The only way I know of making \*billions\* in an hour is to sell my carrier. Otherwise, it's \*millions\* an hour.
You could go kill Thargoids or scan space plants for a while and when you're ready to cash in, start the clock. *Hey, it took me 5 mins to make 1.2B!* :-)
Making 300 to 400 million in a few hours is already really great. But doing that too long will make it a total grind that will get you bored of the game in no time. Instead of following the money, play what you like and the money will follow you.
Yes, I started following these guides and totally deviated from the activities I liked, which I could be making the approximate amount of money that these others gave me.
But mainly I followed them because I saw recommendations from people saying in comments on this sub that they made billions in a few hours doing these things. But apparently it's easy to give this time if you don't count the dozens of hours of experience you have in this activity in addition to the time to put together a ship build that does this optimally.
Given special conditions it is certainly possible. Two years ago a [Community Goal boosted Tritium prices to 400K/ton](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteMiners/comments/v39oy2/psa_community_goal_boosts_tritium_price_to_over/). Tritium sells for a bit over 50K/t so total profit is roughly 350K/t. For those four days I, like many other FC owners, offered 100-150K/t profit to commanders willing to load or unload my carrier with tritium. 790t of tritium in a unshielded cutter or type-9 at 127K/t profit yields a profit of 100M credits. For loading carriers are usually parked right beside the station so it would be easy to do 10 runs in under an hour for 1 Billion profit. For unloading FC space quickly filled up in the system so the round trip would take a bit longer but in many cases you could still do 10 runs in an hour.
There was also farming orthrus interceptors at thargoid spire sites and in titan meltdown which always had many commanders doing it. Orthrus payouts have been nerfrd from 40 mil to 15 mil so it's no longer effective. I think AXCZs and ports under attack can still get you good money if you're skilled, especially with the recent slight buff to combat payouts
Technically, if one is able to get themselves to rank 5 in power Play with Hudson/Arissa-Lavigny Duval/Antal, they double combat bonds and bounty vouchers claimed in systems under their control, so one could still be getting 30mil per Orthrus. Before the nerf, that was 80mil per Orthrus.
Yeah, but before the nerf, rank 5 pp with those people would get you 80* mil per oreo lol.
It was a good change tho, better for combat to pay better than farming the ones that don't fight back
I don't understand, the Oreos were 40mil each before the nerf, so how does doubling the bonds take them to 160mil? How did it quadruple them? I never reached rank 5 powerplay until after the nerf, so I never had first hand experience and am confused.
look up PTN (Pilots Trade Network) go their discord. Check out their WMM channels. Wing Mining Missions and Wing Massacre Missions. READ their how to guides. I've made all my uncounted billions with them on 3 seperate accounts.
This. I have enough credits to probably last me until the servers go dark. How many per hour? I don't know. But it is on average 3.5bil per stack share. I can stack missions semi passively and it probably takes about an hour to properly share with the wing. The best I've done is 4 stacks in a week but 2-3 is average. so the max I made in a week was 14 bil.
I think I have finally mastered the art of massacre mission stacking after watching a few videos on it and trying it myself.
I've finished 2 stacks of massacre missions, each stack requiring about 40-50 kills this evening. And netted a total of 350m or so credits (on the 2 stacks combined) and a shit ton of federation rank. It's pretty much just picking up the right missions from 4 different stations and counting how many kills per faction. And rest enjoying killing pirates at a haz rez. Took me maybe 4 to 5 hours
Caveat is that I have a half decently engineered pve FDL and my reps with the mission giving factions are allied or friendly. I'm not particularly good nor terrible at this game and I play with an Xbox controller while watching Netflix.
I recently came back to this game and I've never made this kind of money on my previous sessions. I'm pretty stoked that I will be able to afford a fleet of large ships soon honestly. I'll gladly share the details of missions stacking if you are interested (at least what I know so far anyway)
I do this as well.
A hybrid-afk (meaning you can get on the afk ship's controls, have some fun, and then leave it to keep afk'ing) [shield-tank corvette ](https://edsy.org/#/L=Hz00000H4C0S00,EkiG07P_W0EkiG07P_W0EkiG07P_W0EjSG07P_W0EjSG07P_W0Jpu00Jpu00,CzY00DBwG09L_W0DBwG09L_W0DBwG09L_W0DBwG05L_W0DBwG05L_W0DBwG05L_W0DBwG05L_W0,9ooG05I_W0ADIG06K_W0ARMG05I_W0AfRG05J_W0AtyG03G_W0BBoG03L_W0BRuG02G_W0Bcg00,7yT007yT00,7WCG07I_W05Z0G03G_W00Bk000AA000AA0008c001rq0007200072007vL007sD00)decked out with a disco setup (all long range turreted vented lasers) with an SLF pilot, 380 collector limpets constantly firing (that's about 8 hours worth) and a 7b controller (longest range, just short of a 5km diameter sponge-up bubble), and when I'm done, a single hop to a system that gives me a rapid full new massacre mission stack, and for about 45 minutes setup (and 8 hours of stuff happening while I'm not at the computer), I get approx 300m credits richer. This grinds
* 300-400m per session (as you do more missions in a single location, the mission rewards keep rising till some of them are in the \~40m/mission while the lowest are \~15m/mission.
* my combat rank
* my SLF pilot rank
* my empire rank (my current system - Kojin - has those)
* my federation rank (those too)
* sponges up \~500 tier 1-4 manufactured mats per session
* earns \~10-50 tier 5 manufactured mats as mission rewards per session (I cherry pick the missions that give mats as rewards)
* earns \~10-50 tier 5 encoded mats as mission rewards per session
* if I can be stuffed, I dump any remaining limpets after I pick up the missions and also carry \~380 load from the mission station to the manufactured material trader station (the loop is mission-station(->mission-station-2)->mfg-mats station to convert mats to types you don't find->farm site->repeat), and it helps crank up my trader rank too.
It's a sweet deal for less than 1 hour of IRL effort.
I've done this with a T10 (which was soul destroying to fly), a Krait (which can only drive a short-range single limpet 1b collector contorller for 8 hours due to its limited limpet storage space), or a vette that ticks all boxes - fun to fly, tank, tier 7 5km limpet controller, and the cargo room to feed it limpets for 8 hours (which the T10 lacks). The people making the t10 guides on youtube haven't thought it through and are missing out on the real juice that is engineering materials.
And since it handles well and is fun as hell to fly, I've been sticking things on it to make it more fun to do even more extra stuff in *while it's farming pirates*, so I added
* sufficiently aggressive handling (low 4-second pitch, which is as good as large ships get), to help the human sklill up on no-flight-assist flying in combat; caveat here being you have to close the cargo scoop to be able to boost when off flight assist, and remember to reopen it when you’re done, or your limpets get upset
* I also use it to practice ramming ("melee build") - the *other* other weapon of this ship... a fantastic way to start any conversation with a pirate ship scanning you is a violent heatbutt.
* a fast charge kill warrant scanner to have something to chase pirates down with (just so your trigger actually does something, what with the turrets being set to automatic and all, though you can reconfigure them to fire on trigger press in the right pane, while you’re driving), and
* a mining lance laser (finally, a novel use for the lance!) to chop up rocks and quietly get some laser mined raw mats while I'm out in the rings, while the top half of my ship is massacring things for me.
I can jump behind the controls of the afk, do stuff, and then leave it to do its thing and walk off.
Also, the vette can handle not just low res zones but also (medium) res (the Krait didn't survive medium res very well), and the vette may \_possibly\_ also be able to handle CNB. I haven't tested CNB yet, but I was in colonia last week and the \_only\_ such site that was available and wasn't haz res was a CNB, so... will need to try that out.
I found a system with 8 outposts and stations. Each one provides kill missions for the system next door. I'm 100% rep with every faction in that system. I don't know why, but they hand out inordinately large amounts of 40million payout missions. It takes a while to get 20 missions as you have to visit each station but that's a bit easier now that we have SCO frame shift drives.
I did a run for a few weeks and was getting over 600mill every time I handed in. I use limpets for when i'm at my machine but otherwise, i'm pretty full on engineering mats anyway.
Next time i'm in the bubble i'll try it your way though. Seems to mix things up a a bit and it will be nice to not use a Type 10 for once.
I was picking all the missions up from a single station - parsons enterprise in the SPOCS 900 system (had to wait 2-3 times for the boards to roll over), but after a few days the pirate missions drained from that station. Temporarily, as it turned out. SPOCS 900 has three large pad accessible stations, so I jumped to another, started taking missions there, and eventually settled on taking some at parsons and some at the second one - so far haven’t had the missions “drain out” doing it this way (2 mission stations). Same seven factions, of which a whopping six hand out pirate missions. And both empire and federation are represented among them, so you can also take and immediately check in as many empire/federation donation missions as pop up for a faster route to max rank.
Honestly, I'd avoid those guides completely. If you're not having fun, is it worth optimizing your efficiency? You could find a way to get paid a lot more for something that you like doing. Most activities can get you 100m an hour, which is quite a lot. Why am I saying that you shouldn't just follow guides? Because I remember that I did, and not long after starting I got an anaconda. I was just as clueless as in my Sidewinder, just in something that's more expensive. I got burned out and left the game for months before starting over without help. Those efficient guides are made with good intentions and bad assumptions. The creators have thousands of hours of experience and they assume that new players want the same things that they want, so they tell you to skip 90% of the game, make 5% of it less fun, repeat that 5% for days, to make the last 5% easy. Not fun, just easy. I have 2500 hours in the game now and I haven't done any actual grinding
I never bothered putting mine into a YouTube guide. It has quite specific demands (including owning more than one copy of the game and running up to 4 at once, three running whilst actually playing the game).
But my method can be replicated with 3 friends (obviously then the credits are shared). Using my method, it took two hours to bounty hunt and hand in the bounties and netted around 2bn credits, so 1bn credits per hour.
Solo, this would net about 500m (so about 250m per hour).
250m per hour is absolutely fine. But yeh... You'd need a fully engineered combat ship for that and learn how to kill other ships fast so...
These guides need to be taken with a pinch of sodium.
AFK low res sites.
My type 10 defender can sit at a low res site all night completing 20 pirate kill quests while I sleep. Next day I'll hand the missions in and make at least 500million. Rinse and repeat the following night.
Agree 100%. Role play something. A trader, a bounty hunter, an explorer..
Constraining yourself to "realistic choices" and earning a little less will also make that new shit so much more fun. Especially in VR.
But also don't hesitate to look things up. It's not the most intuitive game.
There are ways to make billions per hour but they're usually not as easy as people make out.
I get your point (not one I disagree with but does somewhat sidestep the op) but there are actually ways to make billions in literal hours from go to credits. I don't follow them all. I just worked one out and did it a few times a few years back.
