Pilots Trade Network Elite: Dangerous

AFK MASSACRE MISSION STACKING

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Introduction

Please read this entire guide before starting your AFK journey.

It con­tains a lot of use­ful infor­ma­tion. If you still have ques­tions after, we will be hap­py to help! AFK Mas­sacre Stack­ing (Also referred to as Laser Death Dis­co Barge, AFK T10, or sim­ply AFK) is a great method for mak­ing large amounts of cred­its in Elite Dan­ger­ous with very lit­tle effort. You will also earn sig­nif­i­cant amounts of all types of engi­neer­ing mate­ri­als, and can also earn super­pow­er rank for the empire or the fed­er­a­tion. Your com­bat rank will also increase, albeit quite slowly.

This strat­e­gy relies on using a Type 10 Defend­er out­fit­ted with as many laser tur­rets as pos­si­ble, and a fight­er bay with NPC pilot. After gath­er­ing mis­sions to kill pirates en masse, you deploy your ship to get the kills while you are sleep­ing or not at your com­put­er. Once you return, your mis­sions are com­plet­ed and can be turned in or shared.

PTN main­tains the AFK chan­nels on our dis­cord to help you reach your goals in the game, but it only works if you under­stand a few things first.

This guide is orig­i­nal­ly from our Dis­cord serv­er, from where it has been repro­duced with slight adap­ta­tions. You will need to be on our Dis­cord serv­er in order to find oth­er CMDRs to share mis­sions with.
All names with a # in front of them are ref­er­ences to chan­nels on the serv­er, like­wise all names with an @ in front of them are refer­ances to roles. You can find this guide in #📕laser-afk-t10-guide. Click here to join our Dis­cord server.

Contents

1. Things to know before you start
2. Build­ing your ship
3. Prepar­ing to gath­er mis­sions
4. Deploy­ing your ship to get the kills
5. Shar­ing com­plet­ed mis­sions with oth­ers
6. Com­mon ques­tions, tips, and tools
7. Rules to par­tic­i­pate in PTN AFK shares

Things to know before starting

1. DO NOT TURN IN BOUNTIES IN MISSION GIVING SYSTEMS. If stack­ing for Anana, turn in at Lak­sak for an extra 40% bonus!
2. There is no 100% right or wrong way to do AFK T10, dif­fer­ent peo­ple have their own vari­a­tions in strat­e­gy and super­sti­tion.
3. Rebuys should be antic­i­pat­ed regard­less of how engi­neered you build your ship.
4. AFK T10 may cost you around 700m cred­its to out­fit the ship, and rebuy is around 36m cred­its.
5. The shar­ing process is only sup­port­ed by PTN in the Live PC game mode.

You will gain access to the AFK dis­cus­sion and AFK share chan­nels after com­plete­ly read­ing this guide. This guide will give you a basic frame­work to fol­low, but feel free to pick oth­er peo­ples’ brains in #🚢laser-death-barge-dis­co-par­ties.

Building your ship

Step one is to build your T10. We have sev­er­al rec­om­mend­ed builds list­ed below, or you can use builds sug­gest­ed by oth­er guides on the internet.

Gen­er­al build advice
AFK T10 is com­plete­ly pos­si­ble with zero engi­neer­ing, but you should expect more fre­quent rebuys. With min­i­mal engi­neer­ing, your suc­cess rate will increase significantly.

If you don’t have the guardian mod­ules list­ed in our builds, no prob­lem – just use Hull Rein­force­ment Pack­ages instead of Shield Rein­force­ments, and a reg­u­lar pow­er plant with enough engi­neer­ing to pow­er every­thing in the build.

When engi­neer­ing, if you can­not ful­ly engi­neer the ship, we rec­om­mend the fol­low­ing pri­or­i­ty:
1. Long range weapons to G1
2. Pow­er Dis­trib­u­tor
3. Shields
4. Shield Boosters

Point Defence Tur­rets should be pri­or­i­tized in util­i­ty slots 3, 8, 4, or 7 to ensure they cov­er your car­go hatch. We rec­om­mend 3⁄8 or 3÷8÷4 depend­ing on how many you use in your build.

