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Free Traders
Free traders will buy low and sell high in a given solar system automatically. They do not always take the best deal available, but they can make an awful lot of money very fast nonetheless. They often are prime targets for pirate raiders.You can set any ship type as a free trader. Cargo ships tend to work best money wise, but nothing prevent you from using beefier ships to do the job. Endangered free traders, granted their jump-drive is ready will try to jump to safety when faced with certain doom, but it's still possible for it to be destroyed during jump preparations.
Setup a Trader
To set one of your ships as a free trader, open the ship’s setup menu, select a new home-sector (you can select any sector in a given solar system) for it, then in the AI package menu select the Free Trader option to run it. If you’ve not set an home-sector, it will automatically use its current sector.
If you select a home-sector in a solar system, you'll restrict the free trader to that particular solar system, independently of its other settings.
If you set the home-sector outside of a solar system, it will use its current settings, and granted you've set a long range and allows it to use warp-gates, it will most likely cover all the map.
Tips
- Free traders are prime target for pirates. Be wary of systems with a pirate base nearby or, worst, inside.
- Setting too many traders in a the same system will reduce your potential income as they'll compete with each other.
- The Sirak police do not care about 3rd party ships.
- Joining the pirate guild minimize the likelihood of your free traders being hit.
- You can assign some of your ships as escort for your traders, they’ll follow automatically.
- You will sometimes loose free traders, and most often than not it will cost you the goods it was carrying too.
- They are still very good money earners.
Troubleshooting
Occasionally a trader will seem to have stopped working. It generally happens when there are no profitable deal in the zone you've allocated the trader to. Those situations tend to fix themselves after a few dozen minutes, but on rare occasions, you might want to move your ship to a more profitable area.