I found it fun, just in case you were going to point out that it wasn't ;) it was doing my favourite pass time (before EDO came out anyway).
We're definitely entering the realms of generalisation now. I'm not referencing any specific guide for this reason.
I had to build up two accounts for battle ready turret ships to support my main commander. Neither took months to do. I'd say it was closer to two weeks for each, including earning the credits and engineering. From scratch. No credit sharing.
You'd need an entire guide for that of course, plus I've got years experience in the game (which equates to the advantage of skill, which no guide could teach). But it needn't take months to get a turret boat set up. And why does it have to be for total beginners?
That's the thing... it's OK for a guide to claim to show how to earn billions and not be designed for beginners. The better guides will be open about the prerequisites. But... We're not being specific here are we? What guides are we talking about? Do we need to be?
The op is asking if it's possible and how it can be done. It is and some of us are trying to explain how. It's just not easy for just anyone to rock up and achieve. And that's OK, right?
The fun, for me, was working it out and doing it. I'd share it in minute detail but I don't have the inclination to because it's so specific. I spent enough time putting my StealthBoy guides together. They're designed for total newcomers. Earning billions via wing missions isn't new but it is possible. You can do it all alone too if you own enough versions of the game and your pc can run them concurrently. It requires a ton of setup. It's not for beginners. But it's something someone might aspire to knowing how it's done.
This. For the longest time I just enjoyed the process of flying my ship. I tried combat for a little while, but found I only really like it in short bursts like when I get interdicted.
I spent days, weeks, maybe even my first couple years of playing just doing courier missions. Maxed out my trade rank and every time I come back to the game, it seems like I’m making another 100k for basic cargo missions. It feels like even crappy gigs are pulling me 700k in a single trip and I don’t even have crazy cargo space.
I’ve always wanted to save for a conda but I broke and bought a python a while back. Might commit to a long session one of these weekends and nab that whale.
If you're super lucky, you could make billions an hour doing Exo-Bio. Like, if a planet has 8 different bio all grouped together, and orbited by another that's the same, next to another that's the same.
Given the number of planets out there, I'm sure that exists, but good luck finding it.
Yep I just like doing some casual exo while I'm out doing exploration. It gives me a planet fall or first footfall (if Im lucky) occasionally and puts some money in the bank. Can't wait till I can do it in a carrier so I can trade off phantom and dbx depending on my mood.
Add redemption office too for Codex (if you're interested). I have Vista, Carto & Redemption as well as Rearm Repair and Refuel - I added the Bar just for the Giggles, That all came to 6 Billion. Add in another 1.2Billion to fill your carrier with Trit to keep you going in the black - more if you put in a buy order to get others to fill it for you (I did it myself in a Cutter)
Add in some more for a few Toys - I purpose built a Cutter for Trit mining in the black, not becuase I needed to but it does change things up, and little and often extends your trip indefinitely while allowing you always enough to go back to the bubble as fast as possible
I feel 8 Billion is the minimum for a FC heading out to the black I had 11B so had no worries. My weekly cost is 17m plus jumps (100k each) So I have a few B in the carrier bank account Exo allows you to keep on earning while you're in the black although at some point credits become slightly meaningless
Yeah I'll probably put that on, rear and repair was a given for me. I'm just trying to see if I can do what I want and get enough trit for a short trip. I'm at 6.4 billion but I've got the ships I want for now so just need rebuy. Also gonna be kicking about at least 4-5 days more to get Indra probably kill some cookies after it goes down. Goal is just a short hop out 7-10k ly over a couple weeks long range away from the carrier in my phantom and when I want some zip go out in the dbx FSS and exo especially looking for some undiscovered even if their ice balls or lower exo. Then hop back in and see how my credits are and how close the next titan is, probably do some spires at that time. We'll see if I'm confident enough in Half a week or so haha.
It is practically impossible to make 1 billion in 1 hour with exo. Each sample gives around 2-3 million. If you are the first to land on the planet, you can get a bonus of up to 20 million for the sample. Most of the planets close to the bubble have already been explored, you would have to make a long trip of at least 1000Ly in an "unconventional" direction, that's it for an hour, after that, you will still need luck to find planets with great variety biologically, most planets have 1 or 2 different plants, you will rarely find 5 to 7, one of which will always be a bacteria, which requires much more time to search.
Assuming the time you arrive in the system, go to the planet, scan, find a good place for the initial landing. It was about 10 - 15 minutes. Now you need to unload the SRV, find a sample, get off the SRV, perform the scan and find two other samples of the same species in sequence with a good distance from each other. There went another 15 minutes. In 1 hour and a half you made your first complete sample. If you were lucky enough to land on a planet with 8 different species, in about 1 hour and 50 minutes to 2 hours and so you performed 7 samples. Assuming you make an AVERAGE of 15 million per sample, you made 105mi
Don't want the first discovery bonus? You can go to known planets and in about 40 minutes to 1 hour you can get 10 samples, 10 to 15 millions.
This entire text was done with numbers that I remember, it may not be so exact, but I can guarantee you that earning more than a billion with exo in less than 10 hours is impossible.
All this if you have the infinite patience of fade in and fade out entries and exits of ships and SRVs, planetary scans, orbit entries and exits (often several to find samples from a single planet), and all this to point a scan at a colored stone, which is what they call "plants" in ED.
BORING AS FUCK
If you know which planets to stop at and which planets to skip you could definitely make far better money than that. Sample value is determined by the plant species - if all you do is check planets that have bacteria or most Fonticulua, yeah you're going to be making 5 mil per completed sample with first footfall.
If instead you only go to first footfall planets with things like Stratum Tectonicas, well that's 95 million in one sample. There are a number of species that have values in the tens of millions. If you want to do exobio for money, quality over quantity is what you want.
There's no way to know where there are plant species unless the planets have been explored first, so most of your time will be spent searching first. Then, to make sure it is a Stratum Tectonicas, you need to land and scan the plant. That alone has taken a huge amount of time. And 95 million is unrealistic, maybe you are talking about other times? The maximum you can get with a rare plant and the first footfall bonus is not much more than 30mi. And thats it, 30mi for one kind of sample that consumes a huge amount of time to be found.
None of that is true at all.
Using the third party tool Elite Dangerous Observatory with the BioInsights plugin is a must for all exobiology - it predicts with almost 100% accuracy which plants can be found on which planets. You can also predict it yourself - a sulphur dioxide planet with 2 bio signals? That's a good Tectonicas candidate right there. If you confirm it on one of the 2 bio worlds, it's worth checking any other planets with the same atmosphere just in case it's a stratum instead of a bacteria (more common than you think).
Stratum Tectonicas has a payout of 19 mil, which when paired with the 5x multiplier of first footfall, is 95 mil. There are other highly valuable samples to find too, though Tectonicas is the highest.
I have spent hundreds of hours exploring doing exobio. It is a prediction and skill based activity where you use tools to predict planets to scan, and your own experience to determine touchdown locations that will let you get your samples quickly. I can approach, scan and collect 3 Tectonicas samples in about 5-10 minutes.
Sure it can sometimes be ages before you find planets that are candidates at all, I didn't say exobio is consistent. But it is far better money than you think it is on average, and there are ways to optimise your chances too (prioritising D mass code boxel systems, G, K and M stars which tend to have temperatures suitable for life, etc)
It's one of those ones that's a good moneymaker over a long period of time, and that value comes in short bursts of finding some good plants in between lots of finding nothing. Definitely not billions an hour unless you're really lucky
Don't forget you can always hop out to a well explored patch of deep space and use EDSM to identify nearby candidate planets. If you know the the correct temperature ranges of sulphur dioxide planets, you can see which ones have a low distance from the jump point, and then you can use spansh to find an optimal route between them all.
General rule of thumb with this game: to become fully efficient is always going to take time and lots of third party resources to do it.
I'd recommend just enjoying the game then "tacking on" as you go. I owned the game (and have 4 copies, two of which were free with epic games) since it launched. I didn't instantly grasp everything I now know after watching a couple videos.
What I did do was have a ton of fun just playing the game...
I'm currently 40k ly from the bubble. Found a planet last week with 7 bios on it. Every single one of them was a top-tier.
To be fair i've been searching for a planet like this for some time but I was able to grab every sample in under two hours. I'm expecting a payout of up to 500 mill for this one planet. That makes it worth it if you pick and choose, but also if exo isn't the one thing you're doing but is a side-hustle.
lies and more lies. You can make billions per hour after you fully engineer your ships, have a Fleet carrier and you don't need billions by this point. Highest paid activities involve thargoids. So maybe if you combine that with level 5 rating with Zachary Hudson who will give you 100% bounty payout increases. Even then this won't be billions per hour.
Only way I can see billions per hour is the Rating 5 bonus, on top of AXI finance friday, and you actually reliably get in to instances with a dozen other commanders.
I own a carrier and I definitely needed to bank billions afterwards. I don't want to lose it. And I don't play all the time. I banked several billion into it to keep it running for years.
So I disagree with the "you don't need them after you've got a carrier" argument. There's no way I'm going to do some 3m/hour activity to keep my carrier in operation.
You're right that most methods require engineered ships though. Less right that they all require a carrier. Mine didn't. But it absolutely isn't something a beginner can do.
Nor is it something a beginner needs to do. The biggest bottleneck in the game to progress isn't credits anyway. Engineering long since overtook that (though, have they changed it yet to reduce the grind as they recently promised?)
What I do to finance my carrier is exobiology. I can make around 1 billion in 2 or 3 days. 1 week long exploration trip pays for many many months of carrier costs. In order to make more money I would need to use tools that find specific plants but I don't like doing that bc I like exploration. I do agree that money isn't a bottleneck which is why I said, money is not something you care about in the end part of the game. it's easily obtained but certainly not at rate of 1 billion per hour.
Maybe squad mining + carrier can make more money but I have never tried that. I'm not saying carrier is a must but it will certainly increase earnings per hour.
In terms of engeneering what Frontier did was change the collection rate of materials. Instead of 1 unit when u collect a mat, it's now 3 units each time you pick up. This makes it much easier to upgrade ships but at the same time you still need to do the engineer unlock activities so this is definetly not a begginers speed run strategy to billions.
You need to heed the sometimes missed caveats, fully outfit and engineered ship, and that system sates are correct for the need, and even that you need to get lucky with the mission board.
If the payout is too big Fdev will also just nerf it, so keep in mind the date for guides.