Type of SLF isn’t usu­al­ly too impor­tant, but gen­er­al­ly we rec­om­mend:
- Taipan or Gu-97 Gelid F – Improved dam­age for high­er rank pilots
- Taipan Gelid G – Improved sur­viv­abil­i­ty for low­er rank pilots

Type-10 Defender //

Type-10 Defender

AFK Type 10: No engineering

  • 691m Cr
  • No engi­neer­ing
  • 220 m/s boost
  • 17.53 ly

Overview: It’s pos­si­ble to use a com­plete­ly unengi­neered ship, but expect more babysit­ting and more rebuys.

EDSY
Cori­o­lis

Type-10 Defender //

Type-10 Defender

AFK Type 10: LOW EngineerING

  • 739m Cr
  • Some Engi­neer­ing
  • 312 m/s boost
  • 17.35 ly

Overview: You don’t need a lot of engi­neer­ing to be suc­cess­ful. This build will be more than suf­fi­cient 95% of the time, and you’re extreme­ly unlike­ly to encounter any rebuys. If you don’t have the guardian mod­ules list­ed, no prob­lem – just use Hull Rein­force­ment Pack­ages instead of Shield Rein­force­ments, and a reg­u­lar pow­er plant with enough engi­neer­ing to pow­er every­thing in the build.

Pips: Use 3÷0÷3 for best results.

EDSY
Cori­o­lis

Type-10 Defender //

Type-10 Defender

AFK Type 10: Max Engineering

  • 739m Cr
  • Engi­neered
  • 312 m/s boost
  • 26.66 ly

Overview: Com­plete overkill, but if you want the best… this is it.

EDSY
Cori­o­lis

Preparing to gather missions

PTN has worked to sta­bi­lize a group of sys­tems to pro­vide mas­sacre mis­sions for AFK T10 while hav­ing min­i­mal risk for con­flicts to occur. While this guide will refer to these sys­tems, the tech­nique should work in any AFK systems.

Gath­er mis­sions tar­get­ing Anana Broth­er­hood from the fol­low­ing stations:

Ahayan | Feustel Ring (M pads)
Ahayan | Goep­pert-May­er Vision (M pads)
Ahayan | Pas­cal Plat­form (L pads)

Punei­th | Whee­lock Port (M pads)
Punei­th | Papin Works (M pads)

HIP 90112 | Town­shend Set­tle­ment (M pads)
HIP 90112 | Piaget Orbital (M pads)
HIP 90112 | Kubasov Sta­tion (L pads)

You must build your rep­u­ta­tion with minor fac­tions to be offered the best mas­sacre mis­sions. Start build­ing your rep­u­ta­tion with all of the minor fac­tions in the sys­tem by choos­ing mis­sions that pri­or­i­tize Rep­u­ta­tion rewards until the bar is com­plete­ly full and green with Allied sta­tus. You can use pirate mas­sacre mis­sions to accom­plish this. Excep­tion: Anar­chy fac­tions can be ignored.

Most stacks typ­i­cal­ly fall into the range of 200–700 mil­lion cred­its per CMDR, for a total of rough­ly 1–2 bil­lion per full share.

