little P
Super Mod
This guide differentiates between 2-way (return trip) and 3-way (A > B > C > A) routes. The same principles as for 3-way routes applies to finding routes with more than three legs.
A. If you find a 2-way route that is generating between 7800-8100 cr/ton/hour, you have a cash cow and should stop looking farther and milk it for all its worth. If your current 2-way route is generating less income flow than this, you should pull up stakes and look for better. If your current 2-way route is generating more than this, count yourself _extremely_ lucky. Using the current popular commodity tools, you should be able to easily find many such potential cash cow 2-way routes in systems that are only 1-3 jumps apart (~6 to ~24 LY). However, not all of the 2-way routes will be fast enough to traverse round trip to generate a target cash flow of ~8000 cr/ton per hour, so you have to go manually check each such potential route.
B. It IS possible to find a 3-way route that can generate closer to 13,500 cr/ton/hour (or at least more cr/ton/hour than the best 8K 2-way routes), but only with a LOT more effort to find. Most such routes will typically comprise legs that are 30 LY or longer, so even with commodity tools the searching, cross-checking, and in-game flight verification will be intensive. Point being, if you don't have the time or patience to find such 3-way routes, you're probably better off just settling for a much easier-to-find 2-way cash cow in the ~8000 cr/ton/hour range. For more details about effective ways to find such 3-way routes, look in pages 2-3 of this thread for all posts by Commander Armchair for some great insights and tips.
C. Only blind luck will enable you to find such strong 2-way and 3-way routes without using a crowdsourced commodity trading tool such as Slopey's BPC. Even using such tools will require you to work pretty hard to find a good route in the 7800-8100 cr/ton/hour range. Such tools are _not_ easy mode, for two simple reasons: A) the market is volatile and margins or supply volumes change pretty noticeably over any given 48- to 72-hour period. And B), it takes a lot of iterative searching both in the tool itself and lot of flying around in the "real world" to determine actual flight times and fuel costs.
D. Because of the point made in "C" above, I'm not going to elaborate at all on the "in-game" methods for finding a high-profit trade route. For one, the "trade lines" provided by the Galaxy map are highly misleading unless you CLEAR every commodity group and then select ONLY one commodity to display routes for (such as only Palladium or only Progenitor Cells). To make matters worse, some of the best per-ton profit margins are for items being sold at MEDIUM supply levels and purchased at MEDIUM demand levels (despite the conventional wisdom being to look only for HIGH supply items and sell to MEDIUM or HIGH demand stations. Even with additional tips and heuristics about looking at the target systems' population size and economy type, the manual in-game process is still entirely too time-consuming and prone to blind luck. Such processes will NOT give you any clues as to whether any of those half dozen "Imported From" stations will come anywhere close to the magic ~8000 cr/ton/hour benchmark. Use a 3rd party commodity tool that cares only about buy-sell-supply numbers within a large pool of crowdsourced data if you're serious about making money at a decent rate. However, if your goal is to just boogie for 200 LY across the galaxy and look for a little extra profit as you go, then the in-game technique of looking for a commodity that you can BUY for at least 1000 cr under the galactic average, examining the trade routes in nearby systems ONLY for that ONE commodity, and then heading to the system that has several incoming lanes for that commodity will probably net you at least 1000-1700 per ton for hauling that commodity along to that next stop. But for serious trade grinding? No; use a crowdsourced tool and find the solid deals.
E. Extrapolating all of the above points makes me confident to assert that Frontier Development has designed the current economy to effectively time-gate the vast majority of the playerbase to a maximum income flow of 6000-8000 cr/ton/hour, with the "carrot" for the truly hardcore trader types being a maximum time-gated income flow of roughly 13,500 cr/ton/hour. These two benchmark numbers give a good clue of how many hours to expect it will take to bootstrap yourself into the big ships.
F. Frontier Development does _not_ frown on the use of 3rd-party crowdsourced tools. It does not violate the spirit of the game or any aspect of the EULA. The only concern that FD has regarding such tools is that they do not affect stability of the game by directly accessing memory. Also, ask yourself if "real life" pilots/traders in 3300 would really operate by blind luck rather than by subscribing to a market data collection service.
------------------- More detail if interested ----------------
First, my benchmark metric of 7800-8100 cr/ton/hour is based on intensive analysis of crowdsourced data in Slopey's BPC tool since the recent market fixes by ED shortly before Xmas 2014, which is _after_ the market has settled down. This analysis also involved physically traveling to more than a dozen highly-promising trade routes identified this way.