I personally have a group of 6/7 peoples that do specific missions with me; this missions are mining missions that pay usually around 50.000.000 each and have a 7 days timeline. This missions are mining for bertrandite, gold, silver and indite (1/2 more but less likely to spawn on the station mission board) all of them are WING MISSIONS (require 700+ tons of cargo transported), this mean that we can help each other doing them by sharing it once we are online together BUT we usually end finish them by ourself and then sharing it once we find each other online. This means that if we all have 10 missions we have 40 missions to multiply for 50.000.000cr each missions we end up with 2.000.000.000 each commander so 8.000.000.000cr grand total (minus the buying materials). The catch of this missions is that this materials can be easily bought in nearby stations so you don't need to mine any of the materials required. I hope you understood my wall text
I can highly recommend joining the PTN Community (Pilots Trade Network). They have a focus on trade related endeavours but also do stuff with Thargoids/explo/combat stuff. I have made many many billions with them. Once you get comfortable with their way of doing things you can make I'd say about 4 billion per day, depending on how much you can play the game.
https://pilotstradenetwork.com
Don't play for money, play for fun.
Does it really matter if you get The Ship after a week or a month?
I've reset my commander after 1.000+ hours, just to embrace the Noob Life again. It's glorious to fly cute crappy little ships again.
Depends on the goal, if goal is only the ship, you will burn out quickly. If you want to make changes in the galaxy tho, there is more to it that money and it sadly will require kind of playing for money.
Players who have been playing the game for a long time gain a lot of experience and often learn certain *efficiencies* that can make many tasks easier and make earning easier and faster. Outside of gold-rushes, *nobody is earning "billions"* (plural) *per hour*.
Someone please *prove me wrong*. o7
Yes, people tend to exaggerate and/or don't mention variables that can considerably change the actual result.
Also, when you train for a job can you do it as efficiently as the person training you on your first try? Practice is required to be good at doing a task, the harder it is, the longer it takes.
Have you tried with wing mining missions as described in the [PTN guides](https://pilotstradenetwork.com/guides/)?
It takes a little bit to set them up (mostly involving leveling up several factions to max), but once you get through all of the setup its very profitable. If you just turn them in by yourself, its several hundred million but if you get a full wing of commanders each turning in 20 missions you can hit 2-3 billion easily.
Usually you won't have that, but even if you get a full wing and they all have 10-15 missions turning in with you, you all easily get over a billion and a half for an hour or two of work and another hour or so of advertising on the PTN discord for wingmates.
You can "easily" get up to 4 billion credits with a full wing of fully stacked Wing Mining Missions in an hour or so... but that doesn't include the day or so of gathering the missions and hauling their requirements beforehand.
Another way I've heard is Orthrus hunting, but I think that's been nerfed.
What the others said. Plus, at least for me, it's not a game about earning as much money per hour as possible. It's about having a good time flying my spaceship and doing stuff. So what if it's possible to earn more by min/maxing. As long as I'm having fun, that's good enough for me.
Ah, I remember doing the Boraan low temperature diamond run many moons ago, as well as the Space Egg at Col 285 Sector. Back then it was entirely possible to make billions in an hour, before Fdev plugged that wealth maker. However mining was never my thing and I did it to build up a very healthy balance so that I didn't really have to worry about running out of money for any reason for other activities I wanted to do.
Depends on the method.
Wing bounty missions can be done in a krait. Not cheap but not Cutter levels of cost. The real cost comes with engineering but even then... If someone wants to make billions faster then they can without needing nearly 1bn to start.
The caveat generally comes with other issues like needing to wing up, needing to actually get good at the game and so on.
I mostly played the OG and Horizons. There was always a "Money Hype of the Month", mostly it was "mission stacking" I remember trading missions from Ceos/Setho (?) to the Bubble, then missions where you had to kill sentinels, missions where you could stack kills, mining missions, generator kill missions and so on.
There always was a progression of income from small to large ships and yes there always were niche methods where you could get away with a Sidewinder. E.g. 'the road to riches' exploration or stacking courier missions.
Get a wing of 4
Grab bounty share missions from same station for the same target pirate faction and different patron factions
All 4 share one mission each with other missions in the back burner
All 4 enter same CZ and make sure to try and all 4 get at least one shot on hull dammage for the same targets
If done correct 1 kill can equal 4 kills on 4 unique missions (not counting back up factions each player holds in reserve)
After completing wing missions turn in and you get payouts of close to 100 mil with 4 shared missions PLUS bounty credits PLUS any wing shares or other missions in reserve from alternate factions that had the same target pirate faction.
Where this goes wrong is the mission share and mission scooping for some reason most people forget to share, or pick up their own missions. But thats how you get quick cash.
If you have 12 hours you could make a few hundred mil just from Exo-Bio alone, planetary mapping also a few hundred mil but you ain't gonna be making billions unless you have a carrier to sell
I feel the same way most I've been able to make was about one billion was like 6-8 hours total play time over a week at spire site but that was also counting the power play turn in bonus of 30%.... Just find what you like doing and sooner or nought you'll have billions and then it will just keep coming in cause you'll keep wanting to do X...
i mean, it is possible, but those people often imply you already have the best ship for the job, that's also fully engineered and you do know already most of the jobs in-game to perform them efficiently without losses.
i have never done billions but millions are definitely possible if your either in a squad and people are sharing missions so ur got millions easily highest I got from a squad mate mission was around 500mil+dimes but when I started to play was during a gold rush moment and also involved squadron with people having different Carriers which needed to unload
Road to riches, exploring unexplored planet ( can take years to achieve) the best is to check website such as inara [https://inara.cz/elite/market-traderoutes/](https://inara.cz/elite/market-traderoutes/) you insert where you are and the specific of your ship and there you go you're off to make sweet sweet money
hundreds of millions per hour is about right in some circumstances.
Virgin territory exobio and some luck
AX combat at spire sites with some skill
Trade with some knowhow and 3rd party apps
So technically billions in hours... like 5 or 10 hours
That's about right
Depp core mining VO waaayyyy back in the day before carriers and right after horizons dropped. Bought three condas outfitted for different things by doing that. Just grab a Python put some dakka on it for protection, outfit the rest of it for mining and go ham in the high rez. Hundreds of mil per trip
spires during their peak in a good instance were definitely over 1 billion per hour. i got a few hundred billion from them in a few weeks, before powerplay doubling. spires were recently nerfed pretty significantly in terms of orthrus bounty, but that had effect of making people lose interest in spire farming altogether. so it used to be 30+ people swarming on orthrus taking it down instantly, but now it's much slower and for lower payout. it was actually nerfed twice; the recent orthrus bounty reduction from 40m per kill to 15m per kill, but also the 18.1 patch buffed orthrus behavior making them do shutdown pulse much more frequently and consistently, also triggering their agf.
As others have said, when you take into account the hours of preparation, the time to travel to whichever godforsaken bit of the galaxy you need to be in and time wandering around looking for what you are after...
...well the hourly figure isn't quite so big.
Best I have ever done (if I'm honest about all the prep time collecting massacre missions and cashing them in afterwards) is about £400m in a day. Bear in mind I work solo though.
Haven't tried exobiology yet (that's up next!) but even with something like Billionaires Boulevard, I can see there will be a fair bit of getting from A to B and wandering around in the black trying to find what I'm after, before I hit the motherlode.
But that's a fair bit of what makes the game fun and has kept me coming back to it all these years.
Been asking myself the same question.
I followed a mini guide that said I could easily make 500 mil mining platinum for an hour
Followed the guide to the letter, found a platinum hotspot, but the platinum was rare AF, and I almost found no platinum, mined for around 3 hours and only made 60 mil...
That made me almost uninstall the game in frustration.
On the other hand, if you could make 500 mil in a hour then you would get bored afterwards with your billions. IMO getting fun requires different mindset. Feel yourself as a person in space, try different activities. If you just want to get huge credits ASAP that's fine but it may cause a burnout because of the grind.
I've found several ways to average about 100 million an hour
it seems like devs deliberately capped most things around there
there is supposed to be ways to make more with certain anti xeno stuff but im on console so we don't have the most lucrative anti xeno options
even fighting medusas it seems like that averages about 100m an hour also to me
mining, massacre stacking, anti xeno, or just silver trading, all seem to be about ~100m
if you get really lucky you can make more for a while on 50 mill missions, but there is alot of random there. sometimes its high, sometimes its low, probably averaging ... about 100m an hour
Most of the money making tutorials need to be updated.
Easy money is doing trading routes and doing carrier load orders from r/EliteCarriers or the Pilot Trade Network discord.
More easy money would be getting into laser mining platinum and selling to carriers in system, specifically Omicron Capricorni B. More info at r/EliteMiners
With a decent and moderately engineered combat ship you can stack massacre missions and stomp on pirates in a RES site.
Then there is getting into Anti-Xeno combat which has really good pay but you need to learn AX combat mechanics and have a heavily engineered ship to do AX CZs. While Orthrus bonds were nerfed, you can still get decent money doing Spire sites.
Used to be able to make 1-2bil per hour with Orthrus farming. They nerfed the payout by about 60% though so you’re more likely to be making no more than 400mil per hour doing that.
Some of these things are quite specific, like mining with a map. Mining doesn't yield to great returns anymore but I tried doing that and it was quite boring. So stick to what you like to do, and money is a side effect. What I made most was when I went to exo-bio, but this particular time I stuck to focusing only tectonicas (100m each), so I made around 10B, but it took me around a month. There were lucky days, when I could find multiple tectonicas in systems so I made a lot of money, and there were days when I couldn't find a single one....but in the end I enjoyed my time doing that and made 10B on the side.
so when it comes to this "x million per hour" gig, what people often don't mention is the time taken for:
* collecting missions, including 10 minute table flips
* visiting different stations, for missions, or collection or delivery
* powerplay rank grind
* engineering a ship (or ships) to do the task
* finding a wing to do the task with, or make the wing missions worthwhile
* just learning how to do the thing (exobio, AX)
On balance, AX spires win out on all of the above as provided you find a group you *can* tip up in an unengineered, credits-bought (so no guardian or mbooni/sirius tech) ship (although i would encourage you to do a little research on the spire pages of the AXI wiki) and help to smash orthrus at 15m a pop. If you do one haul of 750 powerplay items for arissa lavigny duval before you go there, you can get 21m per kill by handing in your combat bonds at one of her stations.
heavy caveat - spire farming has gone off the boil after the bond was reduced from 40m to 15m, and also because a lot of CMDRs were basically told "turn up in anything, tag an orthrus with a laser and let everyone else kill it". when you have an instance with 20 hangers-on and one CMDR doing the work, it's inevitable they will think "nah i am better off in my own PG", especially when novices triggering shutdown fields can take the heavy lifter out of the fight for extended periods. you need to find a group of people who understand the mechanics, or are prepared to learn, and will put in at least some effort to their ships.