Gathering Missions:
  1. Your aim is to gath­er 20 wing mis­sions from mis­sion gath­er­ing sys­tems that tar­get the same pirate fac­tion. Use your small ship to gath­er mis­sions to speed things up, as most sta­tions only have one medi­um pad.
    • Medi­um pad sta­tions seem to spawn mis­sions more fre­quent­ly than large pad sta­tions, so we usu­al­ly rec­om­mend you stick to the medi­um pad outposts.
    • We rec­om­mend you lim­it the num­ber of sta­tions across sys­tems if you plan on shar­ing your mis­sions with oth­ers. Gath­er­ing mis­sions across many sta­tions will cause shar­ing to take longer as you will have to repeat­ed­ly move. A pro-tip is to use one sta­tion from each system.
  1. Cor­rect mis­sions will be named “Kill xxxxx pirates”, or “Put down xxxxx pirates”, and can appear in the “All” and “Com­bat” sec­tions of the mis­sion board. DO NOT choose mis­sions with the word “Smug­gler” or “Desert­er”, these are not the cor­rect type of mis­sion. You will know that it is the cor­rect mis­sion type if it has the wing mis­sion icon, has “Pirates” in the title or the mis­sion details, and a num­ber of pirates to kill, not a spe­cif­ic named pirate.
  2. When choos­ing mis­sions, spread the required kill count across as many fac­tions as pos­si­ble. Each kill will count once per fac­tion, pro­gress­ing mul­ti­ple mis­sions at once. Using mul­ti­ple sys­tems to pick up mis­sions can help you accom­plish this faster. Aim­ing for an even num­ber of kills across fac­tions will reduce the time need­ed to com­plete your stack.

Pro tip: Use OD Mis­sion Stack­er to help you spread out your stack across fac­tions Your com­bat rank can deter­mine the reward for these mis­sions. At full rep­u­ta­tion you can expect to see the major­i­ty of mis­sions offer rewards in the fol­low­ing ranges

Below Expert    | 10–25m
Below Dan­ger­ous | 15–30m
Above Dan­ger­ous | 20–39m

Gath­er­ing a com­plete stack of high-pay­out Wing Mis­sions can take a long time so it’s rec­om­mend­ed that you grab the best avail­able and don’t try too hard to get all 20 mis­sions at max pay­out. It’s more cred­its over­all if you get a mix of mis­sions that you can com­plete soon­er, rather than wait­ing hours to try and get 20 great missions.

Deploying your ship to get the kills

Deploy your T10 in: Anana 3 – Resource Extrac­tion Site [Low]

P.T.N. Bait Shop (W8W-99B) is parked near­by to the RES with Repair, Restock, Refu­el, Ship­yard, Out­fit­ting, and Bertran­dite on sale for use as bait. Feel free to park your T10 here for con­ve­nient stor­age. You can set an already hired crew mem­ber to active on the car­ri­er, but you must hire a crew mem­ber at a sta­tion before going to the carrier.

After gath­er­ing 20 mis­sion in your small ship, hire a crew mem­ber if you haven’t already, then head to P.T.N. Bait Shop or any Large sta­tion to swap into your T10.

  1. Log into solo in your Type 10
  2. Load some car­go as bait. Research has shown you should load at least 9,000 cred­its over­all worth of car­go to attract all pirates atten­tion. If load­ing from a car­ri­er, reopen the mar­ket to ensure your car­go reg­is­ters in your inventory.
  3. Set your NPC pilot to active.
  4. Fly your Type 10 to Anana and head to Plan­et 3 – Resource Extrac­tion Site [Low]
  5. After drop­ping in, posi­tion your ship rough­ly 5–10 km from the RES mark­er, put your pips 4÷0÷2 or 3÷0÷3, then deploy your hardpoints.
  6. Deploy your NPC fight­er and set them to “Engage at will”.
  7. Make sure all tur­rets are in a fire group and are set to “Fire at Will”.
  8. Mon­i­tor for a few min­utes to check that you aren’t about to be over­whelmed with ene­mies (fresh spawns upon drop­ping into an instance can be heavy)
  9. Go AFK!

Depend­ing on your stack size and spread, your mis­sions should com­plete with­in 4–8 hours. If you are run­ning an unengi­neered T10, you may want to mon­i­tor the ene­mies in the instance to gauge their dif­fi­cul­ty. see “easy vs dif­fi­cult instances” below for more details.

