You can also become a hunter. Buy a starter weapon at one of the various trade terminals in towns and outposts, for example the Sollomate Opalo, a laser carbine. It�s best to start with hunting low-health animals with a low damage potential, such as Exarosaurs, Sabakumas and Daikibas and avoid Combibos, Cornundacandas and Berycled. Although their damage is fairly weak they have quite some health.
Note that although the swords and other melee weapons don�t use ammo, their decay, or loss in value, is equal to the cost a rifle would cause per shot to deal the same damage, which means it won�t be cheaper to use blades really.
Once you have your weapon, then you go out and hunt several creatures and loot them once you killed them, by clicking on the carcass.
In hunting, your general goal is to reduce cost, by using weapons which are �maxed� for example and wearing the right armor for the prey.
Mining
You might also become a miner by buying and using the mining equipment from the trade terminal. There are 2 types of resource you can mine for, ore and enmatter. Each will require a matching finder/seeker, a matching extractor/excavator and either bombs for ore or probes for enmatter. The finder will be used to detonate the bomb or set the probe into the ground. The finder will then see if there are is a resource deposit near. If it is, a claim marker will appear. Using the excavator on the claim marker will then extract the resources and put them into your inventory. Although the starting costs in mining are higher, the mark-up of the resources you find tends to be higher than the hunting loots, which may make it easier to break even and profit. But you must keep in mind the search radius of your finder when you mine, which is usually around 50m, so you have to run around 100m to avoid searching the same area twice.
Crafting
Another profession to try would be crafter, which will require a blueprint (BP) of the item you want to craft, and a matching blueprint book which contains a slot for the blueprint. For example a weapon BP will just fit in a weapon blueprint book. You will also need an amount of the required resources listed in the blueprint. Then you find and use a construction machine, open your blueprint book and click at the blueprint you want to use, place the resources in the machine as well and start manufacturing. If you don�t want to click yourself all the time you can also set it on auto mode.
BPs will have a quality rating, which will have an influence on your chance of success on the crafting attempt, the higher the quality rating the better. The quality rating will also show in the value of the blueprint, a 1 quality rating blueprint will have a tt-value of 1 pec (0.01 PED) while a 100 quality rating blueprint will have a tt-value of 1 PED. Each attempt can result in 3 possibilities:
- success�you get the item you wanted
- near success�you get some resources and residue back
- failure�all resources are lost.
Items, Decay and Mark-Up
Once you have PEDs more options arise, now that you can finally buy equipment and resources. Note that items will lose value on use, for example if you would buy a long blade from the trade terminal (TT) for 15.80 PED and use it once, it will just be worth 15.75 PED, so you would just get 15.75 PED if you want to sell it back to the trade terminal again in this case. You can repair the repairable items and tools at a repair terminal, in this example it would cost you 5 PEC, or 0.05 PED to repair it to the maximum value.
The trade terminal value, usually shortened to �tt�, is the amount of money you would get if you sell the item to a trade terminal. However, many items will have some mark-up, the money other players are willing to pay above the plain tt-value to buy the item.
So for example, could you sell an �Axe 1x0� which has a tt-value of 3 PEDS, for tt+1, which would mean you could ask 4 PEDs for it.
For stackable resources, like the Lysterium ore, the mark-up is based on a percentage. For example if you have 2 stacks of an ore, the first stack has 1000 units and has a tt-value of 10 PED, the second stack of 10000 units has a tt-value of 100 PED; if the price for Lysterium would be 110%, you could ask 11 PED for the first stack and 110 PED for the second stack..
Knowing that, you already know how to trade. When you know you can sell your ore for 110%, but some people are in a hurry sell it and sell it for 108%, you realize you can get some profit that way.
Items with Skill Increase Bonus, Limited Items
Some of the tools and weapons you encounter will have a so-called Skill Increase Bonus (SIB), which generally allows you to reach the best performance of a weapon at lower skill levels than items without SIB. It is generally advised to use maxed SIB weapons, which will show in the item info like �SIB-Not anymore.� Although most of those items are limited and thus can�t be repaired and have to be bought again once they are broken, the better performance tends to save more money than the cost in mark-up for every new item you buy, when compared to a weaker (i.e. more costly) performance of non-SIB items.
