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Stations require a variety of different resource wares in order to produce new wares, and this is potentially lucrative activity for the player to get involved in. Wares come in two basic varieties; harvestable resources and manufactured goods. Ultimately, they feed into the production of ~100 ships, ~50 stations, weapon turrets, drones and missiles. Generally Generally speaking, a player will acquire harvestable resources via mining, although there are also a few unique stations dotted around the galaxy offering some (spoiler at the bottom of here).
The prices we need to pay for any given ware may be modified by a range of possible discounts:
- Supply and demand (modifies price by how much a station has/needs relative to storage capacity).
- Faction discounts (the more a faction likes you, the less their wares cost to buy).
- Discounts gained from NPC on a station (rewarded by successful smalltalk; stackable across multiple NPCs).
- Discounts gained while flying around stations occasionally.
Automated Station trading (via Manager)
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- There's an interesting thread here about how trades are currently (v3.61/v4.00b) worked out, & why your station may stop trading for a time, with Dev comments/clarifications.
Manual trading
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with ships (via Trade menus)
Manual trading involves the player sending their Trade or Mine ships to to collect a ware and sell it somewhere else. Ideally for a profit, but maybe you'd like to pay over-the-odds sometimes, such as when looking around for wares needed for construction. The collection of wares could entail the mining of harvestable resources, as mentioned above, or more-commonly picking up wares produced by a station.
Each successful trade improve reputation with station owner faction. Gained reputation proportional to transaction value. You need to trade goods with cumulative worth about 6 000 000 000 Cr to gain 30 relation with faction.Manual Manual trading (and mining) overlaps with the related 'ware shortage' missions. They are a bit bugged and the source of on-going investigation by Devs but in the meantime, the guide here can help.guide here can help.
As of Rebirth 4.00, two menus are available for trading:
Trade Offer menu (shift+T)
- A multi-purpose menu offering a variety of ways to find particular offers.
- Presents all known offers (your property; NPC property you've visited recently, or with Trade Agents on).
- Able to view all sale offers, or all purchase offers.
- A broad-ranging text filter allows you to focus on, for example, object names, zones or wares.
- Available directly, or via a station or CV's Detail Menu (in order to quickly see offers just for that station/CV).
- Possible trades can be ordered in various ways, such as by 'price per unit as % difference from mean price per unit'.
Trade Deals menu (shift+Y)
- The Rebirth v4.00 counterpart to the Trade Offers menu, which streamlines regular trading.
- Only presents deals (where player knows a matched sale and purchase).
- Incorporates a cargo hold filter, like blackmilan's mod, that restricts presented deals to those the selected ship can carry.
- Possible deals can be ordered by distance, investment or profit.
Useful info from elsewhere on the web:
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