Next, some key metrics to consider since the market stabilization are that:
A. Per-ton profits of roughly 1500-1750 are fairly common in any one station-to-station transaction. In most cases, these metrics will be found only at distances of more than 20 LY, but in rare instances you can find one-way metrics like these in closer distances.
B. However, a _return trip_ profit from such a transaction described in A is routinely in the range of 200-400 cr/ton at best. Especially if you're looking for stations that are less than 20 LY apart. You can indeed find a larger profit from a return trip if you are willing to make trips in the 30-50 LY range between each station, BUT (and it's a big but), the market auto-stabilizes to DROP the profit on the main leg in such cases. For example, You might find two equal 15 minute routes: one that makes 1600 on one leg, and 400 on the return trip. The second route probably looks more like 1100 on one leg and 900 on the return trip. Making both the routes effectively equal in terms of cr/ton/hour cash flow.
C. Put A and B together and a benchmark you're looking for in any return-trip, two-station route is to get as close to 2000 cr/ton per 15 minutes of real-time travel and docking. Basically, if you identify such a potential between any two stations in reasonably close proximity (1-3 system jumps), these are the candidates to go physically fly and see if you can do the full round trip in roughly 15 minutes. If you can make 2000 cr/ton in 15 minutes, that yields 8000 cr/ton/hour, which is the basis of my main 7800-8100 cr/ton/hour metric above in the Executive Summary. IT'S EXTREMELY RARE TO FIND ANY 2-WAY ROUTE THAT WILL YIELD MORE THAN THIS. Sure, any given commodity trading tool might promise numbers exceeding ~8000 cr/ton/hour, but if you go actually fly the route and check the data, you'll probably be disappointed to find that it's not what the commodity tool promised. Remember: crowdsourced data gets stale fast (or contains input errors), AND the system prices are volatile and rapidly changing. For example, I flew a new route today that promised 2436 cr/ton/hour, based on data that was less than 2 days old. By the time I flew both ends of the route and updated the commodity data for both stations, guess what? No surprise to me: the actual numbers worked out to only 2089 cr/ton/hour. In fact, I took a snapshot at station A, flew to B, flew back to A, and discovered that the "Sell" price for the commodity at station A had dropped by literally 100 cr in just the time it took to fly out and back! And these were for commodities in high supply (>50k supply stock) at both ends. That's how dynamic and volatile the market is!
C. Looking for 3-way and 4-way trips (such as A > B > C > D > A) that can somehow yield between 1000-1700 cr/ton on _each_ docking is a unicorn. It's a holy grail that pretty much doesn't exist, unless you are willing to spend a LOT of effort and unless you are willing to rely on 3rd-party commodity trading tools. (As mentioned above, look on pages 2-3 of this thread for posts by Commander Armchair if you want to learn how). It's obvious that FD is counting on most players to not devote this degree of effort to the process, and therefore FD has built their economy to time-gate all players to an income flow range of roughly 6000-8000 cr/ton/hour.
Finally, you cannot rely on a raw "profit per ton" figure to tell you anything useful, other than as a way to identify candidate systems/stations to investigate further. Instead, you _must_ factor in travel time/difficulty to determine whether any given route is actually "better". For example, here is real data from the two best routes I've found so far. (I'm leaving out actual system/station names to protect my resource pool.)
Route 1
System A > Station 1: roughly 160 LS from jump entry to station, which is an exterior dock.
System B > Station 2: roughly 250 LS from jump entry to station, which is a non-haloed cylinder.
A is roughly 6 LY distant from B. One 6 LY jump. No fuel scooping necessary.
A1 > B2 yields 1594 cr/ton
B2 > A1 yields 382 cr/ton
Total round trip: 15 minutes @ 1976 cr/ton
Route 2
System C > Station 3: roughly 19,000 LS from jump entry to station, which is an exterior dock.
System D > Station 4: roughly 400 LS from jump entry to station, which is a non-haloed cylinder.
C is roughly 24 LY from D. Two 18 LY jumps. Fuel scooping is pretty much mandatory.