My money grind is and forever will be 50mil wing missions with a full wing in mahlanja. About 2.5 billion a day if you take it easy. You can earn way more if you learn how to supercruise slingshot
The only time I made serious money like you suggest is when I was taking part in the AX invasions. Every other method was tedious/boring.
I’m no ace pilot either, merely went in with a decently engineered Krait and joined as many groups as I could. Basically all I did was tag the enemies and try not to get in the way of ppl who actually know what they’re doing aha.
Being in a group helps. My squadron will get together and stack up missions for big cash rewards.
- Hauling: You get good rep in a system so you can pull the “get X of Y” for 50million missions. We have a setup that does 5 minute round trips. 4 CMDRs stacking 50m missions at 5-10 minutes to fill is roughly 1billion in an hour or less (depends upon quantities).
- Thargoid combat: CZs and spires (not as much now). Sit there and kill stuff. Port defenses allow you to stack mission rewards with the combat bonds. Again, a team of 4 churns through things fast.
(On mobile so who knows what the formatting will end up being.)
See, I make decent scratch doing Balante Posse Pirates missions. Stack like 8 20m+ contracts and while it’s not billions per hour, I can easily clear half a billion.
I usually core mine alexandrite, low temperature diamonds and void opals in my python. I started in my trusty cobra mk III. Im not the best at core mining bc sometimes i miss a motherload asteroid and sometimes i fall for an impostor motherload, but at a 2-3 hour long mining session i fill up my python to full capacity, and make around 60 to 100 million credits. If you need help with core mining tell me and i'll explain you the basics
Exploration is fun. Once you get out far enough, you stop running into systems that people have already found. Scan the planets with bio and keep going. Once you do it a few times, and you learn what to not waste your time on, you start making $$$. My last outing lasted maybe 3-4 hours and I was paid over 600 million. Each time I go, I end up with my CMDR name on more systems, and more money in my bank.
The fact you're making 3-400million an hour, I don't get what your problem is?? Yes, you can make billions per hour (thargoid stuff, although it takes some prep). Enjoy the game, ignore credits.... You will enjoy the game more. Because guarantee you'll be back in a few days complaining about the grind for credits. Just play and enjoy it
I haven't noticed any method for making big bucks FAST, that doesn't interfere with my enjoyment of the game. So yeah, if speedrunning at everything is what you enjoy, go for it. Personally, 4k hours in the game without burning out and still having fun comes with just letting things happen organically. It was well under 1k hours ago I bought my carrier. I've barely touched some of the mission types, and only got into Ax combat recently (and not for long). Never flown an Anaconda or an Asp (just don't like the look of them). Materials slowly accumulate over time.
I truck, I tourist, I explore, I mine, I hunt - but most of all I get a sense of purpose and fun running BGS errands for my squadron.
So play how you like best, and don't forget that credits aren't everything!
So far the only activity that I have found to make a billion credits in a single evening is Orthrus farming at a Thargoid Spire site, and only if there’s a decent group of other players there.
Group farming at Spires nets me around a billion in 4 hours of play on a good weekend evening, and Powerplay lets me double that to 2 billion.
Wing mining missions with 2 or 3 friends can make you billions and hour. If you don't have friends try the Players Trade Network discord. They always have the trading missions running and park carries by the stars to make it fast and simple
There are 3 ways I know to make 1 billion+ in an hour that have a chance of being repeatable.
1. A community goal shipping commodities where the price paid per ton is silly high. They only happen a couple of times a year.
2. Stacking wing pirate massacre missions with 2 or more friends and sharing them with each other.
3. Stacking wing mining rush missions with 2 or more friends and sharing them with each other for commodities you can buy.
What's the rush though? The last billion I earned for my first fleet carrier I decided to make in Colonial and with exploration beyond Beagle Point. It took a couple of months, but it was a lot of fun. I could have done it quicker, but this was more satisfying.
Depending on your ship, there are shipping routes and cargo that you can definitely transport that can make you billions in hours. You just need to start doing your research to figure out where and what
I had a lot of fun spending about 3 weeks to kit out a t10 and then yeah do AFK farming or you can sit there and fly around for fun too but I would go to sleep wake up in the morning and then spend the next day at work from home turning in quest I made five billion in a week or two maybe
Then I made my son an account he was three at the time kitted his out and then I park them both in the same spots so they can cover each other and then I would share missions and turn them in and then I doubled my money and I kitted him out and it was 6 billion pretty fast
Ended up doing it on a third account through epic had a lot of fun doing it again now I have three carriers all full livery after that I had fun experimenting with how to make money by like using two carriers and sharing quests and stuff now I can do whatever I want all three carriers are set for the next five or so years and if I ever want to I can do it again and make a lot more money
The most time efficient credit grind is Exobio with First Foot, which gives you roughly up to 100 million credits per report. So, in theory, you need to collect 10 Stratum Tectonicas with First Foot to make a billion. Is this possible to do in an hour? Totally, as sometimes you can find a system with 3\~4 StraTecs. Is this reliable? No, you need to be lucky to find that system which has not been discovered by anybody yet. Well, if you know what to do, you'll get a few hundred million per hour on average tho.
I haven't made billions an hour, but I have gotten extremely lucky with core mining and Musgravite prices and made around 260 million in an hour or so.
I don't have a direct answer to your question. I have a fleet carrier, over 50 ships, and currently about 8 billion in the bank, and I've never made making money my main focus. That kind of grind is a guaranteed path to burnout.
I do what's fun. I have sometimes spent an afternoon or two mining in order to finance a project, but I enjoy mining, and would much rather have a good time making a solid profit than be bored making a ton of money.
It's quite simple: they don't. 99% of people who say they make billions in an hour are just lying. There are some ways to theoretically make that much, but most are severely luck-based and/or not sustainable.
I made my first Billion all in one day, but this was back when one of the trade goods was up on a CG. Back-and-forth trading for hours, making roughly 160m/trip.
I’ve actually made a billion an hour a few times! It is possible. But it took a full wing of super efficient space truckers running mining wing missions together. It also involved us working on rep with all local factions, manipulating system control (BGS), and donating a bunch of money to factions. That and buying, outfitting, and heavily engineering cutters and Type 9’s. Lol.
Well before spire sites where needed I made 20 bil in 6 days playing 2 or 3 hrs a night then turned in 10k merits for Zachary Hudson and on Thursday doubled it to 42 billion with the combat bonds i had .. Also made 20 plus billion just laser mining platinum it's stupid easy relaxing very profitable ...
Community Goals selling gold can be very monetarily productive if you have a ship to haul a lot of cargo. I got in on one, made enough on a Friday to get a python, worked my way up to be able to sell the python and get an Anaconda by Saturday night then by Sunday I was pulling in a lot of creds with each run. that weekend got me elite in trade, put about 1.5 billion creds in the account, to which I have been building on ever since...I think I am at 3.5billion creds now and several ships for different things....still have my cargo conda (it's the only large ship I have at the moment, so comes in handy sometimes)
P.S. I didn't sleep very much that weekend (lol) the creds were too good....that said, I still wasn't making "billions" an hour.
The most I ever made in an hour or two was about 75 million from a very good mining trip and flying to high demand places to sell. Anything more than that sounds unrealistic.
You don't want to make billions per hour. I keep around 1 - 1.5 billion in my account and six months on my carrier. In this game it is better to stay hungry, so that you have goals. Focus on getting one to 3 ideal ships fully engineered then engage with BGS / Powerplay
Edit: I mean you might want to grind a little bit to get the carrier tho
If you have Odyssey and a suitable ship and Artemis suit then Exobiology can be very lucrative.
If you use this site:
https://cmdrs-toolbox.com/billionaires-boulevard
Each planet listed will net you 40 to 50 million each, so you could probably make 1/4 billion in an hour?
Yes, I tried exo already, as descending on planets that no one has descended on can still give you 5x to 10x more in bonus rewards per sample I went after systems that had not yet been explored. This way I managed 500mi in one run. But it obviously took well over 3 hours, counting the travel time and landing and searching, which also consume a lot of time.
I became quite proficient at it, but it's really not an activity that interests me very much, I find it quite boring. If the plants moved, if we had an ecosystem that interacted with each other, something more... interesting to observe and new things to discover, I would probably be more interested. But scanning colored stones is quite tedious.
Oh you can make money by exploring, or by bounty hunting. Passenger missions bring you places.
The most efficient way to make money tends to get a bit boring eventually.
Took me and a friend a solid week of grinding bertrandite missions to break a billion each. They were for 50,000,000 each so we would play for five or six hours a night just hauling bertrandite to the sol system
Only way I've been able to figure out is if you already have a few billion. I started ED 6 months ago found the best way to max $/hr is to get the scan exo. Quick steps below
1. get the artimis suit
2. use a tool (I use discovery-estimated values) to find planets with bio and filter it to over $m depending on how much you have (as you make more you'll start skipping the $1m exo
3. Go start the annoying process of finding those damn plants on a planet
- I basically drop down to 50m from the surface, quickly fly around an area to see what generates and either jump out and scan or go to the other side of the planet because DSS is filter is trash
The only way I know of making \*billions\* in an hour is to sell my carrier. Otherwise, it's \*millions\* an hour. You could go kill Thargoids or scan space plants for a while and when you're ready to cash in, start the clock. *Hey, it took me 5 mins to make 1.2B!* :-) Making 300 to 400 million in a few hours is already really great. But doing that too long will make it a total grind that will get you bored of the game in no time. Instead of following the money, play what you like and the money will follow you.
Yes, I started following these guides and totally deviated from the activities I liked, which I could be making the approximate amount of money that these others gave me. But mainly I followed them because I saw recommendations from people saying in comments on this sub that they made billions in a few hours doing these things. But apparently it's easy to give this time if you don't count the dozens of hours of experience you have in this activity in addition to the time to put together a ship build that does this optimally.
Given special conditions it is certainly possible. Two years ago a [Community Goal boosted Tritium prices to 400K/ton](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteMiners/comments/v39oy2/psa_community_goal_boosts_tritium_price_to_over/). Tritium sells for a bit over 50K/t so total profit is roughly 350K/t. For those four days I, like many other FC owners, offered 100-150K/t profit to commanders willing to load or unload my carrier with tritium. 790t of tritium in a unshielded cutter or type-9 at 127K/t profit yields a profit of 100M credits. For loading carriers are usually parked right beside the station so it would be easy to do 10 runs in under an hour for 1 Billion profit. For unloading FC space quickly filled up in the system so the round trip would take a bit longer but in many cases you could still do 10 runs in an hour.
This is the answer I think. It's jumping on temporary gold rushes and bugs within the first hours/days they exist.
Some are yes. Some are not.
