A few tips for beginners:
- Know how to fly, turn, operate the basics of your ship. This looks very complicated in the beginning, but practice pays off. Play tutorial missions, fly around space stations, test things like fighting, fleeing, crash landing, dump cargo, mining, emergency landing and so on. Do not care about making money or a career when you just started, give yourself time to learn E:D. If you are confident enough wipe your save game and start all over. Fresh, without i.e. bounties or negative reputations. This approach will save you from anger and frustration. (been there ;-) ) E:D is complex but not too complex. There are do's and don't's and best practices.
- You start with a viper with weak weapons. You may want to sell the lasers and shield generator, buy additional cargo bays. Stay in safe systems and trade. Or scoop cargo / rare items. Avoid cargo scans and fights.
- Some missions ask you to retrieve things like a black box or communication data. Note that scooped cargo is always 'stolen'. Do not accept such missions on space ports since you will probably be scanned on docking and get a huge fine, much bigger than the profit. Do those missions from outposts only instead.
- Do not supercruise (SC) directly to your target destination. Instead, leave the planetary plane like you take off with a plane to fly at great height. You'll encounter less mass on the way which slows you down. You may also keep a little distance from players who are camping for direct travelers in the planetary planes. Interdicting NPC's may however spawn in the vicinity, always keep an eye on your radar for that.
- When interdicted, submit to it. As soon as you are out of SC head away from your attacker, turbo boost, go back into SC as fast as you can. With stronger thrusters and a better power plant you may evade a fight or even cargo scans.
- Scooped cargo like commodities and rare items are always 'stolen'. Security vessels of the Federation may stop and fine you. Space stations may fine you. To get rid of this kind of cargo and make a profit, go to an outpost with a black market (visible under 'contacts'). A good starting place may be the system "Apollo", the first outpost is close to the star and has a black market.
- You may make some easy money by going to empty systems and look for ship wrecks with cargo floating. Fly a bit away from the star and then slow down to minimum SC speed (30km/s). Sooner or later you'll see Unidentified Source Signals (USS) show up. Target them and you can directly leave super cruise. If you go faster the USS will be further away, which takes tedious time to approach. If it's cargo, scoop it. Sell it at the black market. Try to stay away from Federation space since you may get scanned by security vessels and get huge fines. Again, also stay away from space stations.
- Another way to make money is to explore systems with your D-scanner. The more you discover the more data is worth. You can sell your data at a minimum of 20 light years from the explored system, some systems data is worth thousands of credits. Assign your basic discovery scanner to a firegroup and press (and hold) fire in unexplored systems. Note that if you're not in SC your hardpoints will deploy which may prevent you from going SC fast. You may always want to D-scan in SC (which works without deploying hardpoints). Target an 'unexplored' body like a star or planet and face it. Your scanner will automatically gain data. Note that at a star you may discover X astronomical objects like planets, but if you go to an unexplored planet you may want to D-scan again to discover moons.
- Human players show on the radar as a hollow square. When somebody is trying to approach you you may want to hyper jump to another system, just to be sure not to get killed for no reason. ED has an open gameplay, some players just chose to be pirating bullies with notorious bounties on their heads. Getting bullied is not unfair, it's just the way ED works. You can always block players if you want to (but would you?).
- On outposts it's sometimes hard to see which direction you should land. Always face the buildings with the radar. If you can't see which direction you should land, fly high over the landing platform and turn the ships nose down. It's now much faster to turn. Rotating while hovering horizontally is very slow.
- If your ship is destroyed you can buy a new one at a reduced price. There is no real insurance. Yet, the reduced price may be a huge figure, depending on the modules you had installed. You can take a loan, but only up to a certain amount. Always make sure you can buy back your ship in case you die. You may die in a battle, but you may also run into a heavy or super hot astronomical body after hyperjump.
- Some systems of interest (there are many):
-- Apollo, has an outpost with a black market near its sun.
-- Lalande 18115, has several star ports and outposts, and at least one with a black market. Nearby are empty systems with low traffic to look for floating cargo. Inside the system you can run trades between star ports and make decent profit.
* note that trading and actions do have an effect on local markets.
- Have fun.
