Pilots Trade Network Elite: Dangerous

PTN Wing Mining Missions Guide

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Please read this entire guide before starting your WMM journey.

It con­tains a lot of use­ful infor­ma­tion. If you still have ques­tions after, we will be hap­py to help!
 
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 #🧾wmm-guide. Click here to join our Dis­cord server.
 

Wing Min­ing Mis­sions (WMMs) are one of the best meth­ods for mak­ing large amounts of cred­its in Elite Dangerous.

  • There is no min­ing involved, only haul­ing and patience.
  • If you have the ini­tial buy-in, the time, and if you do it cor­rect­ly you can expect to earn up to rough­ly 3.5 bil­lion cred­its per share (yes, bil­lion) when shar­ing with 3 oth­er CMDRs.
  • Not only that, you will also earn trade rank, engi­neer­ing mate­ri­als, and super­pow­er rank for the empire or the fed­er­a­tion at the same time.

PTN main­tains this oper­a­tion to help you reach your goals in the game, but it only works if you under­stand a few things first.

Contents

1. Things to know before you start
2. Build­ing your rep­u­ta­tion
3. Which mis­sions to gath­er
4. Ful­fill­ing the mis­sions
5. Shar­ing mis­sions with oth­ers
6. Com­mon ques­tions and tips
7. Rules to par­tic­i­pate in PTN WMMs

Things to know before you start

1. The rules at the bot­tom of this chan­nel are active­ly enforced so read the whole guide to under­stand how this works to avoid any dis­rup­tions. Things men­tioned in the begin­ning may be explained bet­ter below.

2. We rec­om­mend you already have 1 bil­lion cred­its in the bank to get start­ed with WMMs. If you don’t have enough cred­its to get start­ed, we rec­om­mend check­ing out our ⁠#🚛offi­cial-trade-alerts, ⁠#🤝affil­i­ate-trade-alerts, and our ⁠#🍹booze-cruise-guide to get there fair­ly quick­ly first.

3. This process is only sup­port­ed by PTN in the Live PC game mode. It is pos­si­ble in Legacy/Console, how­ev­er, PTN do not sup­ply com­modi­ties or main­tain the sys­tems. Sor­ry lega­cy players.

4. Once you start to gath­er mis­sions, we rec­om­mend you do not leave the sys­tem until you com­plete shar­ing. Doing so while hold­ing mis­sions can cause up to 9 very aggres­sive and per­sis­tent pirates per mis­sion to spawn and fol­low you until the mis­sions are ful­ly com­plet­ed or aban­doned, or the pirates are killed.

5. You will gain access to the WMM dis­cus­sion, WMM stock, and WMM share chan­nels after com­plete­ly read­ing this guide.

Our WMM Systems

We cur­rent­ly main­tain two sys­tems for our WMM oper­a­tions: one for Fed­er­a­tion rank, and one for Empire rank. Check on our Dis­cord serv­er to find out which sys­tems we are present­ly using.
 

Building your reputation

You must build your rep­u­ta­tion with the minor fac­tions to be offered the best WMMs.
 
1. Go to one of our two sys­tems and dock at one of the sta­tions men­tioned above.
 
2. Start build­ing your rep­u­ta­tion with all of the minor fac­tions in the sys­tem until the bar is com­plete­ly full and green with Allied sta­tus. The only excep­tion is the Drag­ons of Wal­ly Bei fac­tion in Wal­ly Bei, they do not offer WMMs so don’t wor­ry about them.
 
Build­ing rep­u­ta­tion is pos­si­ble by com­plet­ing mis­sions for the required fac­tions and choos­ing the rep­u­ta­tion reward. Mis­sions with 5 “bars” of rep­u­ta­tion as an avail­able reward will help you build it faster. Data couri­er mis­sions and dona­tion mis­sions are usu­al­ly a fast and easy way to do this. If you have Odyssey, there are addi­tion­al easy deliv­ery mis­sions avail­able when dis­em­barked. You can gath­er rep at any sta­tion or out­post in your cho­sen system.
 
Alter­na­tive­ly, you may be offered the chance to join a share with­out offer­ing any mis­sions in return. This is the fastest and eas­i­est way to gain rep­u­ta­tion, but relies on oth­er CMDRs offer­ing a spot.

As you are build­ing your rep­u­ta­tion, you will begin to see WMMs offered by each faction.