Sharing completed missions with others

AFK can be done alone for decent prof­it, but the major­i­ty of the prof­its come from oth­er peo­ple’s mis­sions when sharing.

When ready to share, grab the LFW-AFK role from ⁠#👀look­ing-to-share

  1. Check the #⁠🚣laser-death-shares (only vis­i­ble with the @LFW-AFK role) chan­nel for oth­er CMDRs who are look­ing to share. If nobody is plan­ning a group, you can ping the @LFW-AFK role to noti­fy oth­ers that you are ready to share. Be polite and please lim­it ping­ing this role to only once per day as it pings hun­dreds of peo­ple. In your mes­sage, you could let oth­ers know when you are avail­able and any details about your stack that might be rel­e­vant. Pro­tip: Use https://hammertime.cyou/ for time­stamps that show in the read­ers local time.
  1. After find­ing up to 3 oth­ers and agree­ing to share, you need to send each oth­er friend requests and join the same game mode. We typ­i­cal­ly sug­gest Hori­zons and using the PTN pri­vate group (#⁠join-our-pri­vate-group) as not every­body has odyssey.
  1. Form a wing/team by send­ing each oth­er requests on the com­mu­ni­ca­tions pan­el (top).
  1. CMDRs typ­i­cal­ly take turns shar­ing all of their mis­sions one at a time. The game only allows each CMDR to share a sin­gle mis­sion at a time.
  1. Under­stand that the list of mis­sions will start to appear bro­ken as you com­plete a share. Fol­low­ing the direc­tions below can help to deal with the mess.
To accept missions shared with you:

When receiv­ing mis­sions from some­body else, you do not have to be in the same sta­tion as the per­son shar­ing, you can be locat­ed anywhere.

  1. Go to the mis­sion tab on your left ship panel
  2. Click the mis­sion that was shared with you
  3. Accept it
  4. Wait for the shar­er to com­plete the mis­sion, and then repeat. Its good eti­quette to be atten­tive and accept mis­sions as soon as pos­si­ble to respect every­body’s time.
  5. After shar­ing, you have 30 days to turn in your wing/team mem­bers mis­sions by fly­ing to the sta­tions which they stacked in to cash them in. They are not lost upon death.
To share your missions:

When shar­ing mis­sions you have gath­ered, you must be docked at the sta­tion where you gath­ered the mis­sions. If your mis­sions are from mul­ti­ple sta­tions, you will need to trav­el to each sta­tion that you gath­ered mis­sions from to fin­ish shar­ing your stack.

  1. Go to the mis­sion tab on your left ship panel
  2. Scroll to the bot­tom of your mis­sions until you find the last mis­sion in the list for the sta­tion in which you are locat­ed.
  3. Click “Share Mission”
  4. Imme­di­ate­ly press your key­bind for the com­mu­ni­ca­tions (top) pan­el to look for the accept con­fir­ma­tions from each wing/team mem­ber. Alter­na­tive­ly, lis­ten for the indi­vid­ual chimes, or coor­di­nate via dis­cord in chat or our
  5. ⁠#🔉Mis­sion Shar­ing or wing voice chan­nels to make sure every­one has accept­ed the mis­sion. If you ever need to check who has accept­ed the mis­sion your­self, exit and reen­ter the shared mis­sion. Any CMDR that has not yet accept­ed will have “emp­ty team slot” beneath their name.
  6. Once every­one has accept­ed the mis­sion, nav­i­gate to the “Com­plet­ed Mis­sions” menu on the sta­tion mis­sion board.
  7. Select the top mis­sion from the list and ver­i­fy it match­es the mis­sion you shared. Be aware that some­times, the order of mis­sions can change dur­ing a share. We rec­om­mend you remem­ber the first 5 num­bers of the mis­sion reward cred­its amount to ensure you cash the cor­rect mission.
  8. If it is cor­rect, select a reward and turn in the mission.
  9. Return to your left pan­el and select the next mis­sion that is low­est on the list and repeat.
  10. (Option­al if you stacked at mul­ti­ple sta­tions): After shar­ing all mis­sions at the sta­tion you are locat­ed, move to the oth­er loca­tion to share those missions

