Elite: Dangerous Blog

Community Goals pop up every week, sometimes several at once. So what? Well, they are a pretty easy way to make money. Lots of money.

If ever there was a get-rich-quick scheme that was legitimate to play in Elite: Dangerous, Community Goals would be it!

Community Goals are effectively a mission that can be worked on as a collective project by all players, usually running for a week starting on a Thursday. They have tiers (target amounts like a cash-o-meter on a telethon) which if met, increase the end pay out. If the time limit is hit or the final tier reached, the mission ends.

As a player makes contributions to a goal, their efforts are rated from top 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%. 10% and Top 10 Commanders (the best of the best!). Rewards are paid from the minimum at the top 100% to the maximum for those at the top 10%, the Top 10 CMDRs getting the largest pay out of all.

Types of community goal

• Bounty hunting – killing ships wanted in a system and handing in Bounty Vouchers
• Building capital ships or starports – supplying one of more commodities for construction
• Exploration – handing in cartographic data
• Piracy – stealing illegal goods from ships
• Trade – supplying one of more commodities
• Wars – killing ships in Conflict Zones

All community goals are not made equal. Some are trade-related and some are combat related. They are open to everyone, but the amount of money you can make is very much dependant on the ship you own. For example a commander flying a Sidewinder with a 4T cargo capacity shipping goods to a station will have to make a LOT of trips to catch up with the CMDR flying an Imperial Cutter with a 734T cargo capacity.

Again a CMDR in a basic Type-6 trader will fare poorly in a Combat Zone compared to a CMDR flying a fully engineer Federal Corvette.

This is an example of where co-operation pays off. With a Wing of four players, while you still won’t hit big rewards in the trade goal itself, you also get 5% of the profit from your other wing-mates. Which could be 100,000CR per trip if one of them is flying a Cutter. A type-6 can score hits on ships in a combat zone, while his wing-mates in combat ships make the kill.

Where to find Community Goals

The Community Goals (or CGs) are listed at the top of the Mission Board in any station.

They are also shown as a yellow icon on the Galaxy Map.

Sign me up!

Rule number one is SIGN UP. Many a commander has handed in cargo or bounty, then realised they had not signed up to the goal FIRST and the effort was wasted. Go to the station running the Community Goal and sign up to the goal you want to play (there may be more than one) before doing anything else.

Your initial reward will be zero until you have made at least one contribution. Then, whatever happens, you will receive the minimum reward pay out. All the rewards increase at each completed tier, so the minimum reward can only get BIGGER!

Okay, so how do I get rich quick?

The typical minimum payout of one of the community goals in recent months has been somewhere around the 500,000CR mark. For a new player, getting half a million credits for shipping one ton of Grain or killing one Eagle in a Low risk Resource Extraction Site is a pretty easy way to get a rapid leg-up in the game.

This doesn't just apply to new players.

Wing up. If you and some buddies (or friendly strangers) wing up in a resource extraction site, you can pull down larger ships, watch each others backs and generally kill targets a heck of a lot faster than you could on your own. Even splitting the bounty four ways, the amounts you can make increase greatly because you dispatch ships so fast. Small ships can keep fighters off big ships. Big ships make killing those juicy Anacondas a breeze. The Wing is your friend.

But I'm a shut-in with no friends and only play in Solo mode. How do I get rich? Well, again it's easy, but you need to use the police as your Wing. This only works for Bounty Hunting CGs, but there are always a few happening, so you don't have to wait long for one to come up.
The tactic is simple. Go into a HIGH or LOW risk Resource Extraction Site (not Hazardous - they are not policed) and find and follow the police ships (green on your radar) and shoot whatever ships they are attacking. For minimum risk, go after targets with shields already down and hull under 50%. Shoot to get some hit damage, then move on. When the cops kill the target, you get paid the full bounty. Using this method a new CMDR in a Sidewinder can make 100K CR every few minutes. You only need to inflict damage to get paid.
You then hand in your bounty to the Community Goal and depending on how much time you put in over the week, you could easily get into the top 50% or even top 25%.

Imagine ending your first week in the game with 5-10CR Million!

Show me the money

Finally, don't forget to go back to the community goal station when the mission is complete and collect your rewards.


As you can see from my screenshot, pocketing 40M CR is perfectly possible! Yes, that shiny new ship or part will be yours! Mwhahahaahaha!!!

Why no updates?

For the last few weeks I've been working on the ship blueprints to the exclusion of all else (pretty much). Corrections to the French editions today and finishing the German versions now I have more translations is keeping me busy and I may also have corrections to do to the Spanish editions as well, so the task is ongoing.

I bought CorelDRAW X8 with some birthday money, so the documents are being merged into single files with language layers.

What else?

