Another tip: Tri-Tach executives pay 300% market value for AI cores. So you go to any Tri station and use the comm network to contact an administrator and sell them off. So a core worth 10k on the black market now nets you 30k. Also get a nice reputation bonus with Tri-Tach. Which is nice because their warships rock.
@@harvia8348 You get them from Remnants ships, stations, and sometimes Dominion probes. Grab Dominion probe scan missions as much as possible and you should find some eventually. Be careful though. Remnant fleets can be dangerous. Be prepared.
@@gamerplays5131 I mean, a small credit chip containing a mere 100k is usually enough to make the AI inspectors realize that your colony is just THAT hard working, with no AI in sight, merely the sweat of mankind's brow. Granted, preemptively destabilizing the major factions when you feel like it's time to establish your empire also sounds quite useful.
Me: Refuses to see a one hour and half video explaining advanced mechanics that I must learn to stay one step more advanced that the class. Also me: Ohh boi, the trade guide I was looking for :D
Really informative, I've seen hours of gameplay and still didn't know a lot of these things. Hey youtube algorithm, this is engagement. Get this guy more views.
You can add +1 speed to civilian grade freighters by using Militarized Subsystems. This mod is more common, and it leaves more ordnance points for other equipment. If you want a silly fast fleet, you can even do +3 on civilian freighters by stacking Augmented Drive Field on top of Militarized Subsystems. So with a limited selection of ships (generally smaller tankers and freighters), you can have a fully functional 12 burn fleet (13 with the character skill).
Problem is if you take militarized subsystems you can only have one other logistics mod. I like that there are multiple tradeoffs to consider depending on how you want to use your fleet in this game. I've had a lot of fun tailoring my force for everything from stealthy smuggling and exploration to heavy fleet combat.
Protip for smugglers: militarized subsystems boost speed by 1 reduce sensor profile by half, and insulated engines cut it in half again only downside is you get less cargo capacity because you probably can't fit expanded cargo holds, but you can run a fleet with less than 100 sensor profile (after getting smuggling skills) with over 1000 cargo space at burn level 9 or 10 for cheap.
And for saboteur/raider fleets, I recommend Valkyrie transports with insulated engines and efficiency overhaul. Reduces crew requirement so more marines to squeeze in, plus ground support package giving bonus troop power by 100 as long as there is at least 100 marines. Good for stealth fleets if coming in with Starliner ships is like a whale in whaling season; attracting patrols and you prefer keeping rep to avoid inconveniences. Valkyrie stealth saboteur fleets makes sneaking into locked down locations like Sindria possible and got no patience for a pirate raid to happen and distract pickets. The raid efficiency is for how much items to loot or how long a system stays down. I was able to cripple Hegemony and League industry planets into decivilization to keep expedition fleets at a minimum, but only after plundering as much blueprints as possible.
Where can I find the militarized subsystems mod? Never seen it anywhere available to buy and in the refit screen it just says dock.. and I can’t install anything, so I guess I have to buy it somewhere ..
@@timebert1132 You can only put it on civilian grade hulls, and some civilian hulls already have it installed. This is usually the case if you buy it from the hegemony. You should be able to dock and refit to install this mod just about anywhere. If you don't see it check the bottom of the list the ship might not be able to get it because it doesn't have a civilian hull or it's already installed. Hope this helps.
Quick tip for smuggling near heavy patrols! -Approach with transponder off -Lure patrols away and go dark -Sneak around their search party and hit the black market -Profit!!
@@davidclasson8852 Yeah, its pretty crazy. Went awhile without usin the black market at all, then got the perk and remembered the S key makes you fleet essentially "walk" while keeping your profile low. Takes forever, but made some real creds trading hvy arms that day. Good tiemz.
3:45 - I'd say the best way to illustrate this entire idea is by first introducing how the planet's population count is made. It's an order of magnitude. A size 3 planet has 10^3, thus thousands. A size 4 has 10^4, thus tens of thousands, and so on. From there, you could point to the commodities working the same way. An industry using level 2 of something is using hundreds of those commodities, but not thousands. So an industry that's producing on the order of hundreds can supply multiple such locations.
Be ME: disrupt a mining base's economy :buy up all drugs and supplies and sector :sell at exponential prices or wait for them to request a mission :Do it again and repeat until the colony falls to decivilization :Profit
This is a brilliant deep dive. Clear explanations while also making important points. Very underrated video. Thank you soo much! No way I would figure this out otherwise.
I'm glad you enjoyed it! Starsector is an amazing game, but has enough of a learning curve that I was worried a lot of new players would bounce off of it. I figured I'd do my part to help the community grow a bit :D
Thank you so much for this guide! Only discovered Star Sector last week. Ironically I consider myself huge fan of such games and knowing that this game is kind of 9 years old is baffling to me. Great guide! So interesting. Going to watch guide on battles next! 👍
You know, this game reminds me a lot of Rogue Traders in Warhammer 40 000 : One part trader, one part smuggler, two parts pirate and three parts conquistador.
recommend you edit those timestamps to reflect the new funky features youtube added. 00:00 intro (you need the 0000 stuff to initiate it all) 00:31 trade basics [04:21] accessiblity 06:17 - stability 09:40 commodities 16:44 black market 32:44 smuggling and going dark 44:10 comm relays, sniffers and mission acquisition 55:03 trade fleet composition i find the very interesting thing about timestamps and the new feature is that if you wanted to have the feature show but not for other types you do this: 00:00:00 intro to trade 00:31 trade basics 04:21 accessibility 06:17 stability 00:09:40 commodities 00:16:44 black market 32:44 smuggling and going dark 00:44:10 comm relays 46:15 comm sniffers 49:49 mission acquisition 00:55:03 trade fleet composition so you get all the timestamps but the feature will put only the ones with 6 digits into the video slider. pretty neat way to avoid cluttering it up.