Which missions to gather

Cor­rect mis­sions will have the fol­low­ing aster­oid icon with the blue wing icon on the low­er left. Mis­sions may or may not have the red threat/pirate sym­bol on the low­er right of the icon, but its not impor­tant as long as you don’t leave the system.
 

Mis­sions will have names such as “Mine xxx tons of xxx”, “Min­ing rush for xxx tons of xxx”, and “Blast out xxx tons of xxx”.

Your aim is to gath­er up to 20 of these min­ing mis­sions for the fol­low­ing commodities:

Gold        ~ 150–250  tons each
Sil­ver      ~ 300–450  tons each
Bertran­dite ~ 600‑1000 tons each
Indite      ~ 650‑1100 tons each

  • Mis­sions spawn ran­dom­ly, so be patient. It can take hours or sev­er­al days to col­lect 20 missions.

  • Mis­sion rewards for ide­al WMMs typ­i­cal­ly range from 30–50 mil­lion cred­its per mis­sion. A full stack of twen­ty 50m mis­sions is worth 1 bil­lion cred­its in rewards.

  • Mis­sions should give you 6–7 days to com­plete them.

  • Mis­sions can spawn in the “All” and “Trans­porta­tion” cat­e­gories every 10 min­utes of each hour (0:00, 0:10, 0:20, etc.) We rec­om­mend you check both categories.

  • You will see min­ing mis­sions for oth­er com­modi­ties, but we’ve deter­mined they won’t work well for this oper­a­tion. Be care­ful to not take any mis­sions for Bromel­lite and Indi­um, they are easy to con­fuse with our sup­port­ed commodities.

  • You will also see Source and Return mis­sions with a box icon. They can have names such as “Bring us..”, “We need…” and “Indus­try Needs..”, and will gen­er­ate for sev­er­al com­modi­ties, includ­ing those that we do sup­port. We high­ly rec­om­mend you do not accept these mis­sions. They expire with­in 24 hours, spawn nasty pirates imme­di­ate­ly in sys­tem, and typ­i­cal­ly demand amounts of com­modi­ties that would leave you with a net loss for the mission.

Fulfilling the missions

You can ful­fill mis­sions as you are gath­er­ing them, or you can wait until you have a full stack of 20 before haul­ing the com­modi­ties. After read­ing the guide you will be able to access our WMM-stock chan­nel to see which car­ri­ers to vis­it to pur­chase com­modi­ties at each station.

1. Check the stock chan­nel to deter­mine which car­ri­er you need to vis­it. It is rec­om­mend­ed that you vis­it the clos­est car­ri­er with the low­est amount of stock so that they can emp­ty and reload faster.

2. Super­cruise to the car­ri­er and dock.

3. Pur­chase the amount of Gold/Silver/Indite/Bertrandite that you need.
Impor­tant note: There is a bug that caus­es com­modi­ties to not show in your car­go hold when pur­chased from a car­ri­er. The com­modi­ties are actu­al­ly there, and they will appear in your car­go hold when you reopen any mar­ket, includ­ing the one at the des­ti­na­tion station.

4. Fly back to the Station.

5. Deposit the com­modi­ties in the mis­sion depot, but do not pick a reward. Can­cel out of the screen.

6. After haul­ing all of the com­modi­ties for your 20 mis­sions and not choos­ing a reward, you are ready to share.

Sharing missions

The major­i­ty of the prof­its come from oth­er peo­ple’s mis­sions when sharing.
 
1. When ready to share, grab the @LFW-WMM role from #👀look­ing-to-share (avail­able after read­ing the guide). Check the #📤wmm-shares chan­nel for oth­er CMDRs who are look­ing to share. If nobody is plan­ning a group, you can ping the @LFW-WMM 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.
 
2. 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)
 
3. Form a wing/team by send­ing each oth­er requests on the com­mu­ni­ca­tions pan­el (top).
 
4. 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.
 
5. 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 #🔉Mis­sion Shar­ing voice chan­nel 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.
5. Once every­one has accept­ed the mis­sion, nav­i­gate to the “Com­plet­ed Mis­sions” menu on the sta­tion mis­sion board.
6. Select the top mis­sion from the list and ver­i­fy it match­es the mis­sion you shared.
7. If it is cor­rect, select a reward and turn in the mis­sion.
8. Return to your left pan­el and select the next mis­sion that is low­est on the list and repeat.
9. (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

Q: How long does this take?
A: Mis­sion spawn is heav­i­ly ran­dom. There can be peri­ods of no mis­sions for hours, and oth­ers of many mis­sions in short spells. It can take sev­er­al hours to sev­er­al days to get 20 mis­sions. Patience is a virtue with WMMs. Shar­ing typ­i­cal­ly takes at least 30 min­utes once a group is formed, some­times longer.

