Making money whilst exploring in Elite Dangerous - Exploring the Galaxy

Exploring the Galaxy

Want to earn riches whilst exploring the galaxy? Of course you do! Man can't live on beautiful screenshots of Shark-Tooth-Religious-Artifacts alone (well I probably could for a while..)

I covered the essential fitting items in my previous post (Making money whilst exploring in Elite Dangerous - Fitting your Ship) so this is all about my methods to make profit whilst exploring.

Jumping around

When travelling around this great galaxy of ours, the initial urge is to jump on the fastest jump setting. This is great for travelling fast from place to place, but not so great for exploring.

What I do instead is jump fast (set to Fastest Routes) until I'm 20LY away (or more) from my base location - as you can't sell system data to a station within 20LY of the explored system.

Once I'm over 20LY away, I'll switch to economical jumping (Economical Routes) and jump from system to system. Simply pick somewhere reasonably far away, plot a route there and off you go!

What to fully explore

So you've landed in a system. Is it worth fully exploring & scanning?

1. Check the Star - Is it a rare star? (a white dwarf, or Neutron star?). You should target it anyway and start the scanning process. Is it scoopable? (remember KGB FOAM, as Stars with this classification are scoopable) If it is, then you might want to get slightly closer and scoop further.
2. Honk the horn - Hit the Advanced Discovery Scanner to scan all the other bodies in this system
3. Open the System Map - Whilst the scanning is in progress, and maybe the scooping, open the system map up. Look at the bodies in system. You are looking for -



Scan these

1. Gas Giants - any that are within 2000LS from the point of origin. You'll be scanning these.
2. Planets - any that look earthlike or that will have water. You'll be scanning these too
3. Planets/Worlds - any that have a pattern or colouring to them. This is the last thing I'll scan.
4. Additional Suns - if they are reasonably close. But I would ignore anything over 5000LS for a sun.
5. Ignore - any worlds that look rocky or have no pattern (ie. are plain). Anything that is too far away (over 2000LS). Asteroid belts - these aren't worth the exploration time
4. Target the nearest body of interest - And fly towards it. It will initially be "unknown". When you get near enough, your scanner will kick in and will fully scan it. Be patient whilst scanning - it can take some seconds to complete!  The distance the object is scannable depends on how big the object is-
1. Suns/Stars - about 5000LS
2. Gas Giants - 900LS
3. Planets - 90LS
4. Moons - 15LS
5. Hit the next body of interest - If every body in the system is of interest, you can simply use the Navigation tab to pick your next target. But if there are a lot of things to ignore, then you'll need to open the system map and select your next target.  So pick your next target, fly to it and scan it
6. Repeat until all bodies in system are explored (or there's only ignorable ones left) - then Jump to the next system in your route
1. It's useful to bind a key to target your next system in route (I use shift-N).
2. Otherwise, go to the navigation tab, and look for the system with the little orange "next" symbol in it, target it and jump away.

I call this Stop-Honk-Scoop-Scan-Shoot 

As I said in my previous post, there's a lot more information on the Frontier forums under Nutter’s explorers guide to the Galaxy. The above shows how I personally drive around (honking)