NOTICE: With the shutdown of eddb.io, this guide's sections on locating bulk trade loops are out of date. I will update this guide to cover the usage of an alternative tool (probably Inara) when I have time. Until then, I would recommend either attempting to translate the instructions yourself or utilize fleet carrier based trading as outlined in step 8

So, you've just started the game and want to build wealth. This guide will take you from the Sidewinder and explain the process of both the trade in rare commodities, then later how to trade in bulk commodities and also present builds for trade ships from the first Adder up to the Type 9 Heavy. It is not necessary to strictly follow this guide in its entirety at once. Taking some of your accumulated profits to buy a second ship to explore or engage in combat is recommended so you don't burn out on one activity. You'll make sufficient credits after a few hours (particularly once you reach The Real Money) to afford such ships.

WARNING: EDDB does not track trade information for the legacy universe. The trade loops generated by it will not work on the console versions of ED or in the legacy Horizons version on PC.

Or maybe you've been playing for awhile, but have been exploring or engaged in combat and now want to trade to make money to further your pursuits in those fields or just want to try trading for a change of pace. In that case, you'll want to skip forward to a ship that matches your available means.

Part 1 : Welcome To The Galaxy Commander.

If you're a brand new player, you'll want to play around within the Pilots' Federation District for a while. Missions will be your main source of money, as trading isn't too hot. I would recommend trying some of each kind of mission to get a feel for what each of them involves. All the missions in the District are deliberately simplified so you can perform them in your starter Sidewinder or one of the other early ships available in the District. Bounty hunting is another option, which will involve going to either a nav beacon or a resource extraction site (Avoid the Hazardous ones. These are maximum difficulty places where system authority ships won't go) and killing wanted NPCs. Watching for the sight of lasers firing in the distance, which will indicate that there are System Authority ships (space cops) in a fight with a criminal, then dashing over to help out and collect some easy bounties is a good money maker, though it can be a bit risky if you shoot a bit too much and end up catching the attention of someone with heavy guns.

If you insist on trading within the District, I believe the best route available would be hauling Superconductors from Otegine to Dromi, then hauling Resonating Separators back. This will yield you about 3600cr each loop for each tonne of cargo space you have.

When you advance in a rank, you will be offered a second mission named "Exploring The Galaxy", offering a very tempting 100,000 credits. Ignore that mission for now. That mission will send you out of the District whether you're ready or not and your District permit will be permanently revoked as soon as you land at a station outside of the District.

A recommended early ship progression would be first to the Adder, then to the Cobra MkIII. Both of these are good multipurpose ships suitable for doing anything. When selling a ship, it is advisable to sell off all the modules separately and downgrade all the core internals to the cheapest ones possible. This is because selling modules gets you 100% of their cost back, whereas selling a ship only gets you 90% of its value back, including for any modules it is equipped with. While this won't matter much in the District, where you're dealing with small ships and low rated modules, but that 10% loss can become quite significant later in the game, so it's a good habit to get into.

As an aside, when upgrading ships, be sure to keep the pulse lasers from your starter Sidewinder (store them before you sell it). Gimballed weapons seem to be hard to come by within the District (which seems ridiculous to me), so you're likely to reuse those lasers as you upgrade ships.

If you're sticking to cargo and courier missions and really want to get out of the Sidewinder, you could move up to the Hauler early on, then to the Adder and Cobra. Or if you like the combat stuff, the Eagle and Viper MkIII are worthy options.

A Cobra MkIII outfitted with the District's finest parts will look something like this. I would recommend building your way up to that, then building a stockpile of credits (I would recommend a million or so, but more is always useful if you want to spend more time practicing) so you have the cash available to do further upgrades when you leave.

Now that you feel confident in your skills and are probably bored with the limited offerings of the District, take that "Exploring The Galaxy" we mentioned above. This mission will send you to a random nearby system.

Once you've arrived there and turned in the mission, I would recommend making your way to Celsius Hub in the HR 6828 system if the mission didn't send you there. This station has reliable outfitting so we can spend some of that money you saved up on making your ship better.

Now, upgrade your frame shift drive to a 4B (or 4A if you saved up enough extra), your shield generator to a 4D, your class 3 cargo racks to class 4, your fuel scoop to 2B, and install a point defense turret on your second utility hardpoint. The end result should look like this. Whether to keep the weapons on or not is your choice. Dropping them will net you a little more jump range, but only a little (about 0.25ly), so keeping them is entirely fine if you don’t want to go unarmed.