Thank you for making this series, just bought the game a few days ago and all this information you provide really helps. I found that making money is quite hard when you are new to the game, and soon i had to enlist my sorry behind to Hegemony to pay the monthly bills. The income from enlisting is good but there is a definite trade off.
Bought cause of szeth review. Looked like zombie pirates. Easiest way to get credits early game are trade missions and 50k pirate bounties. Just get a tanker, cargo or speed mods. Mules make great combat haulers. 50k bounty can be done with a destroyer or many high dps wolf frigates.
In depth high quality guide. +1 Thx. Now i understand why that after more than a few sniffers it was driving me nuts. @51:25 Those requested supplies missions fall under the 'Trade' tab in that Intel screen & the 'New' tab for a short while.
Oh boy. The end of this video made me want a series on ships. 1 or 2 ships per video explaining what they're used for, cool little tricks to utilize them etc. As a brand new player my biggest hurdle rn in understanding the game is knowing what ships do what and when and where they should be used and what weapons they should be outfitted with and why. Also g with what dmods are most efficient on each ship. Like a dmid may be detrimental to one ship but another may can handle it alot better.
One thing worth mentioning for people wanting to be a smuggler: Keep an eye out for Pirate refits of Buffalo and Mule freighters: They often have the "shielded cargo hold" mod, which can make them a lot better for smuggling illegal goods.
Thanks for this tutorial! Watched all the way through. Your videos have helped me a lot already in my playthrough [not just your tutorials either, but your regular gameplay videos] Keep up the great work, it's extremely helpful!
One thing I do hope they add (or somebody makes a mod for) is the ability to remotely access information on colonies and stations when in the vicinity of a comm relay. Right now you can only look up the places that you're... well, already at. That, and you can only see the "Best places to sell/buy" overlay for item you already have in your cargo and don't have the ability to look up the info of all commodities. It doesn't make sense that I can only look up the market of items I have, but can't run a basic google search of things I don't.
(last chapter) honestly, with the new version of the game, all you really need is a burn level of 9 (skill modification the way it is you'll get the maximum burn) the only consideration for more than 9 is to go dark. Alex is considering adding damage to asteroid impacts so i'm fairly sure when that happens you'll need to redo this chapter in order to take advantage of any meta to be had (like finding out the sweet spot of speed versus avoiding getting a huge decrease in velocity right when that patrol is chasing you)
a helpfull Starsector fan took the time and posted a Starsector Colony guide on reddit. www.reddit.com/r/starsector/comments/cp8c4j/091a_stressfree_newbie_colony_guide/ It answered my questions on how to make my colonies work much better than my previous attempts.
One mores way to do black market business: Just have ton of paragons Just come back from pirates bases hunting Got scaned Find contrabands I looted Refuse to give them Patrol have just little cute ship Patrol See 3-4 Paragons Patrol is Too scared to engaged the “smuggler” Fly pass patrol and sell all of goodies to black market
@@yourallygod8261 well, you always have pirate fleet's and bounty's for that, and ai cores if you feel risky to go and get some of high danger system's
Don't know if anyone has said this before, but Colossi freighters actually seem to be a more economical choice for a trade ship - with 6 maintenance, 3 fuel per light year, and 1170 cargo with the expanded cargo holds, 2 Colossi would only be missing 260 cargo space, yet cost 12 supplies and 6 fuel, as opposed to a single atlas with 10 maintenance and 10 fuel per light year.
Good call. I actually never use Atlas' unless I am forced to by virtue of maxing out my fleet size. Otherwise the compromises (*especially* on speed) are just far to rough to bother with.
btw, i have noticed, iirc, that moving inside an asteroid belt removes any bonuses of said belt - which is different from before because i swear my detection range was different a few patches ago when i played last. *EDIT: could have been the wrong kind of belt? i'll need to confirm and even test which 'belts' give bonuses even when moving* the nice thing about standing still inside an asteroid belt is that if you're inside a debris field as well you get both bonuses. really fun stuff. sadly, moving at all removes both so for smuggling it's not the greatest.
or hold down the "S" key while you are moving. Also lots of other stealth effects will also stack such as ring system, asteroid belt, magnetic field and nebula.
I dont know if you knew this, but during the tutorial in the starting sector you can exploit one mission during which you can have transponder on without any consequences. I earned 100000 credits at the start of the game thanks to it
Question: The salvagers boost your salvage you gain from salvaging? Salvage. Just double checking because that's what I gathered but not sure, also unsure how many is "optimal". Since I tend to enjoy flying into the middle of system raids and salvaging stuff from the middle of active combat zones like the vulture I am.
Get three salvaging rigs in our fleet (+55% more normal salvage - not rare though, for that you need the Salvaging skill to lvl 3), imho it's the sweet spot where you get the most buck. Getting more starts to offset the bonus you get, so probably not worth it.
This is why if you use going dark alot. Getting the blue level up for it is really nice on top of inculcated engines. Inculcated engines is a tech you can buy or find, that lowers the detraction of each ship you put it on. So making your base range much smaller. Then through upgrades to sensors you can improve going dark and leaving your range to be seen to be nearly touching them if you have smaller ships + Not civ ships. Civ ships have a large detect range, naturally. When upgrade heavy, once you do so you can pretty much avoid most ships rather easily.
The trader missions are good, but smuggling hundreds of heavy armements for like 800 credits profit each is quite profitable ; that’s how I start my fleet expansion in the game.