C3 > D4 yields 1738 cr/ton
D4 > C3 yields 941 cr/ton
Total round trip: 20 minutes @ 2679 cr/ton
Route 2 instinctivly looks _much_ better than Route 1, doesn't it? I mean: 2679 is waaaayyyyy bigger than 1976, amirite? Also, that 1738 cr/ton one way is a _really_ large cr/ton profit margin you don't see very often at all. And to get 941 cr/ton on the return trip, when MOST two-station jumps with any number larger than 1500 cr/ton in one directly rarely has anything larger than 200-400 cr/ton in the other direction? That looks like pure awesomesauce! Let's pick up and move our ships from system A to system C!
But... no. Because:
1976 x 4 = 7904 cr/ton/hour
2679 x 3 = 8037 cr/ton/hour
Considering the tiny difference, it's worth the small 133/ton/hour loss to not have to sit through a 19,000 LS approach on one leg of the route, plus an extra jump, plus all the additional fuel cost that makes me spend time scooping to avoid. By sticking with my current route with a 15 minute travel time and two very short distances from sun to station, I can swap ships around much more easily.
Other random tips. These all assume you're in credit-farming mode and looking to min-max your cash flow to afford more/bigger toys:
A. Do your trade runs in Solo mode, even if you like PvP. Dealing with more difficult interdictions by real players eats up tons of time.
B. Early on, look for routes where at least one station in the route is an exterior dock. They're just much faster to dock at and launch from. (Enjoy it until you move up to T7+, when you can no longer use exterior docks.)
C. Halo stations take the longest time to approach from sides/rear, so avoid routes that have a Halo station at one or both ends.
D. Fuel scooping wastes time. Hauler/T* fuel is cheap if you make only one jump. Therefore, look for routes with only one jump.
E. Always run with 2 pips in Shields and 4 pips in Engines, even when you're interdicted.
F. When interdicted, instantly drop throttle to zero to "submit" before being forcibly yanked out of FSD mode. This helps your FSD recharge faster, and you won't hit your escape vector most times unless you're an ace pilot. Just jink and dodge at full throttle with 4 pips in engines while the interdictor grazes you occasionally, and jump out as soon as your FSD is ready again. Easy peasy.
G. Not sure which tool to use? Slopey's BPC. The market data is the freshest and most accurate.
H. Contribute to the crowdsourced data; don't be a leech. Get Seebek's EliteOCR tool and learn to use it. It takes only 3 minutes at most to ACCURATELY add/update any station (with 100% confidence) into the Slopey's BPC database by using EliteOCR.
A. If you find a 2-way route that is generating between 7800-8100 cr/ton/hour, you have a cash cow and should stop looking farther and milk it for all its worth. If your current 2-way route is generating less income flow than this, you should pull up stakes and look for better. If your current 2-way route is generating more than this, count yourself _extremely_ lucky. Using the current popular commodity tools, you should be able to easily find many such potential cash cow 2-way routes in systems that are only 1-3 jumps apart (~6 to ~24 LY). However, not all of the 2-way routes will be fast enough to traverse round trip to generate a target cash flow of ~8000 cr/ton per hour, so you have to go manually check each such potential route.
B. It IS possible to find a 3-way route that can generate closer to 13,500 cr/ton/hour (or at least more cr/ton/hour than the best 8K 2-way routes), but only with a LOT more effort to find. Most such routes will typically comprise legs that are 30 LY or longer, so even with commodity tools the searching, cross-checking, and in-game flight verification will be intensive. Point being, if you don't have the time or patience to find such 3-way routes, you're probably better off just settling for a much easier-to-find 2-way cash cow in the ~8000 cr/ton/hour range. For more details about effective ways to find such 3-way routes, look in pages 2-3 of this thread for all posts by Commander Armchair for some great insights and tips.
C. Only blind luck will enable you to find such strong 2-way and 3-way routes without using a crowdsourced commodity trading tool such as Slopey's BPC. Even using such tools will require you to work pretty hard to find a good route in the 7800-8100 cr/ton/hour range. Such tools are _not_ easy mode, for two simple reasons: A) the market is volatile and margins or supply volumes change pretty noticeably over any given 48- to 72-hour period. And B), it takes a lot of iterative searching both in the tool itself and lot of flying around in the "real world" to determine actual flight times and fuel costs.
