WIP Trading hints, tips & comments go here
Automated Station trading (via Manager)
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 via owned ships
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Manual trading 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 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.
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 counterpart to the Trade Offers menu, introduced in Rebirth v4.00, 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.
- For deals involving wares on player-owned stations, the sale price is displayed in the Profit column.
- When ordering the menu by Profit, an estimate for player-owned wares is used (probably sale price vs average price).
Useful info from elsewhere on the web:
- NPC ships and Trade Reservation have been explanation by Burnit! (link; Oct 01, 2015).
- Station Match Finder, for matching ware production and needs by EuRoKa (link; Nov 10, 2014).
- Station building guide by Simoom (link; Feb 18, 2014).
Personal trading via Skunk
As above, but there may be a few traders on the station that have different prices for their wares; worth checking if you want to buy a bunch of green marines or sell off your illegal wares from a distance! There is no transport fee for /selling/ but there is one for /buying/ - see below
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