Getting Rich

## Purpose

This is a collection of tips written by players from "The Void, Alliance Wars" server. On this server, alliances build powerful fleets to fight each other. This requires immense amounts of money, resources and good turrets and these tips will help you get that. Usable also on other servers and in single player.

All mods recommended here are installed (or allowed, in case of client only mods) on "The Void, Alliance Wars".

These tips are written roughly in the order in which you can do them. Feel free to do anything else that you like in addition to these things.

This guide mainly focuses on getting close to the galaxy centre and making money with r-mining carriers and factories. For other ways of making money, see Economy.

Attention, bugs! This method relies heavily on mining fighters. Some players often encounter bugs that cause fighters to disappear or duplicate.

## Early Game

Tips for iron/titanium regions (do all the following in the territory of the faction you are allied with and don't stay here for too long):

#### Get a captain, automate quickly

The key to making money or getting any stuff in this game is passive income and automating tasks. In the beginning, you have to mine some iron with your drone. Mining manually is a boring, menial task. Mine enough iron to sell it for 15000 credits and have 300-500 left. Build a tiny ship from just engines and thrusters that does not require any crew. Hire a captain, slap your 2 mining turrets on it and order it to mine. Go get a cup of tea or something. When you are back, you should have some iron to make some small ship to fly around in. Congratulations, now you will never have to mine manually! You can send him to mine at least in civilized sectors, but probably outside of those too (persecutors probably don't live in the starting sectors, but not 100% sure).

#### Explore, make some money

Try to make some money. Maybe you can discover a claimable asteroid, or do some missions, or try trading Goods. Get an Improved Trading System if you can, find some trade routes. If you see a lucrative trade but you only have money to buy small portion of what the stations sell and buy, you can build a small cargo ship, hire a captain and order him to haul the cargo for you on loop. As long as the ship will stay in civilized sectors which you don't enter, no one is going to attack him. Economy page will give your more tips on making money at this stage.

#### Don't fight anybody

The key to fast progression is knowing that you don't have to fight to progress. Stick to civilized sectors and fly in a ship that is fast enough to fly away from any enemies that appear. At this point, the rewards for defeating enemy ships are negligible. But if you see some NPC military ships destroy Xsotans or pirates, you can collect some systems. Use IFTL Improved mod to highlight and collect them. Don't worry about missing out on the fun, you will have plenty of fights later.

#### Get an r-mining turret

If you are in multiplayer, just ask if someone can give you one. In single player, you have to fly somewhat closer to the center (or skip this step but make 500 000 credits trading instead). Use it to mine some resources (not yourself of course, hire a captain to do it).

#### Travel straight to xanion area

Once you have about 100 000 Materials and about 400 000 credits (you can probably do it with less), build a fast ship, install systems that upgrade jump range and deep scan range and speed. Take 2 extra captains with you. Head for the center. Use the deep scan to avoid hidden mass sectors. If you get caught by pirates/Swoks/persecutors or whatever, just pay them if you can, otherwise run away (that's why you need a fast ship). Once in the xanion area (use Galaxy Map QoL mod to determine where it is), use the normal scan to find civilization and jump to a civilized sector.

### Xanion (or core) area

In multiplayer, you can move even closer to the center instead, if you manage to buy Avorion from some other player and build an avorion Hyperspace Core. Don't be afraid to go closer to the center! Remember that you don't need to fight if you stick to the civilized sectors and you can fly away from pirates. Just be careful about Xsotan Invasions if you are on a multiplayer server.

#### Befriend the locals

You probably have bad relations with the faction here. Find resource depots, buy and sell resources from them until they allow you to trade with their factories (there is a 10000 or 8000 cap on relation gain from trading at a single resource depot, after that you have to find another one. Continue collecting stuff after battles you witness. In this area you can find not just systems, but also half-useful turrets sometimes.

Once you can trade, trade. At the beginning you may do some trades at a loss to improve relations. Improve relations to the point where it does not improve by trading anymore.

#### Play normally for a while

Now you can build a normal ship at last (either buy needed resources for money you made trading, or mine them with r-mining turrets you stumble upon - this is why you took those extra captains with you).

You probably already found some turrets. Put all r-mining turrets on ships and send them to mine. When you collect some half-decent combat turrets and gather enough resources to build a viable combat ship, you can start fighting and venturing to hidden mass sectors. Make note of any good mining sectors you find (in xanion area you can sometimes find HUGE resource asteroids). Galaxy Map QoL lets you mark sectors with icons. You can shoot at pirates/Xsotans in civilized sectors, which will further increase your relations with the locals (even if you don't actually destroy these ships, shooting at them is enough).

Make notes on the map when you find trading posts that sell parts for r-mining/salvaging turrets, railguns and lightning guns. The Turret Factory page lists the needed materials.

Otherwise do whatever you enjoy doing.

#### Ally with the locals

The next stepping stone is to ally with the local faction and purchase a full faction map at an Equipment Dock. If you don't have enough relations to negotiate alliance, look for a "Free Slaves" mission, which gives insane relations boost.

### Getting serious with Mining

This is it! Now you are going to get rich! You will get loads of resources and sell those you don't need for credits.

#### Plan fighter production

You will need to build many r-mining fighters for many carriers. You will also need trained crew. It can be somewhat inconvenient to do this on your main ship (also if a ship is destroyed, it loses all fighters. What you can do is build a station or a very slow ship that has a lot of high material stone blocks for cheap durability, some academy and crew quarters blocks and a quite a lot of assembly blocks. Put some crewmen in it and train them to be mechanics and engineers and any officers you need. Start hiring these crewmen and also pilots as you visit stations and transfer them to this ship when you are close.