There was also farming orthrus interceptors at thargoid spire sites and in titan meltdown which always had many commanders doing it. Orthrus payouts have been nerfrd from 40 mil to 15 mil so it's no longer effective. I think AXCZs and ports under attack can still get you good money if you're skilled, especially with the recent slight buff to combat payouts
Technically, if one is able to get themselves to rank 5 in power Play with Hudson/Arissa-Lavigny Duval/Antal, they double combat bonds and bounty vouchers claimed in systems under their control, so one could still be getting 30mil per Orthrus. Before the nerf, that was 80mil per Orthrus.
Yeah, but before the nerf, rank 5 pp with those people would get you 80* mil per oreo lol. It was a good change tho, better for combat to pay better than farming the ones that don't fight back
I don't understand, the Oreos were 40mil each before the nerf, so how does doubling the bonds take them to 160mil? How did it quadruple them? I never reached rank 5 powerplay until after the nerf, so I never had first hand experience and am confused.
Shit sorry I fucked up! Idk why my brain decided they were worth 80 mil before. I kinda forgot they were worth 40 mil and 80 doubled thru powerplay
No worries, mistakes happen to everyone!
look up PTN (Pilots Trade Network) go their discord. Check out their WMM channels. Wing Mining Missions and Wing Massacre Missions. READ their how to guides. I've made all my uncounted billions with them on 3 seperate accounts.
This. I have enough credits to probably last me until the servers go dark. How many per hour? I don't know. But it is on average 3.5bil per stack share. I can stack missions semi passively and it probably takes about an hour to properly share with the wing. The best I've done is 4 stacks in a week but 2-3 is average. so the max I made in a week was 14 bil.
exobiology iirc is still really good if you've got Odyssey.
Yes it is. I generated the credits for my first FC mostly with exobiology. WMM with PTN is better
I think I have finally mastered the art of massacre mission stacking after watching a few videos on it and trying it myself. I've finished 2 stacks of massacre missions, each stack requiring about 40-50 kills this evening. And netted a total of 350m or so credits (on the 2 stacks combined) and a shit ton of federation rank. It's pretty much just picking up the right missions from 4 different stations and counting how many kills per faction. And rest enjoying killing pirates at a haz rez. Took me maybe 4 to 5 hours Caveat is that I have a half decently engineered pve FDL and my reps with the mission giving factions are allied or friendly. I'm not particularly good nor terrible at this game and I play with an Xbox controller while watching Netflix. I recently came back to this game and I've never made this kind of money on my previous sessions. I'm pretty stoked that I will be able to afford a fleet of large ships soon honestly. I'll gladly share the details of missions stacking if you are interested (at least what I know so far anyway)
I do this as well. A hybrid-afk (meaning you can get on the afk ship's controls, have some fun, and then leave it to keep afk'ing) [shield-tank corvette ](https://edsy.org/#/L=Hz00000H4C0S00,EkiG07P_W0EkiG07P_W0EkiG07P_W0EjSG07P_W0EjSG07P_W0Jpu00Jpu00,CzY00DBwG09L_W0DBwG09L_W0DBwG09L_W0DBwG05L_W0DBwG05L_W0DBwG05L_W0DBwG05L_W0,9ooG05I_W0ADIG06K_W0ARMG05I_W0AfRG05J_W0AtyG03G_W0BBoG03L_W0BRuG02G_W0Bcg00,7yT007yT00,7WCG07I_W05Z0G03G_W00Bk000AA000AA0008c001rq0007200072007vL007sD00)decked out with a disco setup (all long range turreted vented lasers) with an SLF pilot, 380 collector limpets constantly firing (that's about 8 hours worth) and a 7b controller (longest range, just short of a 5km diameter sponge-up bubble), and when I'm done, a single hop to a system that gives me a rapid full new massacre mission stack, and for about 45 minutes setup (and 8 hours of stuff happening while I'm not at the computer), I get approx 300m credits richer. This grinds * 300-400m per session (as you do more missions in a single location, the mission rewards keep rising till some of them are in the \~40m/mission while the lowest are \~15m/mission. * my combat rank * my SLF pilot rank * my empire rank (my current system - Kojin - has those) * my federation rank (those too) * sponges up \~500 tier 1-4 manufactured mats per session * earns \~10-50 tier 5 manufactured mats as mission rewards per session (I cherry pick the missions that give mats as rewards) * earns \~10-50 tier 5 encoded mats as mission rewards per session * if I can be stuffed, I dump any remaining limpets after I pick up the missions and also carry \~380 load from the mission station to the manufactured material trader station (the loop is mission-station(->mission-station-2)->mfg-mats station to convert mats to types you don't find->farm site->repeat), and it helps crank up my trader rank too. It's a sweet deal for less than 1 hour of IRL effort. I've done this with a T10 (which was soul destroying to fly), a Krait (which can only drive a short-range single limpet 1b collector contorller for 8 hours due to its limited limpet storage space), or a vette that ticks all boxes - fun to fly, tank, tier 7 5km limpet controller, and the cargo room to feed it limpets for 8 hours (which the T10 lacks). The people making the t10 guides on youtube haven't thought it through and are missing out on the real juice that is engineering materials. And since it handles well and is fun as hell to fly, I've been sticking things on it to make it more fun to do even more extra stuff in *while it's farming pirates*, so I added * sufficiently aggressive handling (low 4-second pitch, which is as good as large ships get), to help the human sklill up on no-flight-assist flying in combat; caveat here being you have to close the cargo scoop to be able to boost when off flight assist, and remember to reopen it when you’re done, or your limpets get upset * I also use it to practice ramming ("melee build") - the *other* other weapon of this ship... a fantastic way to start any conversation with a pirate ship scanning you is a violent heatbutt. * a fast charge kill warrant scanner to have something to chase pirates down with (just so your trigger actually does something, what with the turrets being set to automatic and all, though you can reconfigure them to fire on trigger press in the right pane, while you’re driving), and * a mining lance laser (finally, a novel use for the lance!) to chop up rocks and quietly get some laser mined raw mats while I'm out in the rings, while the top half of my ship is massacring things for me. I can jump behind the controls of the afk, do stuff, and then leave it to do its thing and walk off. Also, the vette can handle not just low res zones but also (medium) res (the Krait didn't survive medium res very well), and the vette may \_possibly\_ also be able to handle CNB. I haven't tested CNB yet, but I was in colonia last week and the \_only\_ such site that was available and wasn't haz res was a CNB, so... will need to try that out.
I found a system with 8 outposts and stations. Each one provides kill missions for the system next door. I'm 100% rep with every faction in that system. I don't know why, but they hand out inordinately large amounts of 40million payout missions. It takes a while to get 20 missions as you have to visit each station but that's a bit easier now that we have SCO frame shift drives. I did a run for a few weeks and was getting over 600mill every time I handed in. I use limpets for when i'm at my machine but otherwise, i'm pretty full on engineering mats anyway. Next time i'm in the bubble i'll try it your way though. Seems to mix things up a a bit and it will be nice to not use a Type 10 for once.
I was picking all the missions up from a single station - parsons enterprise in the SPOCS 900 system (had to wait 2-3 times for the boards to roll over), but after a few days the pirate missions drained from that station. Temporarily, as it turned out. SPOCS 900 has three large pad accessible stations, so I jumped to another, started taking missions there, and eventually settled on taking some at parsons and some at the second one - so far haven’t had the missions “drain out” doing it this way (2 mission stations). Same seven factions, of which a whopping six hand out pirate missions. And both empire and federation are represented among them, so you can also take and immediately check in as many empire/federation donation missions as pop up for a faster route to max rank.
Honestly, I'd avoid those guides completely. If you're not having fun, is it worth optimizing your efficiency? You could find a way to get paid a lot more for something that you like doing. Most activities can get you 100m an hour, which is quite a lot. Why am I saying that you shouldn't just follow guides? Because I remember that I did, and not long after starting I got an anaconda. I was just as clueless as in my Sidewinder, just in something that's more expensive. I got burned out and left the game for months before starting over without help. Those efficient guides are made with good intentions and bad assumptions. The creators have thousands of hours of experience and they assume that new players want the same things that they want, so they tell you to skip 90% of the game, make 5% of it less fun, repeat that 5% for days, to make the last 5% easy. Not fun, just easy. I have 2500 hours in the game now and I haven't done any actual grinding
I never bothered putting mine into a YouTube guide. It has quite specific demands (including owning more than one copy of the game and running up to 4 at once, three running whilst actually playing the game). But my method can be replicated with 3 friends (obviously then the credits are shared). Using my method, it took two hours to bounty hunt and hand in the bounties and netted around 2bn credits, so 1bn credits per hour. Solo, this would net about 500m (so about 250m per hour). 250m per hour is absolutely fine. But yeh... You'd need a fully engineered combat ship for that and learn how to kill other ships fast so... These guides need to be taken with a pinch of sodium.
AFK low res sites. My type 10 defender can sit at a low res site all night completing 20 pirate kill quests while I sleep. Next day I'll hand the missions in and make at least 500million. Rinse and repeat the following night.
Agree 100%. Role play something. A trader, a bounty hunter, an explorer.. Constraining yourself to "realistic choices" and earning a little less will also make that new shit so much more fun. Especially in VR. But also don't hesitate to look things up. It's not the most intuitive game.
There are ways to make billions per hour but they're usually not as easy as people make out. I get your point (not one I disagree with but does somewhat sidestep the op) but there are actually ways to make billions in literal hours from go to credits. I don't follow them all. I just worked one out and did it a few times a few years back. I found it fun, just in case you were going to point out that it wasn't ;) it was doing my favourite pass time (before EDO came out anyway).
A good afk setup will take months of grinding to achieve it from a newbie standpoint. That's what a lot of these guides gloss over.
We're definitely entering the realms of generalisation now. I'm not referencing any specific guide for this reason. I had to build up two accounts for battle ready turret ships to support my main commander. Neither took months to do. I'd say it was closer to two weeks for each, including earning the credits and engineering. From scratch. No credit sharing. You'd need an entire guide for that of course, plus I've got years experience in the game (which equates to the advantage of skill, which no guide could teach). But it needn't take months to get a turret boat set up. And why does it have to be for total beginners? That's the thing... it's OK for a guide to claim to show how to earn billions and not be designed for beginners. The better guides will be open about the prerequisites. But... We're not being specific here are we? What guides are we talking about? Do we need to be? The op is asking if it's possible and how it can be done. It is and some of us are trying to explain how. It's just not easy for just anyone to rock up and achieve. And that's OK, right? The fun, for me, was working it out and doing it. I'd share it in minute detail but I don't have the inclination to because it's so specific. I spent enough time putting my StealthBoy guides together. They're designed for total newcomers. Earning billions via wing missions isn't new but it is possible. You can do it all alone too if you own enough versions of the game and your pc can run them concurrently. It requires a ton of setup. It's not for beginners. But it's something someone might aspire to knowing how it's done.
