You probably already know that you can fly up to within 1000dm of a random NPC ship and hit F4 to open the in-space trading interface, but the obvious sort of trading isn't usually the most profitable way to make money off of them.

As it turns out, your unusually generous nature can pay off big time when dealing with them. Not only can you get coordinates of cargo containers with valuable loot or new planets, but a significant amount of the time they'll give you contraband that's worth much more than you've ever given them!

Here is what you need to know.

Before you do anything else here you're going to need a supply of bribery money. So if you're just starting out, see the other excellent guide on here about how to make money. Mining hydrogen in a nebula and making it into flucrum drives at a construct station will get you more than enough money for a bribery/gift fund in only a couple of trips, so that is an excellent idea.

My suggestion is that if you just started the game, don't proceed with this guide until you at least have a ship with 5 cargo bays and a surplus of maybe 300,000cr to play with. However it will not take you much time mining hydrogen and crafting fulcrum drives to make that money.

If you're not just starting out, how much money you need is probably going to depend on your civilian rating. (At the time of writing this, mine is "Skilled" so the costs here are based on that.)

It took me a while to figure out the most efficient way to approach and open the "trade" interface with NPC ships, so I'll detail some of the basic things you can do here to make this as painless as possible.

First, and most obvious: go to some place with lots of non-hostile NPC ships like a busy station. Also you really want to have 5 empty cargo bays so you're less likely to get attacked and can receive stuff from NPCs, especially the free stuff.

Target an NPC ship, which you can do by hitting R to target the closest ship, T to cycle through all targets in the area, or put your gunsight on their ship and hit Y.

Now, hit F for [F]orm up (or you might prefer to think of this as [F]ollow) which will cause your autopilot to get you within 1000dm of the target ship and keep you there. Assuming your target doesn't jump away or something then this will keep the trading interface from closing due to the target being out of range. Note that [F]orm up only works with non-hostile targets. If you're trying to deal with a hostile target then you'll have to manually take steps to keep them in range long enough to use the interface to bribe them, but once bribed into non-hostility you should be able to use F.

If you're rather far away from your target, just hit the afterburner (tab) to speed things up. The autopilot will slow back down again once you get close, but don't get too carried away with speed (obviously).

Once you're in range, hit F4 to open the trading interface (assuming they don't reject your trade request) and your autopilot should keep you in range the whole time unless the target jumps away or something.

Two things I should mention just so you don't forget: You can bribe some hostile NPCs into not being hostile anymore. Once you do this you can deal with them the same as any other non-hostile NPC ships. Some hostie NPCs will refuse your trade request, especially if you're carrying valuable cargo that they want to steal.

Also, if you happen to have hired any fleet members you can try to pump them for info too just like any other non-hostile NPC.

You may already know that you can bribe hostile ships into leaving you alone by offering them money in exchange for nothing, but you can also just give money to non-hostile ships.

Why would you want to do this? Because not only do you have standing with factions in a given system but you also have a standing with individual ships. While giving money to a ship won't improve your standing with it's associated faction, it does seem to "butter up" the individual pilot to make them more favorably disposed towards you when you ask them for information.

I haven't really done a careful study yet, but it seems that giving them money will lessen the number of cases where they respond with stuff like "if you were allied with the rebels then I'd have something for you." It seems that they may not care what their faction thinks if they have a high individual opinion of you.

How much money do you need to give them? This is hard to say, and it probably depends on your rank. It seems that if I ask for information and an NPC has some they're willing to sell, then at my current rank ("Skilled") they ask for around 55,000cr. When I first started out and my rank was zero they only asked me for 5,500cr or so.

As it turns out, 50,000cr is about what I'd usually currently need to bribe a hostile ship to make them non-hostile. So that's also what I usually give to non-hostile ships before I try to get info out of them.

If they insist on trying to sell me something then I usually just buy it from them and after that offer them the "gift" of free money.

Once you've bribed them in this manner you're ready to hit "ask for info".

And apparently it comes back around many times over. You may be wondering if giving out free cash is going to get expensive, but apparently not. This is because, statistically speaking, NPC ships will give you very valuable contraband items instead of information a small percentage of the time. Even if they don't directly give you an item and insead give you the coordinates of some hidden cargo containers, the containers will probably contain stuff that's worth more than you give them.

I haven't done an exhaustive study, but here's a quick and crude set of results to give you some idea of your return on investment.

I approached about 10 ships around the same station and here are the results:

• 3 ships just rejected the trade request (I gave them nothing but wasted some time)
  
• 2 ships I gave 50,000cr each to but they didn't have any worthwhile information when I asked (got a useless but otherwise free response)
  
• 1 ship I gave 50,000cr to and paid another 55,000cr to for information, but they just ran off with my money and gave me nothing
  
• 2 ships I gave 50,000cr to each and paid 55,000cr to each for information. One gave me the coordinates of hidden cargo containers and the other gave me the sector coordinates of a sector with "something interesting" (probably an uncharted planet).
  
• 1 ship I gave 50,000cr to and paid 55,000cr to for information, but they dumped their contraband Build Constructor on me instead (which I sold in Perl for about 1.5Mcr)
  
• 1 ship I gave 50,000cr to and paid 55,000cr to for information, but they dumped their contraband Auto CM Launcher on me instead (sold in Perl for about 6Mcr)

So basically I paid or gifted around 625,000cr but got 7,500,000cr worth of expensive "contraband" equipment in exchange! That's a pretty good deal.

I think I probably got a bit lucky on that run of attempts, but it's pretty safe to say that at least at my ranking and paying out these amounts of money, I'm practically guaranteed to at least recoup the costs of my gifts, and that's before I even explore the coordinates that I got from the others and loot any containers there. And it's kind of fun playing interstellar Santa Clause.

Once you're done selling all that expensive contraband you're probably going to have collected a number of coordinates that you'll want to check out. Unfortunately many of those places may be 500 sectors or more away from the closest jump gate. So you're going to want to make sure you're prepared for long trips like that.

This isn't really an exploration guide, but here are some basic tips on what you'll want to do before setting out on any long journeys like this.

• You're going to want to have at least a Fulcrum C5 jump drive so you can jump 5 sectors at a time. Really you want the super secret high tech jump drive that can jump even further, but I won't cover that here. All I'll say is, check out the highest tech planets and stations you can find. Doing all the IMG quests will help.
  
• You'll also want at least a Class 4 fuel tank or larger.
  
• Equip a Deploy Constructor so you can deploy a fuel station for yourself if you run low on fuel. This is a slow way to refuel though, which is why you want the larger fuel tank.
  
• Bring a Terrain Walker if you can afford it, but don't worry too much about this. It comes in handy if any containers happen on be on planet surfaces or underwater where you can't get at them with the ship tractor beam.
  
• Don't forget your tractor beam
  
• Science Ops and Navigator crew members can be quite helpful

Once you're ready, check out the quadrant map and try to find the closest system to the coordinates that you want to investigate. Fly there with jump gates, type in the coordinates in your nav panel, and hit the autopilot (Alt-F). Turn off the IDS (space bar) during the long trip to keep it from wasting fuel trying to stabilize the ship between jumps.

So far I've investigated maybe 5 or 6 sets of container coordinates, but most of them weren't worth that much. One of them did have a container full of Fulcrum torpedoes worth several million credits though.

Buttering up NPC ships with gifts and pumping them for info can not only make you some money, but also help you find potentially interesting new places that perhaps no other player has even found yet. While you will get mixed results with any given ship, statistically you'll come out ahead even after a fairly small number of attempts.