Early Game Long Hauling Hauler experiment results
22 Oct 2016Oliver N. Hardy
Experiment resultsIt took me about 10 hours game play to build up to and make my first long haul mission from Ceos to BD+85 1846, with a total bank account of just over 2 million credits at mission end. I was able to only take one mission with 6 tons of haulage (685,000 credit payout) mainly due to RNG - small quantity long hauls just were not spawning. I filled the rest of my hold with 10 tons of Sothis Crystallized Gold which doubled its value at the other end of the trip (about 15K/ton profit).
http://inara.cz/gallery/0/18808
Observations on the current Early Game compared to The Old Days
It is much easier to start in the Horizons iteration of the game than it used to be. When I started back during the pre-release Beta, Coffee and Superconductor hauling were the things you pretty much had to do if you did not want to bounty hunt, and you counted your profits in the hundreds if you could not find a mission that you had the jump range for. Now the bread and butter is the skimmer hunt missions, as I was pulling multiple missions for the same area, and each one was paying between 75,000 and 95,000 credits for up to four drones. I think it is probably more lucrative to stay and drone hunt than to do anything else, as I racked up almost 800,000 credits in my first four hours of game play.
On a rather alarming side note, it appears the mission reset trick of logging out to main then going back into different play modes (solo/open/private group) is no longer a viable option. You will now have to wait for the 10 minute server tick for mission respawns once the new patch goes active.
I was not able to get a mission respawn using this method most of the time, and the ones I did get I suspect were due to the tick. I also had a lot of trouble with the mission server timing out, but that may be due to my internet connection and not a server side issue.Conclusion
Long Hauling in the beginning is doable, but really it is not worth the effort when you can make 200,000+ credits an hour farming skimmer missions. Because I had a specific goal in mind, I did not chase any of the other material signatures while in my SRV, which was somewhat problematic - I almost ran out of fuel twice because of this. However, if you are just starting out you cannot find a better or easier way to make money than this.