D. Because of the point made in "C" above, I'm not going to elaborate at all on the "in-game" methods for finding a high-profit trade route. For one, the "trade lines" provided by the Galaxy map are highly misleading unless you CLEAR every commodity group and then select ONLY one commodity to display routes for (such as only Palladium or only Progenitor Cells). To make matters worse, some of the best per-ton profit margins are for items being sold at MEDIUM supply levels and purchased at MEDIUM demand levels (despite the conventional wisdom being to look only for HIGH supply items and sell to MEDIUM or HIGH demand stations. Even with additional tips and heuristics about looking at the target systems' population size and economy type, the manual in-game process is still entirely too time-consuming and prone to blind luck. Such processes will NOT give you any clues as to whether any of those half dozen "Imported From" stations will come anywhere close to the magic ~8000 cr/ton/hour benchmark. Use a 3rd party commodity tool that cares only about buy-sell-supply numbers within a large pool of crowdsourced data if you're serious about making money at a decent rate. However, if your goal is to just boogie for 200 LY across the galaxy and look for a little extra profit as you go, then the in-game technique of looking for a commodity that you can BUY for at least 1000 cr under the galactic average, examining the trade routes in nearby systems ONLY for that ONE commodity, and then heading to the system that has several incoming lanes for that commodity will probably net you at least 1000-1700 per ton for hauling that commodity along to that next stop. But for serious trade grinding? No; use a crowdsourced tool and find the solid deals.
E. Extrapolating all of the above points makes me confident to assert that Frontier Development has designed the current economy to effectively time-gate the vast majority of the playerbase to a maximum income flow of 6000-8000 cr/ton/hour, with the "carrot" for the truly hardcore trader types being a maximum time-gated income flow of roughly 13,500 cr/ton/hour. These two benchmark numbers give a good clue of how many hours to expect it will take to bootstrap yourself into the big ships.
F. Frontier Development does _not_ frown on the use of 3rd-party crowdsourced tools. It does not violate the spirit of the game or any aspect of the EULA. The only concern that FD has regarding such tools is that they do not affect stability of the game by directly accessing memory. Also, ask yourself if "real life" pilots/traders in 3300 would really operate by blind luck rather than by subscribing to a market data collection service.
------------------- More detail if interested ----------------
First, my benchmark metric of 7800-8100 cr/ton/hour is based on intensive analysis of crowdsourced data in Slopey's BPC tool since the recent market fixes by ED shortly before Xmas 2014, which is _after_ the market has settled down. This analysis also involved physically traveling to more than a dozen highly-promising trade routes identified this way.
Next, some key metrics to consider since the market stabilization are that:
A. Per-ton profits of roughly 1500-1750 are fairly common in any one station-to-station transaction. In most cases, these metrics will be found only at distances of more than 20 LY, but in rare instances you can find one-way metrics like these in closer distances.
B. However, a _return trip_ profit from such a transaction described in A is routinely in the range of 200-400 cr/ton at best. Especially if you're looking for stations that are less than 20 LY apart. You can indeed find a larger profit from a return trip if you are willing to make trips in the 30-50 LY range between each station, BUT (and it's a big but), the market auto-stabilizes to DROP the profit on the main leg in such cases. For example, You might find two equal 15 minute routes: one that makes 1600 on one leg, and 400 on the return trip. The second route probably looks more like 1100 on one leg and 900 on the return trip. Making both the routes effectively equal in terms of cr/ton/hour cash flow.
C. Put A and B together and a benchmark you're looking for in any return-trip, two-station route is to get as close to 2000 cr/ton per 15 minutes of real-time travel and docking. Basically, if you identify such a potential between any two stations in reasonably close proximity (1-3 system jumps), these are the candidates to go physically fly and see if you can do the full round trip in roughly 15 minutes. If you can make 2000 cr/ton in 15 minutes, that yields 8000 cr/ton/hour, which is the basis of my main 7800-8100 cr/ton/hour metric above in the Executive Summary. IT'S EXTREMELY RARE TO FIND ANY 2-WAY ROUTE THAT WILL YIELD MORE THAN THIS. Sure, any given commodity trading tool might promise numbers exceeding ~8000 cr/ton/hour, but if you go actually fly the route and check the data, you'll probably be disappointed to find that it's not what the commodity tool promised. Remember: crowdsourced data gets stale fast (or contains input errors), AND the system prices are volatile and rapidly changing. For example, I flew a new route today that promised 2436 cr/ton/hour, based on data that was less than 2 days old. By the time I flew both ends of the route and updated the commodity data for both stations, guess what? No surprise to me: the actual numbers worked out to only 2089 cr/ton/hour. In fact, I took a snapshot at station A, flew to B, flew back to A, and discovered that the "Sell" price for the commodity at station A had dropped by literally 100 cr in just the time it took to fly out and back! And these were for commodities in high supply (>50k supply stock) at both ends. That's how dynamic and volatile the market is!