So my smuggling trade route is being in a world with 2 tri-techyon and a pirate world that focuses on mining, i destroy their shit and transport them drugs from tri-techyon...thats my route brother Tip: i dont think you have to hold shift, i think u have to just press shift and let it slide i did this once without a mod and it worked, dont hold shift just tapp it Edit 2: i finish a non-modded game of starsector withoit installing one sniffer....nice Edit 3: for late gamr if ur looking to destroy everyone in the space place and dont know any good ships? Look no further to the mora's! Just get ur colony to make multiple moras and moras only and trust me, the amount of fighters u get when u deploy all ya mora is too funny
On the subject of saying no to a smuggling interdiction. I think saying no and trying to get away won't exactly mean a declaration of war. It would translate to some reputation loss, but not enough to warrant outright hostility. You can however increase the negative reputation hit from the escape, and that is by blowing up the pursuing ships.
Saying no to an inspection/transponder activation demand *will* turn all fleets of that faction actively hostile in the current system though, even if the overall faction remains friendly/neutral. I'm not sure how long they stay that way however. :/
0.95 here I think. If the patrol fleet can't take you on it will just sit there after issuing you a rep penalty (if friendly). The other fleets will come and do the same. @@jdcollie258 If Neutral or lower they will most certainly engage provided their own fleet is stornger
Not sure, honestly. There are a *lot* of ships and weapons in the game, and I don't know that I'm enough of an authority on the subject to be making a guide. I will be making a combat and fleet composition guide here in the near future which will cover this to some degree at least.
@@jdcollie258 You could make videos about people send you their savegame and you review the fleet and maybe the colony and give tips how to optimize. Beside of that thanks for the videos, learned some interesting game mechanics again.
You can google "starsector capital ship tier list" you will see reddit link as one of the first results. He has decent fairly accurate tier lists of all weapons,fighters and ships except frigates. Check it out. Though some of them may become outdated because developers rebalance stuff from time to time,but it is still 95% up to date.
(dont mind my profile) You can also do what I call:Being faster than the spiffing brit finding exploits, requirements: 2 hands, a working mouse and a lighting quick (i speak mostly perfect english, but im not an english person so please tell me if im wrong at that word) reaction time, so now the way to do it. 1: Hover your fleet and mouse close to the planet, 2: Quickly turn the transponder off, 3: Click the planet a milisecound after turning the transponder off. 4: Profit. While im sure of it would work, ive only did it in the first system's planet, (mostly because my fleet is not a smuggler fleet)
And also, if you need cargo or firepower and you are poor, just wait for a hedge v pirate (or a faction v faction battle) battle and recover, mothball and repair on a planet with a station, it costs WAY lees than repairing on space
If you haven't finished the tutorial and are doing what Spiffing's suggested, the in-system fleets are coded to not actually care about you if your transponder's off due to the tutorial. Though it does make good practice to use the system for shortening the time. Plus, I'm fairly certain they'll still chase after you for smuggling if you forget to turn it off.
You take a rep loss when you trade enough of a sum on the black market with transponder on to get them a debuff. Same as you get a bit of a rep bonus if you trade on open market... and a rep loss from their enemies, if any. Rep loss from patrol interaction is on top of that, so there's no downside to running away from them. Not sure how do they calculate suspicion level, but I'm pretty sure the only valuable there is volume in money, although it is possible that once you get to high or extreme suspicion level, it cannot be reduced.
But... You can glass a planet... it just takes you a couple times. Each time you bomb the population, it reduces the size by 1. Also, just about every faction will freak the hell out and you will go to war with them for being a mass murderer of innocent civilians, which is silly because Luddic Pathers aren't people. Anyhow, it costs a bazillion fuel for higher pops, and like I said it becomes total war for you, so generally it isn't worth.
ya i am fed up with all the fractions sending expeditions to my planets you know all hell about to break loose when two fraction expeditions and a huge pirate raid happens at the same time :( makes me want to bomb them all to dust but hostilities are bad for export unfortunately
can you divide your fleet? f.e. doing legal missions, piloting your fleet, while parking a tiny smuggler full of drugs in an asteroid belt? just to supply the addic... I mean, the customers regularly. thanks
I'm trying to understand about the Comm Sniffers - is the limit of 1 per faction and then 20% chance for every one above that? Or 1 Comm Sniffer TOTAL and then 20% for every one above?
another thing, about salvage stuff, is that i highly recommend NOT selling recovered ships you're not going to use yourself and instead just get the supplies from it. because (1) you get a better bang for your buck from looting compared to selling damaged unrepaired hulks (2) as you probably know already, you get better than if you recovered and then scrap them (3) as you definitely know, repping then selling the ships gives you the least 'profit' the question i have is: okay, fine and dandy, but i've been paying tariffs on those...what if i just hopped over to my nearest pirate base and sold to their black market? (or smuggled stuff into a regular station with transponder off?) I think i'll go test on a ...what did you say about tritachyon not caring about transponder, iirc?...definitely would love to try out selling unrepaired hulks to see if it's worth it. at the end of the day, the value i get from supplies & fuel far outstrip any credit value i've seen involving tariffs.
Just starve the tutorial system and milk it until it dies. Don't forget to make multiple save "copies" in the inevitable event of the planets death. Or else you won't be able to complete the quest and other quests that follow from it will not be available. just ruined a smuggling run last night and have to start again, though this time I suspect I'm going to make a shit load more credits before I have to stop lol
You can effectively stop the timer on that ticking bomb by making a makeshift comms relay on that one available space, as the colony will have stability 1 even when starved
Do many people stack oxs? The 20 maximum burn is so good but is kinda hard to maintain with increased supplies per day. I usually run cargo fleets with this
That one will be awhile coming I'm afraid. Even in the vanilla game there are a LOT of ships/weapons, and I'm honestly not sure I'm enough of an expert to be making definitive statements about them.
In case anyone still needs the answer to this, you shift+hold left mouse button and drag it along the bar to set the amount. This information is on the tutorial hint when you first trade, but I accidentally skipped that the first couple times.