Common questions and tips

Where should I turn in my boun­ties? Why not in sys­tem?:
Turn­ing in boun­ties in mis­sion giv­ing sys­tems is one way to ensure that wars, elec­tions, and oth­er neg­a­tive states occur and pre­vent good AFK mis­sions from spawn­ing. It can also make fac­tions leave the sys­tem entire­ly. For this rea­son, it’s typ­i­cal­ly a good idea to trav­el far away from your favorite AFK sys­tem to turn in boun­ties to pre­vent from ham­per­ing your own stack­ing. For AFK stack­ing com­plet­ed in Anana, we rec­om­mend Lak­sak (63ly away) for an addi­tion­al 40% bonus!

I’m not get­ting pirates to spawn in the RES/it’s going slow­ly:
Pirate spawns are RNG and set when you launch the game. Exit to the main menu and reen­ter the game to try your luck at get­ting a bet­ter instance. We’ve seen fre­quent reports that peo­ple typ­i­cal­ly see around 20–40 pirates killed per hour.

Graph­i­cal issues:
After leav­ing your ship deployed for many hours, your UI may glitch and appear as though you are no longer in your ship. Every­thing is ok, press ESC and then space to exit to the main menu, which should allow you to reen­ter the game. Alter­na­tive­ly, just close and relaunch the game. Your progress should not be lost.

Why aren’t my tur­rets fir­ing? They are set to fire at will:

  1. Ensure com­bat mode is active.
  2. Make sure they are all in the same fire group, and that they are set to fire group 1. Some reports sug­gest tur­rets will not fire at will in fire group 2.
  3. Ensure the fir­ing group is selected.
  4. Rel­og if none of that works.

How can I find oth­er sys­tems for AFK?
We have recent­ly sta­bi­lized a group of sys­tems for stack­ing, but if you pre­fer to use anoth­er sys­tem, we have pre­vi­ous­ly rec­om­mend­ed Qi Yomisii (Gath­er mis­sions in Njul­ngan and Par­dian) or HIP 105439 (Gath­er mis­sions in Chang Hsien and Chim­bia). You can also find good can­di­dates using tools like https://edtools.cc/pve

Easy vs dif­fi­cult instances (aka Sidewinder wave):
At a Low RES you’ll find pirates spawn­ing from one of two pools; easy ships only, or easy plus more-dif­fi­cult ships. To find an easy instance rel­og to the main menu and re-enter solo until you don’t see any of the ships from the More-Dif­fi­cult list for a short while. Note: Instances also have dif­fer­ing spawn rates so it can take a num­ber of tries to find one that’s both easy and suf­fi­cient­ly active. Tools like OD Mas­sacre Stack­er’s left pan­el can be help­ful for this as it shows the time between kills and the type of ship killed.

All instances

Adder
Asp Explorer/Scout
Cobra Mk III/IV
Dia­mond­back Explorer/Scout
Eagle
Impe­r­i­al Courier/Eagle
Krait Phan­tom
Sidewinder
Viper Mk III/IV

More-Difficult instances only

Alliance ships
Ana­con­da
Fed­er­al Drop/Gunship
Fer-De-Lance
Impe­r­i­al Clip­per
Krait Mk II
Python
Vul­ture

Subjective opinions about AFK

Train­ing an NPC vs Fir­ing and Hir­ing:
There are two schools of thought for hir­ing an NPC depend­ing on your goals.

