Traders pointless in later game?

ben1991

Traders seem to rarely offer anything of any value - either low-value resources or easily crafted equipment. Fine when you're just starting out and can't make your own stuff, but there's little point visiting them once you've spent some time unlocking perks.

Any chance we could get a perk to increase the quality of goods on offer at traders? i.e. more dark matter/energy, crystals, gas, Mk2/3 equipment. Would also be great to purchase upgrades there, too.

invenio

I agree. 80-90% of the time they offer nothing that is worth buying.

Giraffasaur

The Trading Perk has one particular upgrade to have Traders occasionally buy resources, which can add a nice boost of Credits if you're selling off extras (which there can be a lot of).

Furthermore, Traders can have some useful deals, including high-tier Weapons, Devices, Nanobots and Access Keys that can be traded for. And let's not forget that as a neutral faction their ship itself can be used defensively against Outlaw Fighters. Trader turrets are surprisingly powerful.

Overall I do have to agree that I'd like to see Traders with more options.

ben1991

They certainly can, but it's pretty rare. That's the problem really, they're so unlikely to have anything worth buying that they're not really that important.

More options would be good, but I'd like to see them really provide a viable alternative (or a complement to) the crafting system. Especially once you hit those higher level blueprints you need a lot of dark matter to build things, and there's really not much of it about. The option to buy high-level gear (at a high price) would be nice, or to reliably buy rare crafting materials.

Jisei

Interaction with traders would greatly benefit from (much) longer lists of goods on offer - now I only see around 4 deals (meh, for such a big trader ship...). It could also give you a freebie after you help it get rid of some outlaws. I remember spending quite some time in games like Freelancer, X3 and Galaxy on fire, scrolling through those long lists of merch, scratching my head on how to best spend my credits and what stuff to sell - I think it gives any space game an interesting facet. Maybe there could be some kind of big trading post which sells almost every resource and weapon (a station, a black market inside an asteroid?) occurring once in a run..
Edit: sorry, just now I remembered that service stations also trade goods, but they still offer very few deals. So everything comes down to just how much different transactions there is on offer..