@JDCollie - You seem to be using the word sector in at least the first several sections when it seems like you may actually mean system. Is this the case or are you really saying that one planet can be the source of food for the entire sector?
While I really do mix up the word a lot (I have a newborn baby and can't remember my own name half the time I'm so tired) in the case of planets, a single planet could theoretically supply the entire sector, assuming the accessibility for all the planets involved was high enough.
Dear JDCollie, fist: please do more videos about "Star Sector" - i like them second: for this trade video - sorry - but there is no value trade happening in the video where i see how i could be a space trade, is this a flaw a the game because of OP: 30% tax 2 times ? third and last: yes this game is very hard but i dont get the fleet fights right against a similar or some times even weaker fleets because i miss play or miss fit my ship's with "auto fit" and spamming 6-7K interjeptors like firefly's in the front and 1-2 bigger ships behind. The hole fitting and weapon topic is a mistory to me and how auto fire works with AI controled ships because some times the dont even use them and just circle around in space combar doing nothing for me and its just a waste of time *sorry for so much bulk text* 8) Thanks mate
Starsector doesn't have reliable 'trade routes' like many space games due to that 30% tax. This is intentional, btw, and is designed to force the player to take advantage of special market conditions and trade quests. I've never used autofit, honestly. I don't like it, I don't think it does a very good job. Make sure your ships have some good kinetic damage first and foremost. If you can flux out an enemy, you can kill them, it just might take some time if you didn't bring any high explosive to punch through their armor.
Really trying to get into the game. Combat in training vs reality was like night and day. Not sure how it changed from WASD in training to point and click in normal time. Also could not for the life of me control my ships in combat. The enemies were doing circles around me and all I was doing was making waypoints that did nothing. Going to try again later. :P
In that case, I suggest a fleet commander build that focuses on you commanding your fleets to do the fighting, but it does take more leveling to do so. If action is not your strong suit, carriers may be your thing, or the higher tier phase ships.
Not sure if you figured out how it works, but to directly control a ship your character needs to be its officer. If you don't deploy the ship you're commanding, you'll need to do so either by "change commanding ship" before the fight, or do it during so. Ships with captains also usually perform better than ships without, due to the officer's skills giving bonuses to performance.
Its good to learn the concepts though. I just started playing yesterday and learned to use F1 after several deaths. Since I learned it, I know no other style of gameplay besides being a smuggler. But newbs like me learn about installing sniffers and what good freighters to look for quicker in videos like these.
Watched this while in game. Never found the suspicion level. Looked: Extreme
Arrives at planet.
Leaves a planet with a new massive battle group XIV battleship that wasn't disclosed in any report.
Another tip: Tri-Tach executives pay 300% market value for AI cores.
So you go to any Tri station and use the comm network to contact an administrator and sell them off. So a core worth 10k on the black market now nets you 30k. Also get a nice reputation bonus with Tri-Tach. Which is nice because their warships rock.
Where do i get those ai cores
@@harvia8348 You get them from Remnants ships, stations, and sometimes Dominion probes. Grab Dominion probe scan missions as much as possible and you should find some eventually.
Be careful though. Remnant fleets can be dangerous. Be prepared.
@@SeasonsMad042 ok thanks
@@harvia8348 Don't sell alpha's and for beta's too much, they bring a ton of profit for colonies (as long as you blow the hegemony sky high)
@@gamerplays5131 I mean, a small credit chip containing a mere 100k is usually enough to make the AI inspectors realize that your colony is just THAT hard working, with no AI in sight, merely the sweat of mankind's brow.
Granted, preemptively destabilizing the major factions when you feel like it's time to establish your empire also sounds quite useful.
Me: Refuses to see a one hour and half video explaining advanced mechanics that I must learn to stay one step more advanced that the class.
Also me: Ohh boi, the trade guide I was looking for :D
Man, thanks a ton for your super relaxed, precise videos for starsector. They help me a lot.
Such an old video but still a lot of it applies i think still today!
Really informative, I've seen hours of gameplay and still didn't know a lot of these things. Hey youtube algorithm, this is engagement. Get this guy more views.
You can add +1 speed to civilian grade freighters by using Militarized Subsystems. This mod is more common, and it leaves more ordnance points for other equipment.
If you want a silly fast fleet, you can even do +3 on civilian freighters by stacking Augmented Drive Field on top of Militarized Subsystems. So with a limited selection of ships (generally smaller tankers and freighters), you can have a fully functional 12 burn fleet (13 with the character skill).
Millitarized Subsystems also removes the civillian grade hull sensor maluses, which is a really nice bonus.
Good tip, I'll be sure to bring this up in the combat and fleet guide (since I can't add annotations to videos anymore, curse you youtube!)
@@mostlyhybrids it also removes the +maintenance malus from expanded cargo holds and
auxiliary fuel tanks if you would have had civilian graded hull
Problem is if you take militarized subsystems you can only have one other logistics mod. I like that there are multiple tradeoffs to consider depending on how you want to use your fleet in this game. I've had a lot of fun tailoring my force for everything from stealthy smuggling and exploration to heavy fleet combat.
Yup, a stupid fast fleet will be weakened as a fighting force.
Protip for smugglers: militarized subsystems boost speed by 1 reduce sensor profile by half, and insulated engines cut it in half again only downside is you get less cargo capacity because you probably can't fit expanded cargo holds, but you can run a fleet with less than 100 sensor profile (after getting smuggling skills) with over 1000 cargo space at burn level 9 or 10 for cheap.
Good advice. TY
And for saboteur/raider fleets, I recommend Valkyrie transports with insulated engines and efficiency overhaul. Reduces crew requirement so more marines to squeeze in, plus ground support package giving bonus troop power by 100 as long as there is at least 100 marines. Good for stealth fleets if coming in with Starliner ships is like a whale in whaling season; attracting patrols and you prefer keeping rep to avoid inconveniences.