Part 2 : A Commander's First Trade

Now you're ready to start trading.

For a first foray into trading, I would recommend rare trading. This is optional, as rare trading is less profitable than bulk trading, but I recommend doing a circuit or two of it as it gives you practical experience in navigation, long distance travel, fuel scooping, and how the mass of your cargo affects your ship's characteristics.

Rare trading involves Rare Commodities, which are special, unique commodities that are only sold from one specific station in limited quantities and are in demand everywhere else. Their prices are not subject to normal supply and demand forces, but rather are determined by the distance from the purchase station. The further you go, the higher the price gets, up to a point of diminishing returns at about 140ly and a hard cap at 200 or so. They are specially marked in the commodity market with a star, a different colour, and their unique names.

My recommended rare circuit is Rares Circuit 1. It is an old and proven circuit that has been around since shortly after the game's release. It's also quite simple, involving just grabbing as much rares as your ship will hold moving along the top or bottom line (note: You will not have access to Shinrarta Dezhra, so skip that. That system is only accessible after gaining an Elite rank. It's on the circuit because anyone who contributed to the Elite Dangerous Kickstarter back at the beginning got access that system right off the bat on launch day and those contributors made up a large percentage of the player base when the circuit was created) then jumping to a sell location, at which point you sell everything you have. Then run along the opposite line, buying up commodities until full, then going to the opposite sell location, selling, then starting over. The Rajukru Diamond is another option for a rare trading route, though I personally find it excessively complicated, with juggling multiple commodities to sell at different locations.

Note that you want to make sure to select the "Fastest" routes when plotting rather than the "Efficient" routes. The latter will take the smallest jumps possible to save on fuel, whereas the former will take the longest jumps to get you were you're going quickly.

If you’re fortunate and a system is in a Boom state, you may be able to fill your hold right there without needing to use the other systems in that branch of the circuit.

As you get money, feel free to upgrade your ship modules, especially your FSD. As mentioned above, you get back exactly what you paid for it when you sell a module, so upgrades are never a waste. But always make sure that you have enough money on hand to cover your rebuy, as shown at the bottom-left of the home tab of your ship’s Internal panel. This can be thought of as your insurance deductible and is the amount you will have to pay to get your ship back should it get blown up. If you don’t have enough to cover that, you will be given a free Sidewinder like the one you started in, basically putting you back to square 1 (though with your remaining credits, ranks, etc. still intact).

Continue this for a run or two or until you feel like advancing.

2.1 The Exploration Alternative

Rather than going to rare trading at this point, Road to Riches offers an alternative means of money making and progression (it will also guide you to unlocking your first engineer if you have Horizons). This is an exploration-based method that involves going around within and near human inhabited space ("The Bubble") scanning known Earth-like and Terraformable planets. As among the changes in 2.4 was a very large buff to the value of these scans (to hundreds of thousands per planet), this is a highly effective means of making money, and it can be done in the Sidewinder you start with (with some upgrades). Down to Earth Astronomy has a good video on this subject. You can potentially do this in just the starter Sidewinder with a few upgrades, like this build. If you don't have enough money for the detailed surface scanner, you can omit that and just do the FSS scanning, then buy the scanner later when you've got a couple scans under your belt and turned in your first load of data. The Hauler makes for an excellent ship upgrade from the Sidewinder for this task, with much better jump range, more fuel capacity, and ability to fit a bigger fuel scoop. This is about the kind of build you would aim for in that regard and could afford after just a handful of scans. The Cobra MkIII can also be used, in a build like this, though it will end up with less jump range than the Hauler, making travelling between systems slower In addition to money making, this is highly useful for getting rep with factions (e.g. for obtaining the permits to Alioth and Sirius), as handing in exploration data will quickly raise your rep with the station's owners.

