Starflight Resource Pages

OVERVIEW

There are only four effective moneymaking strategies in Starflight 1: mining, endurium collection, recommending colony worlds, and debris collection.  At the start of the game your ship will not be able to barely leave the system let alone destroy alien fleets.  Lifeforms increase in value the further you are from Arth and again are just about worthless in any nearby system that you are capable of traveling to, besides taking up on average much more cargo space than minerals do for the same value.  Recommending colony worlds is only rapidly profitable when the player cheats and looks up a referenced table such as the one on this web site.  If you want to skip the privateering aspect of Starflight, the actual quickest way to do so is to simply start a game with one million credits, in which case you wouldn't even be reading this.  For this reason, this article will concentrate on the first two moneymaking strategies both euphemistically can be described as mining.

Let's first look at a few charts and then go through the planets one at a time.

OPTIMUM PLANETS

* Distance for this table was calculated by the formula: [(x1 - y1)^2 + (x2 - y2)^2] ^ (1/2)  taking into account travel through each continuum flux. Your actual fuel usage will be slightly higher because every time you stop moving fuel is either rounded up or rounded down.  A random extra distance is required to avoid objects and also to navigate around the random positioning when a player is dropped out of a continuum flux.  Also you are forced to travel in diagonals and straight lines and not directly to your target.

** Does not take into effect endurium or mineral density and only factors in the top three most common minerals available on the planet.

You are capable of making this trip only when you have more than twice as much fuel as listed on this chart for your engine class.

125, 100 - P3

I'm sure most of you are wondering why this planet is listed as one of the three optimum planets for mining.  Of course it is in the same system as Arth and easy to travel to, and at least one random ruin on this planet gives the location of an important artifact, but landing and launching eat up 0.8 CM of fuel, and the minerals are not that valuable or that common.

The answer is ancient ruins.  Endurium is very easy to spot on the map, more than twice as valuable as any other mineral, and appears just as often in low altitudes where fuel usage and storm damage is at a minimum.  Ancient ruins appear on only certain planets, but they have the same density as on any other plant containing ancient ruins.  If you travel to close to the waterline, nothing will appear so the best way to collect endurium is on moderate altitude ground halfway between the water and the mountains.  Ancient ruins never appear too close to each other but they are quite consistent so if you travel in one direction a good distance another one will appear promptly for you.

137, 156 - P2

No ancient ruins or endurium here, but this planet has a lot of perks.  No lifeforms to attack you, no fuel is used to launch and land, no weather at all, and plenty of mountainous ranges.  50% mineral density is more than enough to absolutely pack your terrain vehicle and all of the three most common minerals are valuable.  Typically four trips out traveling to all four points of the compass is sufficient before you launch and land somewhere else.  The most valuable mineral in the game, Rodium, named for Rod McConnell and often mistaken for Rhodium(Rh), is very common here.

217, 88 - P4

This is the old empire's primary mining planet of Mardan-4 and the empire definitely knew what it was doing when it picked it.  The system is possibly named for a private school in Irvine California, named after the school where Greg Johnson's mother is/was? an administrator.  The planet is absolutely packed with valuable minerals, only slightly less valuable on average than the planet in 137, 156.  The presence of ancient ruins, recent ruins with curio artifacts, and the fact that the planet itself is colonizable for 50,000 credits more than helps make up the difference.

OTHER OPTIONS

Now for cheaters, consider that minerals, lifeforms, and endurium is restocked when the player leaves orbit.  But planetary data is only randomized when the player either leaves the system or orbits another planet.  The quickest possible way to get money within the confines of the game is to locate an ancient ruin with 9.0-9.9 CM of endurium, pick it up, launch and leave orbit, and then immediately reenter orbit and land on the same spot to pick up the same quantity of endurium again and again.  As you can see, this trick is good for refilling fuel tanks when far away from starport, but would only be marginally faster than normal mining.

Just a note, terrain is rerandomized every time this happens and if water happens to appear closer next time then it was before, the object will not be placed.