Q: Do I need to be in Odyssey or Hori­zons to do this?
A: You can stack mis­sions in either Hori­zons 4.0 or Odyssey, they pro­vide iden­ti­cal mis­sions. Shar­ing is typ­i­cal­ly per­formed in Hori­zons to allow CMDRs with­out Odyssey to join the wing/team.

Q: Do I need to share with oth­ers?
A: The major­i­ty of the prof­its come from shar­ing with oth­ers. Every shared mis­sion pays the full reward for each wing/team mem­ber. If you fol­low the guide, you will prof­it with­out shar­ing, but it will be sig­nif­i­cant­ly less.

Q: Do I need to col­lect 20 mis­sions or can I share with few­er?
A: Depend­ing on oth­er’s pref­er­ences, you can some­times share few­er than 20 mis­sions. It can be help­ful to share a par­tial stack when build­ing rep­u­ta­tion, for exam­ple, or if you are run­ning out of time to col­lect a full 20.

Q: Can I gath­er mis­sions at the oth­er sta­tions in sys­tem?
A: While you can find WMMs at the oth­er sta­tions in each sys­tem (Boas Ter­mi­nal, Volk Dock, Dozois Ter­mi­nal), we do not rec­om­mend that you stack using those sta­tions. PTN does not sup­ply com­modi­ties for these sta­tions, and it caus­es extra incon­ve­nience when haul­ing, stack­ing, and shar­ing for both you and those you share with.

Q: Why am I see­ing low rewards or short­er dead­lines for mis­sions?
A: Either you are not ful­ly allied rank with the offer­ing fac­tion, or your account may have a very low trade rank. As you build that rank, it will improve the mis­sion rewards and dura­tion that you receive

Q: I am an ACO, can I adver­tise WMM com­modi­ties?
A: No, WMM sup­ply is restrict­ed to Cer­ti­fied Car­ri­er Own­ers only.

Com­mon ter­mi­nol­o­gy used in the channels:

Stack (Build­ing a stack, I have a stack)- A stack of 20 mis­sions. Peo­ple often refer to ~10 mis­sions as a half stack, or a par­tial stack.

Share (Find a share, look­ing for a share) – A group of up to 4 CMDRs winging/teaming up in game to share mis­sions with each other

Fully/Not yet hauled – The CMDR may have stacked 20 mis­sions, but they might or might not have ful­filled their missions

RNG – Ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tion, a com­put­er­ized way to imi­tate ran­dom chance which is used to spawn missions

You must agree to follow these rules to participate in PTN WMMs

1. DO NOT park any per­son­al fleet car­ri­ers around any of the plan­e­tary bod­ies spec­i­fied in our Dis­cord guide. These bod­ies are reserved for P.T.N. car­ri­er own­ers to pro­vide the com­modi­ties for you to ful­fill your mis­sions. Park­ing per­son­al car­ri­ers there will dis­rupt our abil­i­ty to do this. If you do park there, con­se­quences may range from a nudge from a Mod, a loss of access to our WMM chan­nels, up to and includ­ing a full serv­er ban.

Impor­tant: If you plan to bring a per­son­al car­ri­er into either of our sys­tems do not plot in with­out choos­ing a body out­side the restrict­ed zone or you will risk end­ing up in a restrict­ed zone and the con­se­quences list­ed above.

2. 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 WMM mis­sions will result in a poten­tial full serv­er ban.

3. For mis­sions gath­ered in for the fac­tion Witou Guardians of Trad­tion, select the Influ­ence reward when avail­able while cash­ing in. This helps PTN to main­tain our abil­i­ty to pro­vide WMM support.

4. Please do your best to run EDMC (or a sim­i­lar appli­ca­tion) when pos­si­ble while haul­ing to help our bots with mar­ket infor­ma­tion. This helps us pro­vide accu­rate stocks and a con­sis­tent sup­ply of com­modi­ties. EDMC is avail­able for down­load at https://github.com/EDCD/EDMarketConnector/

WMM Channel Access

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. Then locate the #🧾wmm-guide chan­nel (It’s near the bot­tom of the list under the 💸Wing Mis­sion Shar­ing sec­tion), then read the last mes­sage in that chan­nel and use the but­ton below it to gain access to the wmm channels.

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