RedlineRonin
Member
Farming is probably still the best. Theorycrafting based on Economies tests I've done and seeing some Farmer feedback, maybe Farmers can make up to 10-12 million an hour with a large enough farm; best numbers I've crunched for Economies, assuming a 48 slot ship, were about 5 million an hour. Both those figures are very endgame though... Especially Farming.
Economies trading though is pretty scaleable. Probably more so than mining because there's much less travel time involved so at least when you move lower volume, you spent much less time traveling to sell. Basically buy in one Economy type and sell in its ideal target market (E.g. Mining Economy Trade Items in an Manufacturing Economy). Wealth level affects quantity of items that merchants have but early on any merchant probably has enough for you.
BTW, Economies affect item prices, too, but not by much. I've seen gold hover around 220 credits in both Mining and Manufacturing Economies. Interestingly, the only time I've ever seen it about 225 was in... Alchemy Economy, I think it was. Alchemy or Processing, pretty sure it was the former.
But if you're mining and sell a lot of Gold, you can still squeak out an extra 5-10% maybe. Think the large variation I've seen in gold was a min of 211 and a max of 228 so it's still sub <10% room for improvement if you were selling low. (All the prices are pre-player sale... I've purposefully been only mining Elerium and been keeping/not selling a stack of gold so I can compare prices that haven't been lowered by player supply.)
Also, BTW, there are only 5 or 6 Economy types. There are quite a few names for the same ones... Mining, Prospecting, Ore Extraction, Minerals... Technically are all "Mining." Manufacturing, Engineering, Industrial, Construction -- all "Manufacturing." Sort of like how planet descriptions also have multiple descriptions for the same core biomes (e.g. Lifeless Moon, Airless Moon, etc of Windy Wastes, Arid Planet, Desert, etc).
Scanning back through the last few pages for stuff I missed.
Where does the game tell you what type of economy you're in?