Wonga, moolah, gravy, cheddar, whatever you wanna call it, to get by on SS you need the $$! I am by no means the best at it or the richest, but I have got by ok. This guide should give you some ideas to getting you on the path to riches.

Low levels F2P etc.- prom running.
People say do dg's but the loot really is pretty sad at this level, getting your first bil together can seem like an impossible task. A decent way I made money at level 20 was to get myself a pax xmas + basic cap aug, a decent engine e.g. bule shover or traders propulsion and fairly fast scoutship e.g. hotrod. Scout round every AI base you can find in your hotrod noting down highs and lows of promethium prices.

To make this pay you are looking for ai bases selling prom at 8-10k and ai bases buying prom at 25k+ (best is around 40k on edges of w1). With that basic cap aug and maybe some transcendental modded gear you should be able to hold 800+ prom in that hold. Don’t bother with weapons but you want a decent shield to get you from one gate to then next in one piece, and get a few shield saves. Now remember prom decays, and it decays fast so you will have to be quick. Prom is also very heavy, so a decent engine with best turning is very important, traders propulsion I found to be very good.

Making money on prom run is a balance of quantity vs. time. I have found 10-12 hops to be the most you can realistically go on a route before it either decays too much or the risk of getting jacked somewhere along the route becomes too high. So head to your source base where the prom is cheap, before you dock, line up facing the gate you will be leaving the gal by.

Now the price you see in the base is not actually the price you will pay because of the way the market works, the real price you pay can be seen as a total figure you paid in the event chat. Buy maximum prom, undock and get thrusting toward the gate.

Never use Auto pilot with a hull full of prom, so you are going to have to be skillful to pilot and do the whole journey on manual. This is very good practice on piloting and getting used to the SS inertia system. It might be useful to practice a run first with a hull of nuc just to get the flow of it. You should be aiming to make around 20m-30m per load, but be very careful of the real price you actually pay and sell for in your event window.

Once you sell a load to a base, undock and redock to see what the new price is in the base. It may not be worth doing another load, it’s up to you to experiment with how many times you can dump on a base before the price crashes.

Some advanced tips:
look for wing4's on auto program docking with an AI base, these are most likely player ships dumping from a nearby player controlled prom mine. Price will nearly always be cheap to buy here. If you are really lucky you will find a player base open to the public selling prom, maybe for 1k each! It's worth investigating any player bases being serviced by mining helgas, you might get lucky as I did and find one open selling prom from its mine. Always think about docking way ahead of the ai base, thrust toward the ai base, turn round and reverse drift onto the ai base and gradually slow to dock using the thruster. Have some GG2 to protect your commod if you die.

Early p2p – Capping

Of course DG's can provide a good source of money, the higher DF (danger factor) the better, but really you want to be getting into capping as soon as you can, and that means infernos..endless infernos.

Get yourself an EFF ship from Beta Antares for the range bonus, a weapon called Zigzag and swirl (radiation), a prismatic convertor (or corsairs convertor slightly better). Find yourself a nice gal or DG full of infernos and capture them. You want your skills to be 8+ on basically everything or you wont be able to capture these, and the higher RC you got the more you can capture in one go.

You can use a normal weapon to get the shield down as low as possible and then switch to your zigzag to finish it off and rad it. The ship is ready for capture when you see solar type glow come out of it and it starts to drift helplessly. Sometime they "desync" when radded so use a tractor to hold it to fire the PC into it.

You can sell infernos in Glass matrix, Prism and Handel’s cove galaxies. You can use your programming skill to program the infernos to head to the galaxy where you will be selling them, but beware you can't program it to go straight to hidden bases (it will turn round and fly back to you when it can’t find it) therefore always send it to the closest "visible" base closest to destination. If you don’t have the programming skill, you can take along some trade control bots to fill your trade slots as well. This can double up your capping capacity easily e.g 8 infernos in tow with RC16. Simply dock 4 and replace the prismatic with your control bots, freeing your combat slots once again.

Dock the infernos in the destination base and hit sell ship, watch event tab to see how much you made (usually around 10m per inferno). Once you have capping down you should be onto your first bil in no time.

Trade (aka god I’m bored of capping infernos now!)

Trade is the very essence of Star sonata money making, you know what they say "buy low, sell high". The best way to make more money is to invest the money you have already made. Learn your prices, keep notes. Go round all the shops and see what things are for sale and for what prices. When someone pops up on trade asking for an item that you know to be in a shop somewhere, pm them and ask for that price +10/20%. You won’t get every sale, but you should get enough. The fact someone is posting on trade is because they are too lazy to go round all the shops themselves. On the other side of this you can be cheeky and PM sellers asking for discount, you don’t ask, you don’t get.