Valkyrie stealth saboteur fleets makes sneaking into locked down locations like Sindria possible and got no patience for a pirate raid to happen and distract pickets.
The raid efficiency is for how much items to loot or how long a system stays down. I was able to cripple Hegemony and League industry planets into decivilization to keep expedition fleets at a minimum, but only after plundering as much blueprints as possible.
Also only 6 biggest ship in fleet contribute to sensor strength and profile, so you don't need to do this for whole fleet.
Where can I find the militarized subsystems mod? Never seen it anywhere available to buy and in the refit screen it just says dock.. and I can’t install anything, so I guess I have to buy it somewhere ..
@@timebert1132 You can only put it on civilian grade hulls, and some civilian hulls already have it installed. This is usually the case if you buy it from the hegemony. You should be able to dock and refit to install this mod just about anywhere. If you don't see it check the bottom of the list the ship might not be able to get it because it doesn't have a civilian hull or it's already installed. Hope this helps.
Quick tip for smuggling near heavy patrols!
-Approach with transponder off
-Lure patrols away and go dark
-Sneak around their search party and hit the black market
-Profit!!
one problem is the time it takes to sneak back to market before they give up and return to patrolling nearby.
Or get the technology perk that increases go dark effectiveness.
You can most often sneak in right under their nose, unless they move around too much
@@davidclasson8852 Yeah, its pretty crazy. Went awhile without usin the black market at all, then got the perk and remembered the S key makes you fleet essentially "walk" while keeping your profile low. Takes forever, but made some real creds trading hvy arms that day. Good tiemz.
Necroing because tip:
Interdiction pulses drive away patrols, interdict then quickly access the market
@@helix33933 Oooh. I gotta try that.
3:45 - I'd say the best way to illustrate this entire idea is by first introducing how the planet's population count is made. It's an order of magnitude. A size 3 planet has 10^3, thus thousands. A size 4 has 10^4, thus tens of thousands, and so on. From there, you could point to the commodities working the same way. An industry using level 2 of something is using hundreds of those commodities, but not thousands. So an industry that's producing on the order of hundreds can supply multiple such locations.
Be ME: disrupt a mining base's economy
:buy up all drugs and supplies and sector
:sell at exponential prices or wait for them to request a mission
:Do it again and repeat until the colony falls to decivilization
:Profit
Oh, Jangala is stable? Wait, my fleet is coming to say hello.
This is a brilliant deep dive. Clear explanations while also making important points. Very underrated video. Thank you soo much! No way I would figure this out otherwise.
I'm glad you enjoyed it! Starsector is an amazing game, but has enough of a learning curve that I was worried a lot of new players would bounce off of it. I figured I'd do my part to help the community grow a bit :D
Thank you so much for this guide! Only discovered Star Sector last week. Ironically I consider myself huge fan of such games and knowing that this game is kind of 9 years old is baffling to me.
Great guide! So interesting. Going to watch guide on battles next! 👍
You know, this game reminds me a lot of Rogue Traders in Warhammer 40 000 : One part trader, one part smuggler, two parts pirate and three parts conquistador.
This game is basically dark age of technology without xenos and demons.
Rogue AI, everything was great but went into shit, all that stuff.
@@Sintarzus So the Age of Strife then.
@@playwars3037 yep. Kinda forgot the actual name of that age.
@@Sintarzus It's not talked about much anyway, apart from "it was so fucked we lost everything" in a few novels.
recommend you edit those timestamps to reflect the new funky features youtube added.
00:00 intro (you need the 0000 stuff to initiate it all)
00:31 trade basics
[04:21] accessiblity
06:17 - stability
09:40 commodities
16:44 black market
32:44 smuggling and going dark
44:10 comm relays, sniffers and mission acquisition
55:03 trade fleet composition
i find the very interesting thing about timestamps and the new feature is that if you wanted to have the feature show but not for other types you do this:
00:00:00 intro to trade
00:31 trade basics
04:21 accessibility
06:17 stability
00:09:40 commodities
00:16:44 black market
32:44 smuggling and going dark
00:44:10 comm relays
46:15 comm sniffers
49:49 mission acquisition
00:55:03 trade fleet composition
so you get all the timestamps but the feature will put only the ones with 6 digits into the video slider. pretty neat way to avoid cluttering it up.
Thank you for making this series, just bought the game a few days ago and all this information you provide really helps. I found that making money is quite hard when you are new to the game, and soon i had to enlist my sorry behind to Hegemony to pay the monthly bills. The income from enlisting is good but there is a definite trade off.
seeth?
Bought cause of szeth review. Looked like zombie pirates. Easiest way to get credits early game are trade missions and 50k pirate bounties. Just get a tanker, cargo or speed mods. Mules make great combat haulers.
50k bounty can be done with a destroyer or many high dps wolf frigates.
I buy marines and heavy weapons, then sell them to Luddic Path. They pay triple sometimes.
and ship "normal" crew back to "civilization" when coming back :)
Rule of Thumb, faction with the most enemies have least accessibility, which means more trading opportunity if you are neutral with them.
I just got this game yesterday, It runs incredibly smooth, I'm having fun with the early gameplay.
In depth high quality guide. +1
Thx. Now i understand why that after more than a few sniffers it was driving me nuts.
@51:25 Those requested supplies missions fall under the 'Trade' tab in that Intel screen & the 'New' tab for a short while.
Great video JD. Definitely will be referring back to it as time goes by.
Excellent tutorial! A lot of useful information while expertly maintaining a clear delivery. Thank you, this is very much appreciated.
