too, so I swapped them for plasma accelerators. They were more my style; shooting purple balls of plasma into my opponent to erase their shields. That is, when I hit. Which is about 10% of the time (even then I feel like I'm being generous).
The plasma balls are projectiles weapons while the railguns are hitscan. The railguns also had a windup before it actually shoots, whereas the plasma just shoots, no windup. For a projectile weapon like the plasma accelerator, I have a leading target reticule that helps me aim. The railgun just has a fixed 'this is where your shot will go' dot.
My aim (with plasma balls) and manuvorbility are my weakness. I tend to stay still to shoot my foes but that means they can shoot me too. My friend pointed this out to me in a way that didn't make me feel like shit, so, thanks coach! I am learning to go right up to ship and blast the underside because A) soft underbelly and B) guns point forward, and they can't shoot me if I'm under their guns.
Sweat report: sweated, but less sweat than usual. It was way less scary now that I'm more armed & I can afford multiple ship insurances.
PS: I lied. We did 10,000 units of gold first, but the agronomic treatments were more profitable. We did 10k gold and 40k agronomic treatments.
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2023