There are many popular items which you can sell easily, and there are many people who setup shops who haven’t got a clue on prices. You can make lots of money off trade without having the risk and the outlay of owning your own shop. Deals generally get done on Neptune in sol, beware of low level scammers who log after payment, one bad deal can really screw your profit margin.

Lots of things can be traded in for cash in missions, pirate crests in cadet academy, enforcer ranks in sol etc.. If you can buy them for less than their trade in value you are in the $. Don’t get too greedy, it’s often better to make a quick small profit than tie you capital up in an expensive item that you can maybe make a higher margin on but take longer to sell.

On the flip side of trading is scamming. I do not condone this in any way and is quickest route to get your character universally hated, but it’s a valid money making method so I will include it. Scammers use all sorts of techniques to part you with your money, they may even squad you, drop and scoop the item to show they have it, take the money then log. Scamming is difficult to do well, because to seem trust worthy you must be high level, and to scam on a high level is risking the reputation of your character that you have spent so long building up. Consequently scammers are often low level alts, so to gain the trust of the victim they have to be very skillful in creating the appearance of genuine honest traders. Recently I know of a scammer saying stuff like "oh this is just my f2p alt i use for storage, but my main is 1.5k you can trust me”… a fool and his money are easily parted!

Mining Commods

Many shops buy commods to run construction projects, and there are many commods that can be used for missions or skills that can be obtained by mining. Some examples of mission or skill item commods might be traginium mined in arena lobby, solar prisms mined in prism, blue vapors and whispers mined in blue outpost. Search for the word asteroid on wiki to get a nice list of places to mine rare and valuable commods.

Some places are more dangerous than others, be very careful of going Bonnet for example, it’s a one way gate you may find yourself trapped. Higher level players are often too busy to mine commods, for example the Paxian fighter ranges need a lot of solar prisms to build, and often hire lower levels to go mine them. There are other guides on this forum to help you with the secrets of mining trag so go read them. In the case of blue outpost go for the really tiny rocks in the the centre belt. Mining tokens can be swapped for ships like asteroid freighters, which may be sold on.

Mining isn’t the greatest source of income, but its mostly free! If you have a base you can set slaves to mine asteroid belts, if you get lucky you might find fermium in a belt, with a nu-conv purchased from lavanite you can convert this into promethium and sell it to ai bases with a fast slave like a hotrod or wing4. This can be very profitable indeed.

Running a shop

Running a shop is the ultimate key to riches, and combines everything you have learnt. First of all building bases and keeping them alive is hard, do not even think about putting all your expensive items in your shop on your first attempt, it’s likely it will get blown by some scumbag or dark transport.

Building strong bases is beyond the scope of this guide so if you can get that down before you setup shop, you are more likely to succeed. Shops can often command a higher price than on trade, and many people don’t know what they want until they see it in a shop. Trade channel can be a confusing place of acronyms for most new players.

You can also set your shop to buy and sell commodities, again find things that are always in demand. For example you could set your base to buy Pax medals for 5m and sell for 10m, people will come along and sell and buy, earning you money without having to do anything. Why do people set buy price to 1 credit? This is a sneaky trick to catch out the double clickers, most people have fallen foul of it at some time, selling something to a shop for 1 cred by accident!

Ai will also sell things to your base, try setting dark remains, pirate crests, scorched gear etc to be bought by your base for 1 credit, you will be surprised how many you get from ai who scoop from kills in the gal. To make your shop popular, location is important, advertising is important and so is your prices. Just like in the real world!

Once you are up and running you can go hit up all those dg’s and fill it with nice gear to sell or you can manufacture gear using blueprints. Beware of modded items though, when you buy a modded item from a shop it strips the modification off it. Always sell modded items in trade chat.

Hope you enjoyed my guide feel free to pm me anytime - topbuzz

Nice guide buzz.. hopefully this will lower the amount of begging f2ps...

I wish..

A small tip for Inferno capping:
After docking at the relay base, usually 3 "Dock" commands for Ice Matrix usually ensures that the Inferno will dock at the hidden base. This depends on how close the relay base is to the station, though.

very, very nice guide, good job!

Deep warp 2 and shallow Warp 3 are good for ccapping too. I got about 200m from my shop this uni. I got about 500m+ from capping. Except I'm still broke D:

Very, very nice guide. I remember mining the neural keysyncs in Liberty and selling them to the AI station for 18k each until I had enough cash for my first Hotrod+. That was before I discovered the joys of prom running though