  1. Hire a Harm­less NPC and retain them as they become Elite ranked. This ensures they only ever take a max­i­mum of 10% of prof­its while becom­ing more skilled than a fresh­ly hired Expert pilot each ses­sion. Con­sid­er using a Taipan with Gim­balled weapons, or mon­i­tor­ing the ses­sion with the pilot set to “defend” to help low­er ranked NPCs sur­vive their first few ranks. Be care­ful though, leav­ing your NPC on “defend” can lead to lost cargo.
  2. Hire an Expert NPC to improve their sur­viv­abil­i­ty, and fire them after your stack is com­plet­ed before turn­ing in any mis­sions. They will not be paid any of your prof­its. Expert pilots are typ­i­cal­ly skilled enough to use fixed weapons.

Thrusters on vs off:
We rec­om­mend leav­ing them on, turn­ing them off can cause you to be pushed away from the RES by NPC col­li­sions or explosions.

Spin­ning vs not spin­ning:
We rec­om­mend spin­ning if you can, but with Flight Assist On to ensure you aren’t pushed away from the RES by NPC col­li­sions or explosions.

Set­ting your NPC to Defend vs Engage at will:
Set­ting your NPC to “Defend” leaves you vul­ner­a­ble to pirates that only fire limpets at you. Nei­ther your ship nor your NPC will fire at these pirates, and even­tu­al­ly, they will deplete your point defence ammo and steal your car­go, end­ing your ses­sion. If you set your NPC to “Engage at will”, they will be more aggres­sive and attack those pirates, which also caus­es your ship to begin fir­ing at them too.

Report crimes against me on vs off:
Turn­ing report crimes against me off is a per­son­al pref­er­ence. If you keep it on, sys­tem author­i­ty will help you more often, improv­ing your sur­viv­abil­i­ty but slow­ing down com­ple­tion of your stack. If you turn it off, they will inter­fere less often, speed­ing up your stack com­ple­tion at the risk of tak­ing more focused damage.

Tools to assist with Massacre Stacking

OD Mis­sion Stack­er
Github page: https://github.com/WarmedxMints/ODMissionStacker
OD Mis­sion Stack­er is a great tool to help you build a bal­anced stack of mas­sacre mis­sions and track progress. It also proves use­ful dur­ing shar­ing and mis­sion turn in.

EDMC Mas­sacres
Github link: https://github.com/CMDR-WDX/EDMC-Massacres
EDMC Mas­sacres is a light­weight EDMC Plu­g­in alter­na­tive to ODMS. It helps with bal­anc­ing your stack as your build it.

ED AFK Mon­i­tor
GitHub page: https://github.com/PsiPab/ED-AFK-Monitor
ED AFK Mon­i­tor allows you to mon­i­tor your AFK ses­sion remote­ly by out­putting a vari­ety of AFK-rel­e­vant events to ter­mi­nal and (option­al­ly) Dis­cord via web­hook. Each type of event can be turned on/off via con­fig file. Many thanks to for cre­at­ing this tool!

Rules to participate in PTN AFK shares

  1. Mis­sions can only be shared in exchange for oth­er mis­sions from oth­er CMDRs, or for free with noth­ing expect­ed in return. No oth­er form of ‘trad­ing’ can take place. Do not exchange any­thing else. Any attempt­ed buying/selling of mas­sacre mis­sions will result in a poten­tial full serv­er ban.
  1. Please avoid cash­ing boun­ties in mis­sion giv­ing sys­tems unless specif­i­cal­ly direct­ed to by a mem­ber of the PTN coun­cil or mod team.
  1. Please keep AFK shares acces­si­ble to all CMDRs. If all CMDRs have Odyssey shar­ing in Odyssey is fine, but when nec­es­sary, please pri­or­i­tize shar­ing in Horizons.

Channel Access

For any help please ask in #🚢laser-death-barge-dis­co-par­ties.

To gain access to the chan­nels men­tioned in this guide you first have to join the PTN dis­cord serv­er (https://discord.gg/ptn). Make sure to read the rules when you first join. To see the #🚣laser-death-shares chan­nel locate the #👀look­ing-to-share chan­nel (It’s near the bot­tom of the list under the 💸Wing Mis­sion Shar­ing sec­tion), then use the but­ton in there for afk shares.

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