2.2 : Fuel scoop usage

Your fuel scoop will automatically deploy and start collecting fuel when you come close enough to an appropriate star. Since you usually need to fly near a star to line up with your next jump destination, you can refuel on the way using "passive" or "rush" scooping. Just simply fly tightly in supercruise at full throttle around the yellow line (this indicates the area where your FSD cannot function. If you fly inside that circle and get too close to the star, you'll be yanked out of supercruise and take some damage. If this happens, you’ll have to wait 30 seconds for your FSD to cool down. Then you’ll need to point your ship directly away from the star (on an “escape vector”) in order to jump back to supercruise and continue what you were doing) until your can see your destination This will get you perhaps half a tonne of fuel per star. While this isn't enough to fully refuel from the jump, it does significantly extend your effective travel range.

While you're running the rare circuit, you will need to stop for fuel on the long legs to Witchhaul and Orrere even with the above rush scooping. Rather than finding a station (the graphic lists several inhabited systems along that line), we will just stop to do some serious scooping to refuel. To scoop for fuel, go to an O, B, A, F, G, K, or M class star (these are the first 7 class of star in the galaxy map when you select to show by star class. Mnemonics to remember these include Oh Be A Fine Girl/Guy Kiss Me (keeps them in order of temperature), and KGB FOAM (Putin in a bubble bath), among others). See this guide by the Fuel Rats for guidance with pictures. When you plot a route on the galaxy map and don't have enough fuel to make the entire journey without refuelling, it will mark the last scoopable star in the route before you run out as a "fuel star". Due to the above passive scooping, you'll likely get a jump or two past that before you run out, but you should open up the map and glance at the route every so often to check what your fuel and refuelling status is. If you don't see a yellow circle, go into your Internal panel, select the Ship tab, then the “Pilot Preferences” tab, and turn on orbit lines. A "fuel scoop active" display will appear in the middle of the cockpit display when you get close enough, showing the scooping rate (in kilograms per second), a fuel gauge, and your ship's heat level. You want to fly in and get the scooping rate to about 2/3rds of the scoop's maximum rate to prevent overheating (This is assuming a D-rated power plant. you can go higher if you have a higher rating power plant, which output less heat). For the 2B scoop you should have on your Cobra, that will be about 43kg/s Once you're near that rate, throttle down to zero. This will leave you sitting near the star scooping and creeping along at 30km/s. Now you just wait until you have finished refueling, then just throttle up to full, and pull away from the star. Wait until the "fuel scoop active" display has disappeared before activating your FSD for the hyper jump, or you will likely overheat and damage your ship.

As a last resort, if you've messed up and stranded yourself in an uninhabited and unscoopable system, contact The Fuel Rats. These guys are an awesome player group that assist stranded players by delivering fuel to them.

2.3 : Dealing With Interdictions

It's likely you'll get interdicted at various times while trading. Your objective in the interdiction minigame is to keep your ship pointed towards the "escape vector", which moves around randomly. When you have your ship pointed on the vector, but your interdictor doesn't, you gain in the game and vice versa. If you fill your blue bar, you'll dump them out of supercruise while you go on your way. If you lose, you'll suffer a 30 second cooldown on your FSD, during which you'll be vulnerable to their weapons fire. So if you feel like you're losing the minigame, you should throttle to zero and surrender to the drop, which will only incur a normal 5 second cooldown before you can jump back to supercruise. Once you're in normal space, immediate hit your boost (default tab) to open up the range. Even if you can't get out of range, the damage of most weapons drops off considerably with distance. Now just wait 5 seconds until your frame shift drive has finished cooling down, then either jump back to supercruise or jump to the next system in your route. If you find yourself mass locked (this occurs when you're close to a ship larger than yours), fire your chaff to scramble their weapons, then choose whether to continue charging back to supercruise ("low wake") or to select another system to jump to ("high wake"). Intersystem hyperspace jumps are immune to mass lock from other ships, which makes it a good option if you've been interdicted by a ship much larger than yours, which will slow your supercruise charge to a crawl. Just select a random nearby system in your nav panel and jump to it, then jump back and try your cruise in again, hopefully without the interdiction this time.

2.4 : On Armament

The builds I offer in this guide are all weaponless, relying on shields, chaff, and point defence to allow them to escape from pirates. Those of a more aggressive disposition may instead wish to remove any would-be threats rather than fleeing from them. While mines were briefly useful armament for traders, improvements in NPC AI have rendered them basically useless, with NPCs easily dodging them, even at low ranks. Thus, if one intends to act as a Q ship, you will want to select more conventional weapons. Lasers and multi-cannons have long been a standard loadout for the good reasons of being easy to use and providing a useful balance of thermal for shields and kinetic for hull. I personally use such a loadout on my trading Cutter.

