Pilots Trade Network Elite: Dangerous

PTN Wing Mining Missions Guide

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Overview

WMMs can be con­fus­ing for new­com­ers because the name seems so contradictory:

  • We do them solo, not in wings (at least, not until the mis­sion is already com­plete and ready to hand in), and
  • They don’t involve any mining
So that said, what do they involve and how is it that they are one of the high­est-earn­ing activ­i­ties in the game?

Getting started

You real­ly do need to use our Dis­cord serv­er to par­tic­i­pate in our WMM oper­a­tions because there are a num­ber of mov­ing parts:

  • You need to check which sys­tem we are cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing in. WMMs are extreme­ly sen­si­tive to back­ground sim­u­la­tion (BGS) states and using the wrong sys­tem can not only result in less prof­it for you, but can also harm the sys­tem’s BGS state and make WMMs there hard­er in future.
  • You need to check which PTN Fleet Car­ri­ers are sell­ing the required com­modi­ties in the tar­get sys­tem. (More about the com­modi­ties soon – don’t worry!)
  • Option­al: if you want to wing up at the end and more than quadru­ple your prof­its (yes, real­ly) you need a place to find oth­er CMDRs who have mis­sions to share from the same system.

When you get to our Dis­cord, you need to first read and accept the serv­er rules, then you can scroll down the chan­nel list to find the #📜wmm-guide chan­nel. Click or tap on the chan­nel to look at it and see the guide. At the bot­tom of the guide is a lit­tle 💸 reac­tion*; click or tap on this to gain access to our WMM channels.

* Vis­it our Dis­cord begin­ner’s guide if you need more help with Discord!

Once you’ve gained access you can vis­it #📦wmm-stock. The first thing to do here is check which sys­tem we are cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing in. The chan­nel con­tains a list of all PTN Fleet Car­ri­ers cur­rent­ly pro­vid­ing sup­plies for the mis­sions and their stock lev­els. Scan along the list and you’ll see the infor­ma­tion is in the format:

Com­mod­i­ty x amount – Sys­tem (Loca­tion in sys­tem) – FLEET CARRIER NAME (ID) – Buy price – data age

The first piece of infor­ma­tion we are look­ing for is the Sys­tem. In the exam­ple below, the sys­tem is Wal­ly Bei.

First steps

Plot a route to the tar­get sys­tem. You can either take your biggest car­go ship, or fly there in some­thing faster with a high­er jump range then trans­fer your ship once you arrive at a sta­tion in the sys­tem. You’ll def­i­nite­ly want the biggest car­go ship you can afford, ide­al­ly either a Type 9 or an Impe­r­i­al Cut­ter stuffed with car­go racks – see our Out­fit­ting guide for more infor­ma­tion. You also need a decent start­ing bal­ance of cred­its: 500 mil­lion should be enough to cov­er your ini­tial pur­chas­es of com­modi­ties, just make sure you have enough left for rebuy on your ship!

Note that all our WMM oper­a­tions take place in the Live ver­sion of the game. One can build the stack in Odyssey or Hori­zons, but we do the shares in Hori­zon. As the sim­ple rea­son is that all CMDRs have access to Horizons.

Dock at the near­est Large-pad sta­tion and check the mis­sion boards. You might already see some Wing Min­ing Mis­sions avail­able from dif­fer­ent fac­tions. Cer­tain Wing Min­ing Mis­sions ask for com­modi­ties which can be pur­chased rather than just mined (Bertran­dite, Indite, Gold and Sil­ver). P.T.N. Fleet Car­ri­ers load up on these com­modi­ties then jump to the tar­get sys­tem – in the exam­ple above, this would be Wal­ly Bei. This means CMDRs can load up on Wing Min­ing Mis­sions from the local station(s) and sim­ply fly to a PTN Fleet Car­ri­er, load up the need­ed com­mod­i­ty, and fly back to the sta­tion to deliv­er – all with­out spend­ing more than a hand­ful of sec­onds in supercruise.

Before you start grab­bing mis­sions though, these are the things you need to know:

WMMs: things you need to know

1. Your reputation determines the value of the missions you are offered

When you first arrive in the tar­get sys­tem, you won’t see (m)any lucra­tive Wing Min­ing Mis­sions on the mis­sion board, because your rep­u­ta­tion with all the local fac­tions will be neu­tral. You can either take what mis­sions are on offer and work your way up by choos­ing the Rep­u­ta­tion rewards on mis­sion hand-in, or you can ask in the #💸wmm-dis­cus­sion chan­nel if any­one is able to share you a set of mis­sions to get you start­ed. If some­one is kind enough to share, make sure to choose the rep­u­ta­tion options when you turn in the mis­sions. You will miss out on a few mil­lion cred­its from each mis­sion but will set your­self up to earn vast­ly, vast­ly more in the future. Once your rep­u­ta­tion with each fac­tion reach­es Allied, you’ll be offered tens of mil­lions of cred­its per mission.