Pirate mules are great for smuggling as they have shielded cargo holds, huge capacity (for that hull mod) and are very combat worthy
Oh boy. The end of this video made me want a series on ships. 1 or 2 ships per video explaining what they're used for, cool little tricks to utilize them etc. As a brand new player my biggest hurdle rn in understanding the game is knowing what ships do what and when and where they should be used and what weapons they should be outfitted with and why. Also g with what dmods are most efficient on each ship. Like a dmid may be detrimental to one ship but another may can handle it alot better.
Really good guide, thanks! Been playing a few weeks but lots of stuff in there I hadn't already figured out.
One thing worth mentioning for people wanting to be a smuggler: Keep an eye out for Pirate refits of Buffalo and Mule freighters: They often have the "shielded cargo hold" mod, which can make them a lot better for smuggling illegal goods.
Thanks for this tutorial!
Watched all the way through.
Your videos have helped me a lot already in my playthrough [not just your tutorials either, but your regular gameplay videos]
Keep up the great work, it's extremely helpful!
Very informative. Been playing the game a while and you didn't miss a damn thing as far as I could see. Awesome job 👌
"Space Twitter"... Oh the horror
Again, thanks a lot, these helps a lot !
Thanks for all the help man, really looking forward into getting into this game.
One thing I do hope they add (or somebody makes a mod for) is the ability to remotely access information on colonies and stations when in the vicinity of a comm relay. Right now you can only look up the places that you're... well, already at. That, and you can only see the "Best places to sell/buy" overlay for item you already have in your cargo and don't have the ability to look up the info of all commodities. It doesn't make sense that I can only look up the market of items I have, but can't run a basic google search of things I don't.
The Luddic Church decreed that Google was too AI for the safety of the Sector and managed to get everyone to ban it
You can look up own colonies from any corner of the sector though
@@Cx10110100 : True, but I meant other colonies.
(last chapter) honestly, with the new version of the game, all you really need is a burn level of 9 (skill modification the way it is you'll get the maximum burn)
the only consideration for more than 9 is to go dark.
Alex is considering adding damage to asteroid impacts so i'm fairly sure when that happens you'll need to redo this chapter in order to take advantage of any meta to be had (like finding out the sweet spot of speed versus avoiding getting a huge decrease in velocity right when that patrol is chasing you)
This was a very useful video! It did a great job at helping me understand some fundamental concepts of the game. Thank you.
I never got too into trading, now I will.
Great tutorial man! Really hope you do a tutorial on colonisation and manufacturing. Those things have me right bamboozled XD
a helpfull Starsector fan took the time and posted a Starsector Colony guide on reddit.
www.reddit.com/r/starsector/comments/cp8c4j/091a_stressfree_newbie_colony_guide/
It answered my questions on how to make my colonies work much better than my previous attempts.
@@Diarmuhnd Excellent. Thanks heaps man!
@@IRatchetI Np man.
One mores way to do black market business: Just have ton of paragons
Just come back from pirates bases hunting
Got scaned
Find contrabands I looted
Refuse to give them
Patrol have just little cute ship
Patrol See 3-4 Paragons
Patrol is Too scared to engaged the “smuggler”
Fly pass patrol and sell all of goodies to black market
Yea but that hits your reputation
yourallygod Don’t worry do you see that pirate fleet that some reputation to get
@@yourallygod8261 well, you always have pirate fleet's and bounty's for that, and ai cores if you feel risky to go and get some of high danger system's
Don't know if anyone has said this before, but Colossi freighters actually seem to be a more economical choice for a trade ship - with 6 maintenance, 3 fuel per light year, and 1170 cargo with the expanded cargo holds, 2 Colossi would only be missing 260 cargo space, yet cost 12 supplies and 6 fuel, as opposed to a single atlas with 10 maintenance and 10 fuel per light year.
Good call. I actually never use Atlas' unless I am forced to by virtue of maxing out my fleet size. Otherwise the compromises (*especially* on speed) are just far to rough to bother with.
speed is fixed by engine upgrades. I didnt realise however that Atlas was more demanding than few colossi@@jdcollie258
btw, i have noticed, iirc, that moving inside an asteroid belt removes any bonuses of said belt - which is different from before because i swear my detection range was different a few patches ago when i played last.
*EDIT: could have been the wrong kind of belt? i'll need to confirm and even test which 'belts' give bonuses even when moving*
the nice thing about standing still inside an asteroid belt is that if you're inside a debris field as well you get both bonuses. really fun stuff. sadly, moving at all removes both so for smuggling it's not the greatest.
CTRL + click for going a bit slower, but with keeping the asteroid sensor decrease bonus (taken this from a game tip? iirc :) )
Afaik the bonus is still there, though if you start moving the bonus is offset
or hold down the "S" key while you are moving.
Also lots of other stealth effects will also stack such as ring system, asteroid belt, magnetic field and nebula.
I dont know if you knew this, but during the tutorial in the starting sector you can exploit one mission during which you can have transponder on without any consequences. I earned 100000 credits at the start of the game thanks to it
Very educational and helpful. Thank you.
Question: The salvagers boost your salvage you gain from salvaging? Salvage. Just double checking because that's what I gathered but not sure, also unsure how many is "optimal". Since I tend to enjoy flying into the middle of system raids and salvaging stuff from the middle of active combat zones like the vulture I am.
They do, but only up to 50%. Having more salvagers then that just offsets penalties.
Get three salvaging rigs in our fleet (+55% more normal salvage - not rare though, for that you need the Salvaging skill to lvl 3), imho it's the sweet spot where you get the most buck. Getting more starts to offset the bonus you get, so probably not worth it.
Well, thanks to your tutorials I finally took the leap and bought the game! I'm gonna stop watching now, time to learn things on my own, cheers :)
Glad to have had you here!
This is why if you use going dark alot. Getting the blue level up for it is really nice on top of inculcated engines.
