Elite Dangerous – Bulletin Boards and Rare Trading Guide

We already talked about the different career paths you can follow in Elite Dangerous, but we’ve yet to touch on one feature these careers all have in common, the Bulletin Board.

Understanding the Bulletin Board

The Bulletin Board can be found under the Starport Services area at any major Starport or Outpost. When viewing the board, you’ll notice there are two distinct areas of interest, one featuring jobs you can take on and complete, and then assignments you don’t have the requirements for. The latter jobs require a higher reputation in the current system, and in order to accomplish this, you’ll want to find jobs that increase reputation.

There are five total mission types available on the Bulletin Board: Courier missions, Trade missions, Steal missions, Mercenary Missions and Assassination missions. These base five mission types are then broken down into sub-categories.

The Courier sub-type includes missions focused on delivering messages and commodities. The Trade category, on the other hand, contains missions that focus on delivering gifts, goods, narcotics, slaves, prohibited commodities, non-lethal and personal weapons. Steal missions include making off with items like medicine, narcotics and salvage. Mercenary missions will push players into quests to kill authority vessels, bounty hunters, pirates and traders. Finally, Assassination requires players to kill civilians, military and pirate vessels for payment.

Each of these mission types will reward Commanders with reputation increases, credits, influence, economy and even security bonuses. Some missions, like assassinating civilian or military ships will decrease certain traits.

You’ll find jobs that you’ve taken under the Transaction tab of the Left-Hand Panel inside your ship. It should also be noted that every job is in real-time, and some jobs will penalize the pilot for dropping out or not completing the mission for any reason.

Rare Trading

Now that you understand the Bulletin Board, it’s  time to take another look at trading, but this time we’re going to take a closer look at a smaller niche of the trading economy in Elite Dangerous.

Rare Trading is not only rewarding but also extremely dangerous, and players will want to be fully prepared before setting out on long journeys that are bound to come with this job.

Unlike normal trading, which we covered last week in our How to Trade article, Rare trading focuses on special commodities that can only be bought in small amounts at certain stations.

These items can then be sold to other stations for large amounts of credits, depending on how far away you are from the parent station. The price seems to stop growing once you reach 120LY out, and this makes it a very good point to sell things.

Tip: To maximize profits per hour when running Rare trade runs, make sure your ship is as fast and light as possible.

Lave to Fujin

One of the longest running Rare trade runs involves picking up Lavian Brandy and selling it after reaching 120LY away from the Lave system, however we’ll take things a bit further and share a nice trade route which will net you over 6520,000 credits in 34 minutes.

To use the table below, start at the first station and jump to the station listed below it until you reach Fujin and sell off your cargo.

Remember that Rare trade commodities do not fall under the normal rules of the economy, and thus can be repeatedly bought and sold as much and as often as they are available. More trade routes are being discovered each day, and it’s only a matter of time before you’ll fly through the stars with millions of credits stashed in your bank account.