C. Looking for 3-way and 4-way trips (such as A > B > C > D > A) that can somehow yield between 1000-1700 cr/ton on _each_ docking is a unicorn. It's a holy grail that pretty much doesn't exist, unless you are willing to spend a LOT of effort and unless you are willing to rely on 3rd-party commodity trading tools. (As mentioned above, look on pages 2-3 of this thread for posts by Commander Armchair if you want to learn how). It's obvious that FD is counting on most players to not devote this degree of effort to the process, and therefore FD has built their economy to time-gate all players to an income flow range of roughly 6000-8000 cr/ton/hour.
Finally, you cannot rely on a raw "profit per ton" figure to tell you anything useful, other than as a way to identify candidate systems/stations to investigate further. Instead, you _must_ factor in travel time/difficulty to determine whether any given route is actually "better". For example, here is real data from the two best routes I've found so far. (I'm leaving out actual system/station names to protect my resource pool.)
Route 1
System A > Station 1: roughly 160 LS from jump entry to station, which is an exterior dock.
System B > Station 2: roughly 250 LS from jump entry to station, which is a non-haloed cylinder.
A is roughly 6 LY distant from B. One 6 LY jump. No fuel scooping necessary.
A1 > B2 yields 1594 cr/ton
B2 > A1 yields 382 cr/ton
Total round trip: 15 minutes @ 1976 cr/ton
Route 2
System C > Station 3: roughly 19,000 LS from jump entry to station, which is an exterior dock.
System D > Station 4: roughly 400 LS from jump entry to station, which is a non-haloed cylinder.
C is roughly 24 LY from D. Two 18 LY jumps. Fuel scooping is pretty much mandatory.
C3 > D4 yields 1738 cr/ton
D4 > C3 yields 941 cr/ton
Total round trip: 20 minutes @ 2679 cr/ton
Route 2 instinctivly looks _much_ better than Route 1, doesn't it? I mean: 2679 is waaaayyyyy bigger than 1976, amirite? Also, that 1738 cr/ton one way is a _really_ large cr/ton profit margin you don't see very often at all. And to get 941 cr/ton on the return trip, when MOST two-station jumps with any number larger than 1500 cr/ton in one directly rarely has anything larger than 200-400 cr/ton in the other direction? That looks like pure awesomesauce! Let's pick up and move our ships from system A to system C!
But... no. Because:
1976 x 4 = 7904 cr/ton/hour
2679 x 3 = 8037 cr/ton/hour
Considering the tiny difference, it's worth the small 133/ton/hour loss to not have to sit through a 19,000 LS approach on one leg of the route, plus an extra jump, plus all the additional fuel cost that makes me spend time scooping to avoid. By sticking with my current route with a 15 minute travel time and two very short distances from sun to station, I can swap ships around much more easily.
Other random tips. These all assume you're in credit-farming mode and looking to min-max your cash flow to afford more/bigger toys:
A. Do your trade runs in Solo mode, even if you like PvP. Dealing with more difficult interdictions by real players eats up tons of time.
B. Early on, look for routes where at least one station in the route is an exterior dock. They're just much faster to dock at and launch from. (Enjoy it until you move up to T7+, when you can no longer use exterior docks.)
C. Halo stations take the longest time to approach from sides/rear, so avoid routes that have a Halo station at one or both ends.
D. Fuel scooping wastes time. Hauler/T* fuel is cheap if you make only one jump. Therefore, look for routes with only one jump.
E. Always run with 2 pips in Shields and 4 pips in Engines, even when you're interdicted.
F. When interdicted, instantly drop throttle to zero to "submit" before being forcibly yanked out of FSD mode. This helps your FSD recharge faster, and you won't hit your escape vector most times unless you're an ace pilot. Just jink and dodge at full throttle with 4 pips in engines while the interdictor grazes you occasionally, and jump out as soon as your FSD is ready again. Easy peasy.
G. Not sure which tool to use? Slopey's BPC. The market data is the freshest and most accurate.
H. Contribute to the crowdsourced data; don't be a leech. Get Seebek's EliteOCR tool and learn to use it. It takes only 3 minutes at most to ACCURATELY add/update any station (with 100% confidence) into the Slopey's BPC database by using EliteOCR.