Inculcated engines is a tech you can buy or find, that lowers the detraction of each ship you put it on. So making your base range much smaller. Then through upgrades to sensors you can improve going dark and leaving your range to be seen to be nearly touching them if you have smaller ships + Not civ ships. Civ ships have a large detect range, naturally.
When upgrade heavy, once you do so you can pretty much avoid most ships rather easily.
The trader missions are good, but smuggling hundreds of heavy armements for like 800 credits profit each is quite profitable ; that’s how I start my fleet expansion in the game.
Very very very very good.
Thanks again still good advice!
So my smuggling trade route is being in a world with 2 tri-techyon and a pirate world that focuses on mining, i destroy their shit and transport them drugs from tri-techyon...thats my route brother
Tip: i dont think you have to hold shift, i think u have to just press shift and let it slide i did this once without a mod and it worked, dont hold shift just tapp it
Edit 2: i finish a non-modded game of starsector withoit installing one sniffer....nice
Edit 3: for late gamr if ur looking to destroy everyone in the space place and dont know any good ships? Look no further to the mora's! Just get ur colony to make multiple moras and moras only and trust me, the amount of fighters u get when u deploy all ya mora is too funny
On the subject of saying no to a smuggling interdiction. I think saying no and trying to get away won't exactly mean a declaration of war.
It would translate to some reputation loss, but not enough to warrant outright hostility. You can however increase the negative reputation hit from the escape, and that is by blowing up the pursuing ships.
Saying no to an inspection/transponder activation demand *will* turn all fleets of that faction actively hostile in the current system though, even if the overall faction remains friendly/neutral.
I'm not sure how long they stay that way however. :/
0.95 here I think. If the patrol fleet can't take you on it will just sit there after issuing you a rep penalty (if friendly). The other fleets will come and do the same. @@jdcollie258
If Neutral or lower they will most certainly engage provided their own fleet is stornger
Your videos are great.
Sorry if this is a bit much to ask , but are you ever going to do a full ship/weapons guide? Great video btw
Not sure, honestly. There are a *lot* of ships and weapons in the game, and I don't know that I'm enough of an authority on the subject to be making a guide. I will be making a combat and fleet composition guide here in the near future which will cover this to some degree at least.
@@jdcollie258 Cool, thanks
@@jdcollie258 You could make videos about people send you their savegame and you review the fleet and maybe the colony and give tips how to optimize.
Beside of that thanks for the videos, learned some interesting game mechanics again.
You can google "starsector capital ship tier list" you will see reddit link as one of the first results. He has decent fairly accurate tier lists of all weapons,fighters and ships except frigates. Check it out. Though some of them may become outdated because developers rebalance stuff from time to time,but it is still 95% up to date.
(dont mind my profile) You can also do what I call:Being faster than the spiffing brit finding exploits, requirements: 2 hands, a working mouse and a lighting quick (i speak mostly perfect english, but im not an english person so please tell me if im wrong at that word) reaction time, so now the way to do it. 1: Hover your fleet and mouse close to the planet, 2: Quickly turn the transponder off, 3: Click the planet a milisecound after turning the transponder off. 4: Profit. While im sure of it would work, ive only did it in the first system's planet, (mostly because my fleet is not a smuggler fleet)
And also, if you need cargo or firepower and you are poor, just wait for a hedge v pirate (or a faction v faction battle) battle and recover, mothball and repair on a planet with a station, it costs WAY lees than repairing on space
If you haven't finished the tutorial and are doing what Spiffing's suggested, the in-system fleets are coded to not actually care about you if your transponder's off due to the tutorial. Though it does make good practice to use the system for shortening the time. Plus, I'm fairly certain they'll still chase after you for smuggling if you forget to turn it off.
Sure, i went before when i did not put the transmitter on the tutorial, and the hedgemony was hunting me so hard i had to delete that save
Hey hey people, Sseth here!!
You take a rep loss when you trade enough of a sum on the black market with transponder on to get them a debuff. Same as you get a bit of a rep bonus if you trade on open market... and a rep loss from their enemies, if any. Rep loss from patrol interaction is on top of that, so there's no downside to running away from them. Not sure how do they calculate suspicion level, but I'm pretty sure the only valuable there is volume in money, although it is possible that once you get to high or extreme suspicion level, it cannot be reduced.
Sectors stability gonna plummet after this
Good work
Thank you
you rock
But... You can glass a planet... it just takes you a couple times. Each time you bomb the population, it reduces the size by 1. Also, just about every faction will freak the hell out and you will go to war with them for being a mass murderer of innocent civilians, which is silly because Luddic Pathers aren't people. Anyhow, it costs a bazillion fuel for higher pops, and like I said it becomes total war for you, so generally it isn't worth.
ya i am fed up with all the fractions sending expeditions to my planets you know all hell about to break loose when two fraction expeditions and a huge pirate raid happens at the same time :( makes me want to bomb them all to dust but hostilities are bad for export unfortunately
Dammit, I wish UA-cam hadn't removed annotations. It makes addressing corrections like this so much harder >.
Fortunately there is the slower and more tedious solution of raiding the planet like 20 times so that it decivilizes
Pathers arent. There are however regular people on their planets who want to get away but cannot afford to.
can you divide your fleet? f.e. doing legal missions, piloting your fleet, while parking a tiny smuggler full of drugs in an asteroid belt? just to supply the addic... I mean, the customers regularly.
thanks
I'm trying to understand about the Comm Sniffers - is the limit of 1 per faction and then 20% chance for every one above that?
Or 1 Comm Sniffer TOTAL and then 20% for every one above?