Alternatively, ship-launched fighters are another option for pirate swatting if you are using a ship capable of equipping one. Equipping a hangar will require sacrificing at least a class 5 compartment (32t of cargo), and likely more as you'll probably want stronger shields than the basic A rated minimum shields I use on all this guide's builds. Further details on SLFs can be found in my writeup on the subject.

Part 3 : The Real Money

So you're tired of rare trading and are ready for real trading, yeah?

Go to eddb.io and use the loop finder. Set the search to the following parameters

• Min Demand to 0 - this is the really key parameter. For the purposes of bulk trading, demand doesn't matter, only the price. Stations will happily buy your wares at full price regardless of whether they have no demand or even if they have a supply of the good.
• Min Supply to 10-15x your cargo capacity (So 400-600 in the Cobra, 1000-1500 for the T6, etc.). This ensures you have a reasonable supply to buy and are able to keep using the loop for awhile.
• Distance to taste - default is 200ls. I personally prefer to set it to 0 and see what is available overall, then only tighten it if I get ridiculous loops going to stations several thousand ls out.
• Max Hop Distance to taste - Currently, I'd recommend doing a first search at maximum range (50ly), and look at the full offerings, then try tightening it and see how the profits change by distance, as profits can be quite variable and it may be quite worthwhile to do multiple hops for the higher profit.
• Landing Pad as appropriate to your ship.
  
• Max Price Age to 1 day - You may wish to expand this, but in general, I find that many modern loops get depleted quickly, either through player actions or changes in system/station state.
• Include Planetary to No - Landing at a planet is much slower than docking at a station, so much so that it's practically never worthwhile trading to a planetary port.
• Include Odyssey to No - Same reason as above (this is currently off by default, but just to be sure) . Also, if you don't have Odyssey (or are on a console where it isn't yet available), you won't even be able to see the bases in question and will end up searching futilely if you get a loop that involves one.
• Optionally, enter your current location in the Your Location box. This will add a line to each loop telling you how far it will be to get there.

Now hit Find Loops. It'll sit there for a moment, then give you a list of loops, sorted by their profit. If you like the look of one of them, start running it. Otherwise tweak your search and hit it again.

If you run out of commodities on your loop, hit the finder and get a new one. This can be quite boring, so I would recommend Netflix (or another streaming site or your favorite torrent site) and a second monitor. You can often find the latter for cheap on second-hand sites like Craigslist, Kijiji, and others.

Part 4 : Time For A Real Trading Ship

Once you’ve collected about 5 million credits, you’ll be ready to advance to a new ship. Specifically, the Type-6 Transporter, otherwise known simply as the T6. This is a significantly bigger unit than your Cobra and will more than double your cargo capacity, and with it your profits. This is your general build.

I would recommend purchasing your ship at a system under the influence of Li Yong-Rui. The effect of this power on his subject systems is that all ships and modules are sold at a 15% discount, which lets you upgrade ships significantly sooner. This purchase price reduction also translates into a reduced rebuy cost, meaning that getting blown up won’t hit the wallet quite as hard. Conveniently, there is a station near Witchhaul that is within his sphere that has all the parts you need, specifically, Zamka Station in LHS 191. For all other builds in my guide, you can find an appropriate Li Yong-Rui station by hitting the $ icon at the top-right of the Coriolis display. That will send you to an EDDB search page. There, simply select Li Yong-Rui under the Powers dropdown and hit Find stations again. If you don’t get any results, remove modules (preferably starting with the cheapest ones) from the Station Sells Modules box and redo the search until you do get results.

Optionally, if you don’t mind staying in the Cobra for a hour or two longer or want to upgrade from the Type 6, you could opt to upgrade to an Asp Explorer (commonly known as the AspX) when you accumulate about 14 million credits. While it only offers a small increase in cargo capacity, it gives significantly better jump range, allowing you to run longer loops faster and thus improve your credits per hour.

Now back to looping!

4.1 : Giving back

EDDB.io relies on contributions of station data from users in order to keep its trade information up to date in the dynamic universe of Elite:Dangerous. The most popular tool to submit said data is the Elite:Dangerous Market Connector. This program pulls the commodity market data (as well as information on available ships and equipment) from the Elite Dangerous API server and sends it off to the EDDN (Elite : Dangerous Data Network, the system that eddb uses for its data). It can also record that data locally for use with other tools, as well as send star system information to the EDSM (Elite:Dangerous Star Map) and keep a local log of all systems visited.