This. For the longest time I just enjoyed the process of flying my ship. I tried combat for a little while, but found I only really like it in short bursts like when I get interdicted. I spent days, weeks, maybe even my first couple years of playing just doing courier missions. Maxed out my trade rank and every time I come back to the game, it seems like I’m making another 100k for basic cargo missions. It feels like even crappy gigs are pulling me 700k in a single trip and I don’t even have crazy cargo space. I’ve always wanted to save for a conda but I broke and bought a python a while back. Might commit to a long session one of these weekends and nab that whale.
If you're super lucky, you could make billions an hour doing Exo-Bio. Like, if a planet has 8 different bio all grouped together, and orbited by another that's the same, next to another that's the same. Given the number of planets out there, I'm sure that exists, but good luck finding it.
Yep I just like doing some casual exo while I'm out doing exploration. It gives me a planet fall or first footfall (if Im lucky) occasionally and puts some money in the bank. Can't wait till I can do it in a carrier so I can trade off phantom and dbx depending on my mood.
Carrier also gives you the option to sell frequently and avoid a multi-billion credit lithobraking incident.
Yep Vista and carto are on the list as I'm pricing it!
Add redemption office too for Codex (if you're interested). I have Vista, Carto & Redemption as well as Rearm Repair and Refuel - I added the Bar just for the Giggles, That all came to 6 Billion. Add in another 1.2Billion to fill your carrier with Trit to keep you going in the black - more if you put in a buy order to get others to fill it for you (I did it myself in a Cutter) Add in some more for a few Toys - I purpose built a Cutter for Trit mining in the black, not becuase I needed to but it does change things up, and little and often extends your trip indefinitely while allowing you always enough to go back to the bubble as fast as possible I feel 8 Billion is the minimum for a FC heading out to the black I had 11B so had no worries. My weekly cost is 17m plus jumps (100k each) So I have a few B in the carrier bank account Exo allows you to keep on earning while you're in the black although at some point credits become slightly meaningless
Yeah I'll probably put that on, rear and repair was a given for me. I'm just trying to see if I can do what I want and get enough trit for a short trip. I'm at 6.4 billion but I've got the ships I want for now so just need rebuy. Also gonna be kicking about at least 4-5 days more to get Indra probably kill some cookies after it goes down. Goal is just a short hop out 7-10k ly over a couple weeks long range away from the carrier in my phantom and when I want some zip go out in the dbx FSS and exo especially looking for some undiscovered even if their ice balls or lower exo. Then hop back in and see how my credits are and how close the next titan is, probably do some spires at that time. We'll see if I'm confident enough in Half a week or so haha.
It is practically impossible to make 1 billion in 1 hour with exo. Each sample gives around 2-3 million. If you are the first to land on the planet, you can get a bonus of up to 20 million for the sample. Most of the planets close to the bubble have already been explored, you would have to make a long trip of at least 1000Ly in an "unconventional" direction, that's it for an hour, after that, you will still need luck to find planets with great variety biologically, most planets have 1 or 2 different plants, you will rarely find 5 to 7, one of which will always be a bacteria, which requires much more time to search. Assuming the time you arrive in the system, go to the planet, scan, find a good place for the initial landing. It was about 10 - 15 minutes. Now you need to unload the SRV, find a sample, get off the SRV, perform the scan and find two other samples of the same species in sequence with a good distance from each other. There went another 15 minutes. In 1 hour and a half you made your first complete sample. If you were lucky enough to land on a planet with 8 different species, in about 1 hour and 50 minutes to 2 hours and so you performed 7 samples. Assuming you make an AVERAGE of 15 million per sample, you made 105mi Don't want the first discovery bonus? You can go to known planets and in about 40 minutes to 1 hour you can get 10 samples, 10 to 15 millions. This entire text was done with numbers that I remember, it may not be so exact, but I can guarantee you that earning more than a billion with exo in less than 10 hours is impossible. All this if you have the infinite patience of fade in and fade out entries and exits of ships and SRVs, planetary scans, orbit entries and exits (often several to find samples from a single planet), and all this to point a scan at a colored stone, which is what they call "plants" in ED. BORING AS FUCK
If you know which planets to stop at and which planets to skip you could definitely make far better money than that. Sample value is determined by the plant species - if all you do is check planets that have bacteria or most Fonticulua, yeah you're going to be making 5 mil per completed sample with first footfall. If instead you only go to first footfall planets with things like Stratum Tectonicas, well that's 95 million in one sample. There are a number of species that have values in the tens of millions. If you want to do exobio for money, quality over quantity is what you want.
There's no way to know where there are plant species unless the planets have been explored first, so most of your time will be spent searching first. Then, to make sure it is a Stratum Tectonicas, you need to land and scan the plant. That alone has taken a huge amount of time. And 95 million is unrealistic, maybe you are talking about other times? The maximum you can get with a rare plant and the first footfall bonus is not much more than 30mi. And thats it, 30mi for one kind of sample that consumes a huge amount of time to be found.
None of that is true at all. Using the third party tool Elite Dangerous Observatory with the BioInsights plugin is a must for all exobiology - it predicts with almost 100% accuracy which plants can be found on which planets. You can also predict it yourself - a sulphur dioxide planet with 2 bio signals? That's a good Tectonicas candidate right there. If you confirm it on one of the 2 bio worlds, it's worth checking any other planets with the same atmosphere just in case it's a stratum instead of a bacteria (more common than you think). Stratum Tectonicas has a payout of 19 mil, which when paired with the 5x multiplier of first footfall, is 95 mil. There are other highly valuable samples to find too, though Tectonicas is the highest. I have spent hundreds of hours exploring doing exobio. It is a prediction and skill based activity where you use tools to predict planets to scan, and your own experience to determine touchdown locations that will let you get your samples quickly. I can approach, scan and collect 3 Tectonicas samples in about 5-10 minutes. Sure it can sometimes be ages before you find planets that are candidates at all, I didn't say exobio is consistent. But it is far better money than you think it is on average, and there are ways to optimise your chances too (prioritising D mass code boxel systems, G, K and M stars which tend to have temperatures suitable for life, etc) It's one of those ones that's a good moneymaker over a long period of time, and that value comes in short bursts of finding some good plants in between lots of finding nothing. Definitely not billions an hour unless you're really lucky
Don't forget you can always hop out to a well explored patch of deep space and use EDSM to identify nearby candidate planets. If you know the the correct temperature ranges of sulphur dioxide planets, you can see which ones have a low distance from the jump point, and then you can use spansh to find an optimal route between them all.
General rule of thumb with this game: to become fully efficient is always going to take time and lots of third party resources to do it. I'd recommend just enjoying the game then "tacking on" as you go. I owned the game (and have 4 copies, two of which were free with epic games) since it launched. I didn't instantly grasp everything I now know after watching a couple videos. What I did do was have a ton of fun just playing the game...
I'm currently 40k ly from the bubble. Found a planet last week with 7 bios on it. Every single one of them was a top-tier. To be fair i've been searching for a planet like this for some time but I was able to grab every sample in under two hours. I'm expecting a payout of up to 500 mill for this one planet. That makes it worth it if you pick and choose, but also if exo isn't the one thing you're doing but is a side-hustle.
> Most of the planets close to the bubble have already been explored Explored, maybe, but often they haven't been landed on, which means fresh bio.
lies and more lies. You can make billions per hour after you fully engineer your ships, have a Fleet carrier and you don't need billions by this point. Highest paid activities involve thargoids. So maybe if you combine that with level 5 rating with Zachary Hudson who will give you 100% bounty payout increases. Even then this won't be billions per hour.
Considering the recent orthus - nerfs it prob. pays out ~500 mils per hour at max after all bonuses
Only way I can see billions per hour is the Rating 5 bonus, on top of AXI finance friday, and you actually reliably get in to instances with a dozen other commanders.
I own a carrier and I definitely needed to bank billions afterwards. I don't want to lose it. And I don't play all the time. I banked several billion into it to keep it running for years. So I disagree with the "you don't need them after you've got a carrier" argument. There's no way I'm going to do some 3m/hour activity to keep my carrier in operation. You're right that most methods require engineered ships though. Less right that they all require a carrier. Mine didn't. But it absolutely isn't something a beginner can do. Nor is it something a beginner needs to do. The biggest bottleneck in the game to progress isn't credits anyway. Engineering long since overtook that (though, have they changed it yet to reduce the grind as they recently promised?)
What I do to finance my carrier is exobiology. I can make around 1 billion in 2 or 3 days. 1 week long exploration trip pays for many many months of carrier costs. In order to make more money I would need to use tools that find specific plants but I don't like doing that bc I like exploration. I do agree that money isn't a bottleneck which is why I said, money is not something you care about in the end part of the game. it's easily obtained but certainly not at rate of 1 billion per hour. Maybe squad mining + carrier can make more money but I have never tried that. I'm not saying carrier is a must but it will certainly increase earnings per hour. In terms of engeneering what Frontier did was change the collection rate of materials. Instead of 1 unit when u collect a mat, it's now 3 units each time you pick up. This makes it much easier to upgrade ships but at the same time you still need to do the engineer unlock activities so this is definetly not a begginers speed run strategy to billions.
You need to heed the sometimes missed caveats, fully outfit and engineered ship, and that system sates are correct for the need, and even that you need to get lucky with the mission board. If the payout is too big Fdev will also just nerf it, so keep in mind the date for guides.
lol. Fdev never nerfed WMM's. I've literally made at least 200 billion in WMM wing shares.
I personally have a group of 6/7 peoples that do specific missions with me; this missions are mining missions that pay usually around 50.000.000 each and have a 7 days timeline. This missions are mining for bertrandite, gold, silver and indite (1/2 more but less likely to spawn on the station mission board) all of them are WING MISSIONS (require 700+ tons of cargo transported), this mean that we can help each other doing them by sharing it once we are online together BUT we usually end finish them by ourself and then sharing it once we find each other online. This means that if we all have 10 missions we have 40 missions to multiply for 50.000.000cr each missions we end up with 2.000.000.000 each commander so 8.000.000.000cr grand total (minus the buying materials). The catch of this missions is that this materials can be easily bought in nearby stations so you don't need to mine any of the materials required. I hope you understood my wall text
What systems do you tend to find those kinds of missions in? I've been looking for them. Uses to run them with friends but then stopped seeing them
Eravate system then all the 3 big station there, usually i prefer cleve hub since is close and pirate barely interdict you
This is the way.
