Dealing with loot
(a reply to a question on Reddit)
- Early on, most loot is useful, and most needs to be sold to vendors
to become lovely credits
- You can easily sell directly from your ship's cargo to any vendor,
so you'd want to put as much in there as leaves about 40 kg or so free
to pick up loot from ships you've destroyed
- although you can make cargo space even in combat by jumping into
your Fleet UI, then Cargo, and pull some ore or something from ship
cargo to inventory to let you loot ship debris or whatever
- you can expand cargo space at any ship technician, although this
is an entire sub challenge of (1) add cargo (2) cry at the impact to
grav jump range and maneuvering (3) upgrade grav drive and engine (4)
cry at having no power left for weapon (5) upgrade reactor, etc...
More on that in a bit
- you can access you ship cargo from inside the ship, near it,
or even from anywhere, depending on your difficulty settings.
Being able to stuff your loot into cargo while inside a POI does
make things easier (until cargo's full, of course)
- If you have loot that you aren't using, don't want to sell (yet),
and won't fit in your ship, you can stash it
- in the Lodge (not linked to crafting but the bench is right
there), or
- (with more effort) in an Outpost of your own - the big containers
are crafting linked, or
- in chests you can build in your ship, which don't count against
your Cargo capacity, but also aren't linked to crafting
- on the floor of any ship or hab you own. Or on furniture.
Or whatever
- Past a certain point, you'll have enough credits that low profit/mass
loot isn't worth looting anymore. The flip side is that selling a huge
pile of guns and armor can be more difficult, since vendors have limited
credits. Stolen loot is harder to move, and Contraband is trickier
- You can sell stolen and contraband loot - or launder just to remove the
stolen tag (and then sell for real at a different vendor) - at certain
vendors. Those with ✠ are always safe to approach with contraband
(no scan), but for the TA guys, it varies by system
- Any Trade Authority vendor (note that one of them, in Hopetown,
just hangs out at the bar)
- Trade Authority ships
- ✠ The Den (TA, this is the best known one)
- ✠ The Key (if you're a Crimson Fleet pirate, otherwise they shoot)
- ✠ The Red Mile
- UC Exchange in Cedonia (I'm pretty sure that isn't just a mod
effect)
- occasionally a Civilian outpost is friendly to stolen goods
- When stripping stolen tags, sell a chunk to the vendor, then go to
the vendor's Buy Back tab to pull it all back, then cycle through
the rest of your stolen good the same way. Now you can
sell it (except for contraband) to any vendor, not just the TA or whatever
- There are ways of getting contraband past scans, including tricks with
having an outpost in the same tile as the vendor, Skills, ship equipment,
abuse of Fast Travel, but most are tricky and uncertain
- there was one where you could leave contraband in one ship, land
in a different ship somewhere with police, then switch ships, but
when I last did that my swapped ship lost its contraband - not sure
if that was a glitch or a fix ;-)
- selling a ship with contraband on board just loses the contraband
- you could probably abandon a follower with contraband somewhere
(having him unfollow you and not have a ship job, then make sure he's
not on your ship), land in a policed system, then reassign him to a
ship role, but I haven't tried this and don't know if his contraband
with come along
If you want more ship cargo space, you can buy a ship (super expensive),
expand a ship (like the Frontier), or capture a ship. Here's some info on
the latter two from a cargo perspective:
- Upgrading the Frontier, at its heart is about the Reactor, because
you need to upgrade it, Grav, and Engines all to support large Cargo
capacities
- If you want to use the fastest engines and be maneuverable, you'll
probably be limited to about 1000 cargo before skills
- If you can sacrifice the speed aspect, you can use B or C engines
(with a B or C Reactor) for preposterously huge cargo
- The most popular engine for that is the unlockable SAL-6830 C
class engines. But be warned, they have poor acceleration and boost,
and it's hard to dodge a bunch of missiles with them
- You can spare a lot of expense by buying final parts, like
the unlockable Obliterators, or by skipping multiple levels of
intermediate parts
- The other (non-expensive) approach is to just steal the perfect ship :-)
or to score one of the special reward ships from the appropriate missions
- The best Reactor of any of the reward ships is an A/29. Finding
any better Reactor means you can do better than any reward ship
- Captured ships go up to C/40 Reactors, but the in-space ship
battles are challenging
- Ground-captured ships are plentiful too, although one usually
needs to kill crew and turrets inside the ship before
killing crew outside it.
- Killing the outside crew first often leads to the ship launching
- Killing everyone doesn't always unlock the pilots seat, dammit
- Be sure to save before entering the ship - it may launch
immediately, and then be destroyed in orbit. Woe, you.
- This approach is now possible because Bethesda seems to have fixed
the bug where captured ships could just disappear from your Fleet.
Before that, only reward ship slots could be trusted for any
expensive upgrades
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