#### Build a good r-mining turret

You have bought the faction territory map, so you know the location of many Turret Factories. Visit them all and find the r-mining turret that has the best DPS/slot multiplied by efficiency. When looking for the best turret, remember that the initial turret stats (when the factory blueprint is selected) can sometimes be misleading, as for example in one factory you can get much more extra DPS (on the same turret type and rarity) per added good then in another factory. So it is advisable to check the turrets with max quantities of goods.

#### Start fighter production

Create a Fighter from this turret (max speed + at least some maneuverability) and make a blueprint for it in your production ship (or in a new ship that will be your first mining carrier, if you prefer). Alternatively, if you are afraid of fighter bugs, you can acquire many r-mining lasers and civilian turret control systems and mine with lasers. However, this is more expensive, very sensitive to your ship design (ships must be agile and not too large or long) and usually less efficient (I did an experiment and was able to mine 2.4 million resources/hour with a carrier and 1.6 million with a ship that used lasers).

#### Build your first mining carrier

There are many carrier designs on the workshop if you don't want to build your own. Choose a design that you can afford, but that has at least 15000 cargo (more is better, even 40000 is useful). Keep enlarging it, adding/improving armour, shields (use some Shield Boosters and Energy To Shield Converters you've found) and military turrets (even totally useless ones like anti fighter will do) until the notification that the ship is too weak for this area disappears (this is important, otherwise the carrier will keep being attacked by persecutors when outside of civilization). Add at least one r-mining turret that can handle the material you want to mine. Fighters do not count when determining which asteroids your ship will mine!

Add a captain, Transporter Block and system, Mining System (good enough for the materials you want to mine), a Hyperspace Upgrade, add r-mining fighters and crewmen from your production ship and you are done!

You have to experiment with the best number of fighters needed per carrier. As a rule of thumb, if it takes more than a few seconds for the fighters to mine a small resource asteroid (counting from the moment when they start shooting), it is still useful to add more. If it just takes a few seconds, then you will not gain much by adding more fighters, because the time it takes for them to fly to another asteroid is the "bottleneck". For me, 4 squadrons of fighters with 1600 mining DPS (= 8 "regular" DPS) per fighter were more than enough.

#### Proper mining orders

Now we must maximize profits from the carrier!

The default AI will waste time standing next to a Resource Depot until all ores are refined, then pick up Materials. Our goal is to get more Materials, not to get them sooner. To fix this, get the mod Refine Without Waiting.

Resource asteroids respawn when a sector is unloaded and loaded. To benefit from this, you must create a mining loop that involves mining in two different sectors (after you mine all asteroids in a sector, it needs some time with no player ships in it to unload). You should already have some mining sectors discovered. Sectors with huge resource asteroids are best. Sectors with Xsotan Breeders in them won't respawn, so you can mine them, but only once. Let's call the mining sectors you chose Sector A and Sector B.

Experiment with cargo capacity. If your ship can mine all asteroids in Sector A and and still have a good portion of it's cargo bay free, it does not have to jump to a refinery after mining all the asteroids, but it can jump straight to mining in B. Then it will spend more time mining and less time collecting fighters, jumping and flying to refinery. So your profits will increase.

Example mining loop with a small cargo bay: mine, jump to refinery, refine, jump to B,mine, jump to refinery, refine, jump to A, loop.

Example mining loop with a large cargo bay: mine, jump to B, mine, jump to A, mine, jump to B, mine, jump to A, mine, jump to B, mine, jump to refinery, refine, jump to A, loop.

#### Sell materials

Sell some materials until you have money to build your own Resource Depot. From now on, whenever you need money, sell there. Sell all Materials except those you will be needing soon.

#### Get more carriers

When you have 2 new mining sectors discovered and cleared of hostiles and you have one r-mining turret, enough fighters, resources, systems and crewmen, build another carrier and set up a new mining loop with it. Repeat until you are happy with your income from mining.

### Getting filthy rich

Even more money can be made by building high-tech Factories (read info on that page). But these are stationary, so you must have enough firepower to protect them against both NPCs and players. Check PvP settings on your server. On Alliance Wars, you need to announce sectors in which you build stations, so build some military ships first (see info about turrets below), or ask some other alliance for protection. Add a lot of high material stone to your station so that it has a lot of cheap hitpoints.

The best thing you can build is an Accelerator Factory. Build near NPC Research Stations so that there is demand. You can start with a smaller factory, but eventually build enough assembly so that it does it's cycle in 15-16 seconds in sector and enough cargo space so that it does not run out of ingredients or get full. Leave "actively sell" and "actively buy" set and you shouldn't need to worry about supplying your factory or selling goods. Don't lose the factory! It's a huge investment.

Other players also like Body Armor, War Robot, Vehicle and Mining Robot factories.

## Turrets and System Upgrades

When you have money and materials, this is the only thing missing and you can have a powerful fleet.

In base game, Systems can only be collected manually or bought in small quantities at Equipment Docks, then researched. Mods help a lot. Get Systems Factory to build them or IFTL improved to have captains who are ordered to salvage wreckages collect them. Loot Order allows you to directly order captains to pick them up (exception - not installed on Alliance Wars).

If you collect too much stuff, use Trash Man to sell what you don't want to research.

To get the best turrets, you must build your own Research Station and Turret Factories very close to the center (described in more detail here). If you are missing some turret parts, you can build a Factory that uses them. NPC traders will deliver them to it and the factory will pay for itself after some time, then make money.

(The following applies to current turret balancing as of May 2020) If you want to shoot at other human players, build only turrets with "instant" projectile speed. Player ships are insanely fast and impossible to hit with projectile weapons. Short range (less than 15 km) can also be a problem depending on your flying skill.

On Alliance Wars, it is better to build turrets with the +x% damage to shields/hull property, as this bonus does not count towards the DPS limit.