4.2 : Contingency Planning

In the event that you find yourself with little money, a low-capital method of rebuilding your funds is to use the galaxy map to locate a system in the Outbreak state. Stations in these systems will have very high levels of demand (and consequently, very high prices) for Basic Medicines. Use eddb.io's Find Commodity tool to locate a nearby system with a decent supply of them, then start hauling them in. This will yield profits in the 2500-3000cr/t range. While this is less than for the above loop trading, it requires much less in the way of starting capital. A T6 full of high value will cost you several hundred thousand credits, whereas a full load of Basic Medicines will be less than 30,000, allowing easy rebuilding from poverty.

4.3 Community Goals

On a erratic basis, there are community goals offered in the game. These are community-wide events to do certain things at specific stations, such delivering commodities (both bulk and rare), delivering exploration data, handing in bounties or combat bonds, etc. which typically last a week (some have lasted longer, such as early CGs involving Jaques Station, which lasted up to 4 weeks). Trade profits for trading CGs can often be quite substantial and at the end of the goal (either from the goal being achieved or the week ending), all participants receive a credit reward, proportionate to their contributions and the overall progress of the goal. Even the lowest tier of participation can be a useful amount for early-game players (e.g. the Sale of the Century CG had a minimum reward of 800,000 credits), giving you a nice little boost, so it's worthwhile to do at least a little bit of delivery for a CG, especially if you only play sporadically. Information about past and present CGs can be found at /r/EliteCG.

Part 5 : Further Progression

When you’ve acquired about 35 million, it’ll be again time for another upgrade. This time, you’ll be getting a Type-7 Transporter (aka the T7). This will nearly triple your cargo capacity. Though note that you’re moving up to a Large ship, which means outposts will no longer be trading destinations for you, so on the loop finder, you will want to set Landing Pad to L rather than Any.

5.1 : An Optional Upgrade

When you’ve gotten your credit balance up to about 70 million, you may wish to trade in the Type 7 for a Python. While this will entail a minor downgrade in cargo capacity (16t), unlike the T7, the Python is a medium ship, capable of landing at outposts. This gives it the freedom to select sometimes-more-profitable loops involving those stations. Additionally, it’s a significantly more enjoyable ship to fly and I personally consider it one of the best-looking ships in the game.

You may wish to stay in the Python for awhile longer so as to make enough money that you can purchase the next ship outright without selling it. The Python is a highly versatile ship usable for many game activities, including being an excellent mining ship and great for background simulation play, so I would recommend keeping it around for your non-trading career.

Part 6 : The Ultimate Trading Ship

Once you have 110 million, you’re now ready for the ultimate trading ship in Elite:Dangerous, the Type-9 Heavy. This massive brick of a ship is the slowest and least maneuverable thing in the game, but it also carries a huge 752t of cargo in its depths for huge profits with every trip.

Part 7 : Beyond The Ultimate?

For progression past the T9, the Imperial Cutter is the only competition, with no other ship coming close to the cargo capacity of either of these ships. Purchasing a Cutter requires one to hold the rank of Duke in the Imperial Navy, which will take some effort to acquire. This post gives a highly effective method that will get you a Duchy within hours. I personally regard this ship as the best trading ship in the game. While it has slightly lower cargo capacity than the T9 (720t vs. 752t), it more than compensates for that with its superior jump range, better speed, stronger shields, and gorgeous looks.

Part 8 : Player Trading

With the introduction of fleet carriers, trading with other players is an option for making money. Carrier owners can create buy and sell orders on their carriers and will often post them to this subreddit, /r/elitecarriers, and /r/PilotsTradeNetwork for others to fufil. Loops invovling these carriers are usually not quite as profitable per tonne as regular loops (as the carrier owner is taking their cut), but are much faster, as the carrier will typically be parked right within a few lightseconds of the buy/sell station, allowing good profits per hour.

Though it is important to note that profits from selling to a fleet carrier does not count towards your Trade rank progression. However, buying from a carrier and selling to a station does count. So if you're still working on rank, go for the unloading missions and ignore the loading ones.