In game, I made the trip out to the Formidine Rift and carried out some exploration towards the Community Goal. When I got back to the bubble last week, I took my Corvette out bounty hunting and let of some steam with my ship launched fighter using matching ship skins and weapon colours!

This week I have been running missions for the various factions at Jameson Memorial in Shinrarta Dezhra to raise my reputation to "allied" across the board, the reason being you only get the juicy passenger missions from factions your allied with. Since my ships are mostly parked at Jameson, it made sense to get all popular at my home base, so I can set out with my Beluga (it has blue paint, so does that make it a Blue-luga?) and get a few high-paying trips under my belt.

In other news...

Ah yes, also Frontier have just announced Elite: Dangerous for the PlayStation 4. So welcome to the Galaxy PlayStation gamers, we look forward to seeing you out there!

CMDR Cosmo on the Frontier Forums pointed out the following items of interest in the trailer:

- 0:08 the player character stands in the ship at 0:08. Spacelegs confirmed?
- 0:15 Asteroid base
- 0:46 New Capital Ship, maybe a Generation Ship
- 1:27 multi-crew with faces and rank customization on the spacesuit.

I made the Combat rank of Elite this week after 18 months and 15 weeks of play-time. Which goes to show it can be done without any grind.

I was helping a new player (Awesome_Gamer) and thought a bit of bounty-hunting combined with a Community Goal (The crime crackdown at Morrina) would be a good way to introduce him to the concept of community goals and do some pirate-hunting for cash in the process.

Over the week of the CG my young Padawan went from a Cobra Mk III to a Viper Mk IV and put several million credits in the bank. He’s current goal is to achieve enough rank with the Federation for a SOL permit.

On Monday night I pushed the combat rank from Deadly that last 1% into Elite. I’m now looking forward to seeing what missions that this new status unlocks!

Choose your weapon

For the most part in Elite, I tend to fly around in multi-role ships favouring light armour and good jump range over ships with heavy combat loadouts and short range.

I’ve owned an Anaconda since February of 2014, so a lot of smaller ships have simply passed me by, having been added later. Although I own a Federal Corvette (The "Kharon") which is a monster of a combat ship, I hadn’t really tried any others.

During this week’s CG though, I took out my Federal Assault Ship on CMDR Ranualf’s recommendation and loadout advice and found it an amazing ship. Agile, tough and very adept at bounty hunting. Having found the change rather satisfying, I dusted off my Vulture from storage and took “Toomes” out for flight last night (Spider-man fans will get the reference). Wow! The thing is a killer. A space-faring attack-dog! Equipped with a C3 Beam and E3 Pulse I was racking and stacking the kills, but the best part was how it sounded. The audio effects are pure artistry! If you haven’t tried these ships, do yourself a favour – you don’t know what you’re missing.

Footnote: In case you are wondering why I have ships I haven't flown, it's because I have every ship, but until this February I only had four. The rapidly acquired collection of ships are for my VR shipyard at LaveCon.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Yesterday I received the most forum reputation I’ve ever had for any single post! People were complaining on the forums (shocker there) that 2.1 was over-hyped. I pointed out that, just like the militants in Monty Python’s Life of Brian in the "What have the Romans ever done for us?" sketch, that you can give someone everything or nothing or something in between and they will STILL be unhappy.

To make the point with a bit of satire, I whipped up a GIF file.

The best bit (for me) was when someone reposted this on Reddit and people were making complaint posts underneath, about how it "..was outrageous for them to have to pay $60 for these fixes to be done when all the Horizons functionality should have been in the game at launch for free!"

Clearly the irony was lost. Everything mentioned (except skid marks) is free and available to everyone at the next release. My point made for me – you just can’t please some people.

Or… How I crashed my Anaconda.

Over the weekend I had been doing a mix of Wing trading with other members of dMw getting lots of trade dividends and spending some time shooting ships at Lugh, racking up credits with the “The Spear of Lugh” community goal.

I had bought an upgrade to my Python (Class 5B thrusters) which hit my bank account by 5 million credits, so with the bank balance at 8 million, I needed to do some trading to bring my account back to the 12 million mark, so I would have twice my Anaconda re-buy value.

Over the course of Saturday and Sunday I went from 8M CR to about 16.5M CR, which was great, because with the mixture of combat and trading I was doing, nothing was too repetitive and it only took a few hours on the day.

Sunday evening, everyone else had logged off and I was a bit tired, but I had a 600CR fine at a station around 50Lyr away, so I set sail for “one last trip” to go and pay the fine.

Leaving the station at Gliese 868 I was on too high a throttle setting and realised it too late I also had upward momentum!  Frantic use of thrusters failed to arrest my collision with the edge of the station exit and boom! No more Anaconda and six million credits then left my account to re-buy the ship (thankfully with no cargo on board).

So, the moral of the story is always have your insurance, but if you don’t want to NEED it, don’t fly tired; you make mistakes. Really costly ones.