Oh, Elite. How I love you, how I hate you, and how I'm a little disappointed by you.
TL;DR game's been out for 6 years, still missing features promised in the fundraising campaign, and only one activity is worth doing.
Elite: Dangerous offers you a 1:1 scale of the Milky Way and a ton of activities to do around it. Dogfighting, piracy, powerplay (faction wars), bounty hunting, mining, trading, exploration, engineering... the list goes on. It's pretty fun solo, and even more so with friends. The galaxy is shared among all players, and in fact, there's an open play gamemode where you can encounter other players at random.
But there's several issues with all of this. No one who wants to make money plays open, because gankers love ruining fun. But that means pirating is off the table, since there's no one carrying goodies around.
PvP and Bounty Hunting are exhilarating, but the payout compared to repair costs and a rebuy risk? Not worth it.
Trading can get you some good money... except there's no station browser. You have to manually dock at stations to get their info, and THEN you can see commodity info on the galaxy map, but you have to navigate a 3d map to find your stations. Or skip all that and use EDDB.io.
Exploration is great... for the first dozen hours or two. Watching loading screen after loading screen for hours to maybe find something weird out there is not really worth it.
That leaves me to mining.
All of the above pays around maybe a few hundred thousand to a few million per run. Now keep in mind, most ships are in the millions, with the most expensive ship being 200,000,000 credits.
Look at the "max sell price" of a mineable resource called Low Temperature Diamons: https://inara.cz/galaxy-commodity/144/
That's 1.5 million. Per unit. A single asteroid can net you about 10 Diamonds.
Mining is the only thing that can get you a reasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time. But mining gets stale quick.
If you want a proper space trading game with some good combat and a way to build an automated trading empire, check out X4: Foundations.
TL;DR game's been out for 6 years, still missing features promised in the fundraising campaign, and only one activity is worth doing.
Elite: Dangerous offers you a 1:1 scale of the Milky Way and a ton of activities to do around it. Dogfighting, piracy, powerplay (faction wars), bounty hunting, mining, trading, exploration, engineering... the list goes on. It's pretty fun solo, and even more so with friends. The galaxy is shared among all players, and in fact, there's an open play gamemode where you can encounter other players at random.
But there's several issues with all of this. No one who wants to make money plays open, because gankers love ruining fun. But that means pirating is off the table, since there's no one carrying goodies around.
PvP and Bounty Hunting are exhilarating, but the payout compared to repair costs and a rebuy risk? Not worth it.
Trading can get you some good money... except there's no station browser. You have to manually dock at stations to get their info, and THEN you can see commodity info on the galaxy map, but you have to navigate a 3d map to find your stations. Or skip all that and use EDDB.io.
Exploration is great... for the first dozen hours or two. Watching loading screen after loading screen for hours to maybe find something weird out there is not really worth it.
That leaves me to mining.
All of the above pays around maybe a few hundred thousand to a few million per run. Now keep in mind, most ships are in the millions, with the most expensive ship being 200,000,000 credits.
Look at the "max sell price" of a mineable resource called Low Temperature Diamons: https://inara.cz/galaxy-commodity/144/
That's 1.5 million. Per unit. A single asteroid can net you about 10 Diamonds.
Mining is the only thing that can get you a reasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time. But mining gets stale quick.
If you want a proper space trading game with some good combat and a way to build an automated trading empire, check out X4: Foundations.