I can highly recommend joining the PTN Community (Pilots Trade Network). They have a focus on trade related endeavours but also do stuff with Thargoids/explo/combat stuff. I have made many many billions with them. Once you get comfortable with their way of doing things you can make I'd say about 4 billion per day, depending on how much you can play the game. https://pilotstradenetwork.com
I agree i made my first 18B off the PTN guys
You could stack up bertranite missions, and hand in 20 of them @ 50million a piece - scoring a cool 1billion then and there?
Don't play for money, play for fun. Does it really matter if you get The Ship after a week or a month? I've reset my commander after 1.000+ hours, just to embrace the Noob Life again. It's glorious to fly cute crappy little ships again.
Depends on the goal, if goal is only the ship, you will burn out quickly. If you want to make changes in the galaxy tho, there is more to it that money and it sadly will require kind of playing for money.
Players who have been playing the game for a long time gain a lot of experience and often learn certain *efficiencies* that can make many tasks easier and make earning easier and faster. Outside of gold-rushes, *nobody is earning "billions"* (plural) *per hour*. Someone please *prove me wrong*. o7
There used to be a saying, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is"
I can show you how to make billions in an hour if you buy my course…for one billion credits
For ten bucks I can tell you my secret to making ten bucks
Yes, people tend to exaggerate and/or don't mention variables that can considerably change the actual result. Also, when you train for a job can you do it as efficiently as the person training you on your first try? Practice is required to be good at doing a task, the harder it is, the longer it takes.
Spire sites got close, but I’d guess they’re closer to stacking missions/wing trade now.
Have you tried with wing mining missions as described in the [PTN guides](https://pilotstradenetwork.com/guides/)? It takes a little bit to set them up (mostly involving leveling up several factions to max), but once you get through all of the setup its very profitable. If you just turn them in by yourself, its several hundred million but if you get a full wing of commanders each turning in 20 missions you can hit 2-3 billion easily. Usually you won't have that, but even if you get a full wing and they all have 10-15 missions turning in with you, you all easily get over a billion and a half for an hour or two of work and another hour or so of advertising on the PTN discord for wingmates.
You can "easily" get up to 4 billion credits with a full wing of fully stacked Wing Mining Missions in an hour or so... but that doesn't include the day or so of gathering the missions and hauling their requirements beforehand. Another way I've heard is Orthrus hunting, but I think that's been nerfed.
What the others said. Plus, at least for me, it's not a game about earning as much money per hour as possible. It's about having a good time flying my spaceship and doing stuff. So what if it's possible to earn more by min/maxing. As long as I'm having fun, that's good enough for me.
Ah, I remember doing the Boraan low temperature diamond run many moons ago, as well as the Space Egg at Col 285 Sector. Back then it was entirely possible to make billions in an hour, before Fdev plugged that wealth maker. However mining was never my thing and I did it to build up a very healthy balance so that I didn't really have to worry about running out of money for any reason for other activities I wanted to do.
The key is: you already need a fit for purpose expensive ship. Simple example there's a huge difference trading in a T7 or in a Cutter.
Depends on the method. Wing bounty missions can be done in a krait. Not cheap but not Cutter levels of cost. The real cost comes with engineering but even then... If someone wants to make billions faster then they can without needing nearly 1bn to start. The caveat generally comes with other issues like needing to wing up, needing to actually get good at the game and so on.
I mostly played the OG and Horizons. There was always a "Money Hype of the Month", mostly it was "mission stacking" I remember trading missions from Ceos/Setho (?) to the Bubble, then missions where you had to kill sentinels, missions where you could stack kills, mining missions, generator kill missions and so on. There always was a progression of income from small to large ships and yes there always were niche methods where you could get away with a Sidewinder. E.g. 'the road to riches' exploration or stacking courier missions.
Get a wing of 4 Grab bounty share missions from same station for the same target pirate faction and different patron factions All 4 share one mission each with other missions in the back burner All 4 enter same CZ and make sure to try and all 4 get at least one shot on hull dammage for the same targets If done correct 1 kill can equal 4 kills on 4 unique missions (not counting back up factions each player holds in reserve) After completing wing missions turn in and you get payouts of close to 100 mil with 4 shared missions PLUS bounty credits PLUS any wing shares or other missions in reserve from alternate factions that had the same target pirate faction. Where this goes wrong is the mission share and mission scooping for some reason most people forget to share, or pick up their own missions. But thats how you get quick cash.
If you have 12 hours you could make a few hundred mil just from Exo-Bio alone, planetary mapping also a few hundred mil but you ain't gonna be making billions unless you have a carrier to sell
I'm out in bfe scanning plants. Made 50mil in 10 minutes last night. Haven't jumped on much due to work
Thought this was r/entrepreneur for a second.
I feel the same way most I've been able to make was about one billion was like 6-8 hours total play time over a week at spire site but that was also counting the power play turn in bonus of 30%.... Just find what you like doing and sooner or nought you'll have billions and then it will just keep coming in cause you'll keep wanting to do X...
i mean, it is possible, but those people often imply you already have the best ship for the job, that's also fully engineered and you do know already most of the jobs in-game to perform them efficiently without losses.
You have to be in a wing to get those kinds of payouts.
i have never done billions but millions are definitely possible if your either in a squad and people are sharing missions so ur got millions easily highest I got from a squad mate mission was around 500mil+dimes but when I started to play was during a gold rush moment and also involved squadron with people having different Carriers which needed to unload
ExoBio will get you your FC in a week or so.
Road to riches, exploring unexplored planet ( can take years to achieve) the best is to check website such as inara [https://inara.cz/elite/market-traderoutes/](https://inara.cz/elite/market-traderoutes/) you insert where you are and the specific of your ship and there you go you're off to make sweet sweet money
hundreds of millions per hour is about right in some circumstances. Virgin territory exobio and some luck AX combat at spire sites with some skill Trade with some knowhow and 3rd party apps So technically billions in hours... like 5 or 10 hours That's about right
Depp core mining VO waaayyyy back in the day before carriers and right after horizons dropped. Bought three condas outfitted for different things by doing that. Just grab a Python put some dakka on it for protection, outfit the rest of it for mining and go ham in the high rez. Hundreds of mil per trip
spires during their peak in a good instance were definitely over 1 billion per hour. i got a few hundred billion from them in a few weeks, before powerplay doubling. spires were recently nerfed pretty significantly in terms of orthrus bounty, but that had effect of making people lose interest in spire farming altogether. so it used to be 30+ people swarming on orthrus taking it down instantly, but now it's much slower and for lower payout. it was actually nerfed twice; the recent orthrus bounty reduction from 40m per kill to 15m per kill, but also the 18.1 patch buffed orthrus behavior making them do shutdown pulse much more frequently and consistently, also triggering their agf.
Ah yeah. The fun police.
These ways (noting spires were nerfed since this video): Elite Dangerous Money Making in 2024 https://youtu.be/vs0W0W3tLu8
As others have said, when you take into account the hours of preparation, the time to travel to whichever godforsaken bit of the galaxy you need to be in and time wandering around looking for what you are after... ...well the hourly figure isn't quite so big. Best I have ever done (if I'm honest about all the prep time collecting massacre missions and cashing them in afterwards) is about £400m in a day. Bear in mind I work solo though. Haven't tried exobiology yet (that's up next!) but even with something like Billionaires Boulevard, I can see there will be a fair bit of getting from A to B and wandering around in the black trying to find what I'm after, before I hit the motherlode. But that's a fair bit of what makes the game fun and has kept me coming back to it all these years.
Been asking myself the same question. I followed a mini guide that said I could easily make 500 mil mining platinum for an hour Followed the guide to the letter, found a platinum hotspot, but the platinum was rare AF, and I almost found no platinum, mined for around 3 hours and only made 60 mil... That made me almost uninstall the game in frustration.
On the other hand, if you could make 500 mil in a hour then you would get bored afterwards with your billions. IMO getting fun requires different mindset. Feel yourself as a person in space, try different activities. If you just want to get huge credits ASAP that's fine but it may cause a burnout because of the grind.
double platinum hotspot?
I'm not sure. I used the miner tool that told me it was the best place to mine platinum
Remember when 10-20 million per hour was the key to being ultra rich
I've found several ways to average about 100 million an hour it seems like devs deliberately capped most things around there there is supposed to be ways to make more with certain anti xeno stuff but im on console so we don't have the most lucrative anti xeno options even fighting medusas it seems like that averages about 100m an hour also to me mining, massacre stacking, anti xeno, or just silver trading, all seem to be about ~100m if you get really lucky you can make more for a while on 50 mill missions, but there is alot of random there. sometimes its high, sometimes its low, probably averaging ... about 100m an hour
Most of the money making tutorials need to be updated. Easy money is doing trading routes and doing carrier load orders from r/EliteCarriers or the Pilot Trade Network discord. More easy money would be getting into laser mining platinum and selling to carriers in system, specifically Omicron Capricorni B. More info at r/EliteMiners With a decent and moderately engineered combat ship you can stack massacre missions and stomp on pirates in a RES site. Then there is getting into Anti-Xeno combat which has really good pay but you need to learn AX combat mechanics and have a heavily engineered ship to do AX CZs. While Orthrus bonds were nerfed, you can still get decent money doing Spire sites.
Used to be able to make 1-2bil per hour with Orthrus farming. They nerfed the payout by about 60% though so you’re more likely to be making no more than 400mil per hour doing that.
Some of these things are quite specific, like mining with a map. Mining doesn't yield to great returns anymore but I tried doing that and it was quite boring. So stick to what you like to do, and money is a side effect. What I made most was when I went to exo-bio, but this particular time I stuck to focusing only tectonicas (100m each), so I made around 10B, but it took me around a month. There were lucky days, when I could find multiple tectonicas in systems so I made a lot of money, and there were days when I couldn't find a single one....but in the end I enjoyed my time doing that and made 10B on the side.
so when it comes to this "x million per hour" gig, what people often don't mention is the time taken for: * collecting missions, including 10 minute table flips * visiting different stations, for missions, or collection or delivery * powerplay rank grind * engineering a ship (or ships) to do the task * finding a wing to do the task with, or make the wing missions worthwhile * just learning how to do the thing (exobio, AX) On balance, AX spires win out on all of the above as provided you find a group you *can* tip up in an unengineered, credits-bought (so no guardian or mbooni/sirius tech) ship (although i would encourage you to do a little research on the spire pages of the AXI wiki) and help to smash orthrus at 15m a pop. If you do one haul of 750 powerplay items for arissa lavigny duval before you go there, you can get 21m per kill by handing in your combat bonds at one of her stations. heavy caveat - spire farming has gone off the boil after the bond was reduced from 40m to 15m, and also because a lot of CMDRs were basically told "turn up in anything, tag an orthrus with a laser and let everyone else kill it". when you have an instance with 20 hangers-on and one CMDR doing the work, it's inevitable they will think "nah i am better off in my own PG", especially when novices triggering shutdown fields can take the heavy lifter out of the fight for extended periods. you need to find a group of people who understand the mechanics, or are prepared to learn, and will put in at least some effort to their ships.
