Star Citizen Making Money in 3.6 – UEC Guide
Welcome to some more Star Citizen 3.6, talking about making (money) aUEC in game, whether you want to buy a new ship, get the best gear and equipment or just amass wealth. We will also talk about what to spend it on & the Black Market Locations as I keep getting asked where these are.
Ship Purchasing
An awesome way of making money is buying a new ship with your aUEC, You can purchase almost every flyable ship or vehicle in the Game Now from one of the Ship Purchasing Kiosks.
Teaches – Levski – Delamar
AstroArmada – Area 18 – ArcCorp
New Deal – Lorville – Hurston
If you want to grind Bounty Missions more effectively then maybe an Anvil Arrow for 970k or a 300i for 670k.
You can get a Prospector for 2m OR Cutlass Black for 1.4 and then use them to Grind up more Credits Faster.
But how do you get the aUEC in the first place?
There are a few ways to make money in Alpha 3.6 the easiest and most accessible is Bounty & Destroy Skimmers / Data Probe Missions, even in your starter Mustang, you can chain these together, the more you do the more you may have access too & some of them payout more than others. You may have to complete an introductory Mission First.
Try to take them all in a particular area if you can. GrimHex is probably the best place to be able to quickly do large amount of bounties and Skimmer Mission, also being able to rearm and repair very easily by going to GrimHex. You can take multiple bounties/mission at once if you want. Just make sure you read the mission, it should give the the approximate location, you want to avoid travelling too far.
I avoid the Personal & Illegal Assisintation Missions when not around GrimHex as they can net you fines, however that isn’t an issue around GrimHex (and the Mercenary Skimmer Missions there) as the area is dampened from Crime Detection.
However I’d feel guilty not warning you that GrimHex can be the most laggiest of places in the Game Currently.
You can also take multiple Missions at once for the destroying skimmers for example I have taken 3 or more at a time and just flown to the location, blown them up quickly and got the payout before QT to the next location. You can make 100 – 200k an hour once you get efficient, making most of the ships very viable for players to buy and enjoy during a patch cycle. But generally stack missions where sensible.
Mining is a great money earner too, if you have a Prospector, now Mineables are clustered together, it is much easier to find delicious mineral loots & nom them up much quicker.
Also with Mining in space (Yela Asteroid Field) it’s very quick to once you have cleared an area to get somewhere to sell without much in the way of travel time.
Even on the ground now, since they have QDs being able to be used much closer to the surface of a planet, you’ll be able to make aUEC very quickly EVEN by clearing out all mineables in an area quickly rather than really searching for pay dirt.
Cargo Hauling
Once you have a reasonable amount of aUEC maybe 200k if you have a cargo ship of a Cutlass Black Size or Bigger than Cargo Running is a great earner, though it’s more risky than Bounty Hunting. As if you ship bugs out, explodes, gets destroyed or the server crashes and you can’t recover then you’ll lose the cargo, this can be extremely costly.
Mass Cargo Smuggling isn’t great in 3.6 – One of the problems with the buying and selling of narcotics is that you can’t sell them in large quantities, though they have high profit margins per unit, legal trade is by far more profitable per hour & you can effectively run a lot of commodities within the same planetary area without having to move around the whole system too much.
Trade Routes are going to vastly vary based on your ship, risk and how far you want to travel. I’ve linked a couple of star citizen web based trade apps down below that will help you with the most profitable trades.
Black Market
There are locations like the new ScrapYards that are supposed to buy and sell some typically more prohibited or stolen goods.
On Hurston there is the Reclamation & Disposal Orinth.
Samson’s & Son’s Salvage Centre on Wala.
Brio’s Breaker Yard on Daymar.
And there are the all the narcotics labs like JumpTown and the Orphanage around the Verse too.
The locations are discoverable via “Personal” Missions that will typically have you delivering a prohibited or stolen good to or from their delivery lockers. However like JumpTown they don’t have a marker UNLESS you are on a mission for them, so you either need to know where they are OR have a mission… thankfully there are very often missions for them in the Personal Section of the Mission Manager. These appear as with most missions when you are in the same planetary system. So near Crusader, Hurston or ArcCorp & GrimHex.
So for example you could fly to Hurston’s Area then look for a delivery mission in personal that references the Reclamation & Disposal Orinth.
At ScrapYards there is currently no way to sell stolen ships or individual Ship/FPS items/weapon currently. At the moment the only real reason to visit illegal locations is for a Mission or if you have acquired some or want to acquire some prohibited cargo AND illegal goods, as I said earlier, these aren’t what I would recommend for aUEC grinding in 3.6
There are delivery missions that spawn from some of these locations to take a crate from one area to another, and as you can take multiple missions at the same time, you could go to an area like The Reclamation & Disposal Orinth and take all the delivery missions from there, I think I had 4 missions from at once to deliver boxes around Crusader.
One of the annoying things about these “illegal” locations is that you can’t QJ directly to them, the quickest way of getting to them is QD to a location that the destination point goes directly over them and power off your ship as you are near it so that you come out of QD. Although some have OM points or Outposts nearby.
Other Tips
As weapon & equipment loadouts are persistent (when you reclaim your ship it keeps the changes) I recommend purchasing ship weapons and better systems for whatever ship you are using, centre mass on ArcCorp Area18 is where you can get most weapons, especially if you are running combat missions. And getting some FPS armor & some form of weapon can save your life.
Auto-Gimbals are still pretty over powered and very noob friendly, so buying gimbal mounts and weapons is also recommended, when in your ship after it’s flight ready press R to toggle your gimbal mode.
Please Remember that aUEC and aUEC Purchases are currently reset every major patch, progression is not permanent at this stage.
Also Ship Rentals A MUCH CHEAPER WAY of trying and leveraging the money making ability of a ship are planned to be available in a very near future 3.6.x patch.