Any above 1 sniffer anywhere in the sector will result in one of them getting removed eventually
Buffolo's speed is one more than the colossus tho
another thing, about salvage stuff, is that i highly recommend NOT selling recovered ships you're not going to use yourself and instead just get the supplies from it. because (1) you get a better bang for your buck from looting compared to selling damaged unrepaired hulks (2) as you probably know already, you get better than if you recovered and then scrap them (3) as you definitely know, repping then selling the ships gives you the least 'profit'
the question i have is: okay, fine and dandy, but i've been paying tariffs on those...what if i just hopped over to my nearest pirate base and sold to their black market? (or smuggled stuff into a regular station with transponder off?)
I think i'll go test on a ...what did you say about tritachyon not caring about transponder, iirc?...definitely would love to try out selling unrepaired hulks to see if it's worth it.
at the end of the day, the value i get from supplies & fuel far outstrip any credit value i've seen involving tariffs.
I think for the system bounty you need to have turned on your transponder
*n o f u e l*
Just starve the tutorial system and milk it until it dies. Don't forget to make multiple save "copies" in the inevitable event of the planets death. Or else you won't be able to complete the quest and other quests that follow from it will not be available. just ruined a smuggling run last night and have to start again, though this time I suspect I'm going to make a shit load more credits before I have to stop lol
You can effectively stop the timer on that ticking bomb by making a makeshift comms relay on that one available space, as the colony will have stability 1 even when starved
@@alentjanestetico3014 what what what!? Brilliant. You have totally encouraged me to begin a new play through after wiping my laptop few months ago.
Bruh guide thats ONE HOUR LONG JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH!
"You have to pay the tariff"
/LaughsInAnCap
When buying things do we have to buy them in bulk?
Do many people stack oxs? The 20 maximum burn is so good but is kinda hard to maintain with increased supplies per day. I usually run cargo fleets with this
there is no fast picket faster than 13 burn => no need to stack above 14
Can you please make a guide on ships and weapons? Cant seem to find a good guide that's noob friendly for idiots like me. Thanks!
That one will be awhile coming I'm afraid. Even in the vanilla game there are a LOT of ships/weapons, and I'm honestly not sure I'm enough of an expert to be making definitive statements about them.
I have a problem:
I dont know how to scroll the items so lets say that i sell suply when i sell it i sell the entire stock of it
Me too
In case anyone still needs the answer to this, you shift+hold left mouse button and drag it along the bar to set the amount. This information is on the tutorial hint when you first trade, but I accidentally skipped that the first couple times.
@@alentjanestetico3014 thank you my man
@JDCollie - You seem to be using the word sector in at least the first several sections when it seems like you may actually mean system. Is this the case or are you really saying that one planet can be the source of food for the entire sector?
While I really do mix up the word a lot (I have a newborn baby and can't remember my own name half the time I'm so tired) in the case of planets, a single planet could theoretically supply the entire sector, assuming the accessibility for all the planets involved was high enough.
There is no reputation hit if you get away from fleet trying to scan you.
Dear JDCollie,
fist: please do more videos about "Star Sector" - i like them
second: for this trade video - sorry - but there is no value trade happening in the video where i see how i could be a space trade, is this a flaw a the game because of OP: 30% tax 2 times ?
third and last: yes this game is very hard but i dont get the fleet fights right against a similar or some times even weaker fleets because i miss play or miss fit my ship's with "auto fit" and spamming 6-7K interjeptors like firefly's in the front and 1-2 bigger ships behind.
The hole fitting and weapon topic is a mistory to me and how auto fire works with AI controled ships because some times the dont even use them and just circle around in space combar doing nothing for me and its just a waste of time
*sorry for so much bulk text* 8)
Thanks mate
Starsector doesn't have reliable 'trade routes' like many space games due to that 30% tax. This is intentional, btw, and is designed to force the player to take advantage of special market conditions and trade quests.
I've never used autofit, honestly. I don't like it, I don't think it does a very good job. Make sure your ships have some good kinetic damage first and foremost. If you can flux out an enemy, you can kill them, it just might take some time if you didn't bring any high explosive to punch through their armor.
what do you get out of glassing a planet
Mostly it becomes uncolonized I imagine and then you can colonize it yourself.
You potentially kill billions of people which is a reward in itself.
And no more competition hehehe
@@windradyne8724 but muh money
Just remember, everything is profitable if you never pay for anything.
Really trying to get into the game. Combat in training vs reality was like night and day. Not sure how it changed from WASD in training to point and click in normal time.
Also could not for the life of me control my ships in combat. The enemies were doing circles around me and all I was doing was making waypoints that did nothing. Going to try again later. :P
In that case, I suggest a fleet commander build that focuses on you commanding your fleets to do the fighting, but it does take more leveling to do so. If action is not your strong suit, carriers may be your thing, or the higher tier phase ships.
Not sure if you figured out how it works, but to directly control a ship your character needs to be its officer. If you don't deploy the ship you're commanding, you'll need to do so either by "change commanding ship" before the fight, or do it during so. Ships with captains also usually perform better than ships without, due to the officer's skills giving bonuses to performance.
TT is the best girl.
Buy high sell low
35 is max ship count.
The game's default config file lists it as 30.
@@jdcollie258 strange.
how the fuck do i expand info on an item in trading this game is so unexplicit
y'all watching a full hour documentary when i'd just tell you to press f1
Its good to learn the concepts though. I just started playing yesterday and learned to use F1 after several deaths. Since I learned it, I know no other style of gameplay besides being a smuggler. But newbs like me learn about installing sniffers and what good freighters to look for quicker in videos like these.
@@jacobsummers3441 i still can't get this combat system down, all i'm really good at is trade
@@comradep8519 me too man, me too.
Please never buy a new Mic.
Please: Stop Wispering like your daughter is asleep in the next room. Wispering into the mic does not make your videos easy to watch.
Thanks...
This is makes it really hard for people to understand, poor design
*game
Hakageryuu nah its a poorly designed game even the combat is shit