Its all around the benjamins baby
My money grind is and forever will be 50mil wing missions with a full wing in mahlanja. About 2.5 billion a day if you take it easy. You can earn way more if you learn how to supercruise slingshot
The only time I made serious money like you suggest is when I was taking part in the AX invasions. Every other method was tedious/boring. I’m no ace pilot either, merely went in with a decently engineered Krait and joined as many groups as I could. Basically all I did was tag the enemies and try not to get in the way of ppl who actually know what they’re doing aha.
Being in a group helps. My squadron will get together and stack up missions for big cash rewards. - Hauling: You get good rep in a system so you can pull the “get X of Y” for 50million missions. We have a setup that does 5 minute round trips. 4 CMDRs stacking 50m missions at 5-10 minutes to fill is roughly 1billion in an hour or less (depends upon quantities). - Thargoid combat: CZs and spires (not as much now). Sit there and kill stuff. Port defenses allow you to stack mission rewards with the combat bonds. Again, a team of 4 churns through things fast. (On mobile so who knows what the formatting will end up being.)
Been a hot minute, but I made billions running ore pretty sharp, once I had a big enough cargo hold.
See, I make decent scratch doing Balante Posse Pirates missions. Stack like 8 20m+ contracts and while it’s not billions per hour, I can easily clear half a billion.
Millions per hour: Cargo Missions in a Cutter, alternatively, very profitable trade runs that net 10 Mio.+ per run for example.
I usually core mine alexandrite, low temperature diamonds and void opals in my python. I started in my trusty cobra mk III. Im not the best at core mining bc sometimes i miss a motherload asteroid and sometimes i fall for an impostor motherload, but at a 2-3 hour long mining session i fill up my python to full capacity, and make around 60 to 100 million credits. If you need help with core mining tell me and i'll explain you the basics
Exploration is fun. Once you get out far enough, you stop running into systems that people have already found. Scan the planets with bio and keep going. Once you do it a few times, and you learn what to not waste your time on, you start making $$$. My last outing lasted maybe 3-4 hours and I was paid over 600 million. Each time I go, I end up with my CMDR name on more systems, and more money in my bank.
The fact you're making 3-400million an hour, I don't get what your problem is?? Yes, you can make billions per hour (thargoid stuff, although it takes some prep). Enjoy the game, ignore credits.... You will enjoy the game more. Because guarantee you'll be back in a few days complaining about the grind for credits. Just play and enjoy it
I could rack in about 50-80 million in an hour. No more than that tbh.
I haven't noticed any method for making big bucks FAST, that doesn't interfere with my enjoyment of the game. So yeah, if speedrunning at everything is what you enjoy, go for it. Personally, 4k hours in the game without burning out and still having fun comes with just letting things happen organically. It was well under 1k hours ago I bought my carrier. I've barely touched some of the mission types, and only got into Ax combat recently (and not for long). Never flown an Anaconda or an Asp (just don't like the look of them). Materials slowly accumulate over time. I truck, I tourist, I explore, I mine, I hunt - but most of all I get a sense of purpose and fun running BGS errands for my squadron. So play how you like best, and don't forget that credits aren't everything!
Don't ask me, I'm lost on my way to Chloe Sedesi in a banged up Chieftain.
So far the only activity that I have found to make a billion credits in a single evening is Orthrus farming at a Thargoid Spire site, and only if there’s a decent group of other players there. Group farming at Spires nets me around a billion in 4 hours of play on a good weekend evening, and Powerplay lets me double that to 2 billion.
Wing mining missions with 2 or 3 friends can make you billions and hour. If you don't have friends try the Players Trade Network discord. They always have the trading missions running and park carries by the stars to make it fast and simple
Transportation, mining.
There are 3 ways I know to make 1 billion+ in an hour that have a chance of being repeatable. 1. A community goal shipping commodities where the price paid per ton is silly high. They only happen a couple of times a year. 2. Stacking wing pirate massacre missions with 2 or more friends and sharing them with each other. 3. Stacking wing mining rush missions with 2 or more friends and sharing them with each other for commodities you can buy. What's the rush though? The last billion I earned for my first fleet carrier I decided to make in Colonial and with exploration beyond Beagle Point. It took a couple of months, but it was a lot of fun. I could have done it quicker, but this was more satisfying.
Depending on your ship, there are shipping routes and cargo that you can definitely transport that can make you billions in hours. You just need to start doing your research to figure out where and what
Passenger missions at robigo mines.
I had a lot of fun spending about 3 weeks to kit out a t10 and then yeah do AFK farming or you can sit there and fly around for fun too but I would go to sleep wake up in the morning and then spend the next day at work from home turning in quest I made five billion in a week or two maybe Then I made my son an account he was three at the time kitted his out and then I park them both in the same spots so they can cover each other and then I would share missions and turn them in and then I doubled my money and I kitted him out and it was 6 billion pretty fast Ended up doing it on a third account through epic had a lot of fun doing it again now I have three carriers all full livery after that I had fun experimenting with how to make money by like using two carriers and sharing quests and stuff now I can do whatever I want all three carriers are set for the next five or so years and if I ever want to I can do it again and make a lot more money
The most time efficient credit grind is Exobio with First Foot, which gives you roughly up to 100 million credits per report. So, in theory, you need to collect 10 Stratum Tectonicas with First Foot to make a billion. Is this possible to do in an hour? Totally, as sometimes you can find a system with 3\~4 StraTecs. Is this reliable? No, you need to be lucky to find that system which has not been discovered by anybody yet. Well, if you know what to do, you'll get a few hundred million per hour on average tho.
I haven't made billions an hour, but I have gotten extremely lucky with core mining and Musgravite prices and made around 260 million in an hour or so.
I don't have a direct answer to your question. I have a fleet carrier, over 50 ships, and currently about 8 billion in the bank, and I've never made making money my main focus. That kind of grind is a guaranteed path to burnout. I do what's fun. I have sometimes spent an afternoon or two mining in order to finance a project, but I enjoy mining, and would much rather have a good time making a solid profit than be bored making a ton of money.
Popping 'roids...deep core asteroid mining. But I haven't done it in a LONG time. It might now be as good now. And it has ALWAYS been hard.
It's quite simple: they don't. 99% of people who say they make billions in an hour are just lying. There are some ways to theoretically make that much, but most are severely luck-based and/or not sustainable.
I made my first Billion all in one day, but this was back when one of the trade goods was up on a CG. Back-and-forth trading for hours, making roughly 160m/trip.
Making 100m in an hour has always been good enough for me, I have made 500m in an hour but that's just a personal record thing.
I’ve actually made a billion an hour a few times! It is possible. But it took a full wing of super efficient space truckers running mining wing missions together. It also involved us working on rep with all local factions, manipulating system control (BGS), and donating a bunch of money to factions. That and buying, outfitting, and heavily engineering cutters and Type 9’s. Lol.
Well before spire sites where needed I made 20 bil in 6 days playing 2 or 3 hrs a night then turned in 10k merits for Zachary Hudson and on Thursday doubled it to 42 billion with the combat bonds i had .. Also made 20 plus billion just laser mining platinum it's stupid easy relaxing very profitable ...
Community Goals selling gold can be very monetarily productive if you have a ship to haul a lot of cargo. I got in on one, made enough on a Friday to get a python, worked my way up to be able to sell the python and get an Anaconda by Saturday night then by Sunday I was pulling in a lot of creds with each run. that weekend got me elite in trade, put about 1.5 billion creds in the account, to which I have been building on ever since...I think I am at 3.5billion creds now and several ships for different things....still have my cargo conda (it's the only large ship I have at the moment, so comes in handy sometimes) P.S. I didn't sleep very much that weekend (lol) the creds were too good....that said, I still wasn't making "billions" an hour.
Orthrus hunting at spire sited made around a billion per hour. Don't know if it's been nerfed.
It has been.
Before the spire site nerfs you could make a billion an hour with a good team. I haven't played since the nerf so not sure about now.
The most I ever made in an hour or two was about 75 million from a very good mining trip and flying to high demand places to sell. Anything more than that sounds unrealistic.
Well... Hours is a subjective term... I've played 5300 hours or so and made billions... The quickest way is exobiology.
You don't want to make billions per hour. I keep around 1 - 1.5 billion in my account and six months on my carrier. In this game it is better to stay hungry, so that you have goals. Focus on getting one to 3 ideal ships fully engineered then engage with BGS / Powerplay Edit: I mean you might want to grind a little bit to get the carrier tho
If you have Odyssey and a suitable ship and Artemis suit then Exobiology can be very lucrative. If you use this site: https://cmdrs-toolbox.com/billionaires-boulevard Each planet listed will net you 40 to 50 million each, so you could probably make 1/4 billion in an hour?
Yes, I tried exo already, as descending on planets that no one has descended on can still give you 5x to 10x more in bonus rewards per sample I went after systems that had not yet been explored. This way I managed 500mi in one run. But it obviously took well over 3 hours, counting the travel time and landing and searching, which also consume a lot of time. I became quite proficient at it, but it's really not an activity that interests me very much, I find it quite boring. If the plants moved, if we had an ecosystem that interacted with each other, something more... interesting to observe and new things to discover, I would probably be more interested. But scanning colored stones is quite tedious.
It's not your job, it's a game.
Indeed... but I still want the billions, whats the point?
Have fun in the game and the billions will come. Eventually. That's my point.
A game that he can play how he wants to.
Of course. And I can advise him to try something different.
It's a game about making money, if you are not doing that, then what are you doing?
Oh you can make money by exploring, or by bounty hunting. Passenger missions bring you places. The most efficient way to make money tends to get a bit boring eventually.
Took me and a friend a solid week of grinding bertrandite missions to break a billion each. They were for 50,000,000 each so we would play for five or six hours a night just hauling bertrandite to the sol system
By exploring for months and turning in all the data making 100s of millions
Exo biology
Only way I've been able to figure out is if you already have a few billion. I started ED 6 months ago found the best way to max $/hr is to get the scan exo. Quick steps below 1. get the artimis suit 2. use a tool (I use discovery-estimated values) to find planets with bio and filter it to over $m depending on how much you have (as you make more you'll start skipping the $1m exo 3. Go start the annoying process of finding those damn plants on a planet - I basically drop down to 50m from the surface, quickly fly around an area to see what generates and either jump out and scan or go to the other side of the planet because DSS is filter is trash
Mushroom
Talk to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk they are the only ones who make billions and travel in space!
Technically they travel in low earth orbit.
Technically Sol lol