2. Only take “WING MINING” Missions, and only for Bertrandite, Indite, Gold or Silver

Don’t take “Source and Return” or any oth­er mis­sion type. Don’t take Wing Min­ing mis­sions for any com­modi­ties oth­er than the four list­ed. It just won’t work!

Do look for (a) Wing Min­ing mis­sions which (b) have a pay-out of 30 mil­lion cred­its or more and (c) are for Bertran­dite, Indite, Gold or Sil­ver – those are the ones you want to stack up on.

3. Don’t turn in your missions when you unload your cargo – save them up for sharing

You ful­fil the mis­sion con­di­tions when you use the mis­sion inter­face in the star­port to trans­fer car­go from your hold to the mis­sion giv­er. Once you’ve com­plet­ed the mis­sion’s require­ments, it will become “com­plete” and be list­ed as such in your mis­sion log. How­ev­er you do not have to hand a mis­sion in as soon as it is com­plet­ed. If you save up your com­plet­ed mis­sions, you can share them with oth­er CMDRs in a wing lat­er – and they can share their mis­sions with you. Because these mis­sions are already com­plete, you don’t have to do any­thing except turn them in – it’s lit­er­al­ly free mon­ey, all you have to do is share.

One word of warn­ing though: Wing Min­ing mis­sions expire after 7 days, so don’t hold on to them too long or you’ll lose all your hard-earned profit.

4. Fulfil mission demands by loading from P.T.N. Fleet Carriers

The #📦wmm-stock chan­nel lists all PTN Fleet Car­ri­ers and the com­modi­ties they sell. Once you’ve got your mis­sions, fly to the near­est car­ri­er that sells what you need and pur­chase your need­ed com­mod­i­ty. This will cost quite a bit of mon­ey, but the cred­its you earn for turn­ing in mis­sions will dwarf what­ev­er you spend now.

5. You can stack up to 20 missions at once

It’s unlike­ly you’ll be offered 20 good mis­sions at the same time, but you can either wait 10 min­utes for mis­sions to refresh and check the boards again, or check the boards each time you make a deliv­ery. Mis­sion boards refresh every 10 min­utes exact­ly, on the 10s – so 1:00, 1:10, 1:20 etc – but the whole
board does not change at every refresh; instead, old­er mis­sions are removed and new ones replace them pro­gres­sive­ly. It’s hard to get a full stack of 20 and you should­n’t be embar­rassed about going to share with few­er, but if you’re lucky or per­sis­tent (and have a lot of time to spend watch­ing the mis­sion board refresh) it’s def­i­nite­ly pos­si­ble to get up to 20 mis­sions to share.

6. Flag yourself as Looking to Share and find other CMDRs to share your missions with

The #👀look­ing-to-share chan­nel on our Dis­cord enables you to access our mis­sion-shar­ing sys­tem. React to the “LOOKING TO SHARE: WING MINING MISSIONS” mes­sage (pic­tured) with your game plat­form (PC, Xbox or PlaySta­tion) – this will give you access to #📤wmm-shares. Once there you can use one of the list­ed roles to ping oth­er CMDRs look­ing to share mis­sions – for exam­ple, if you’re on PC you can type “@LFW-PC-WMM” to alert oth­er PC CMDRs.

It may take a lit­tle while but you should get respons­es from oth­er CMDRs with stacks of mis­sions to share, or who are cur­rent­ly build­ing stacks. You can then arrange a time to get togeth­er in-game, invite each oth­er to a Wing, and share your mis­sions. For this you can either use our Pri­vate Group, or you can wing up in Open play. Details for join­ing the Pri­vate Group are found in the #join-our-pri­vate-group channel.

If you’re not sure how to wing up, don’t wor­ry! Oth­er CMDRs will be hap­py to help you out. Just ask in #💸wmm-dis­cus­sion or #📤wmm-shares for help.

7. You have to share missions one at a time

When every­one’s in the wing and ready, park at the sta­tion your mis­sions are for and get ready to share. Go to the Trans­ac­tions pan­el (left-hand MFD, sec­ond tab) and select your first mis­sion, then select SHARE. You’ll hear a lit­tle audio “peep” when each CMDR accepts; if you’re in a full wing, that’s 3 peeps! You can also back out of the mis­sion infor­ma­tion dis­play then open it again to see which CMDRs have accept­ed. Once every­one has accept­ed, you can turn in the mis­sion. The oth­er CMDRs in your wing will then get to choose their rewards also.

Receiv­ing shared mis­sions is sim­i­lar. Sit on the land­ing pad at the tar­get sta­tion watch­ing your Trans­ac­tions pan­el. Mis­sion share offers will appear there and can be accept­ed there. Once the mis­sion is accept­ed, wait for the mis­sion shar­er to turn it in – you can then col­lect your rewards from the mis­sion board as usual.

Note that mis­sion rewards are dupli­cat­ed, not shared – that’s to say, if you share a 50 mil­lion cred­it mis­sion, you get 50 mil­lion and so does every­one else for a total of 200 mil­lion for a sin­gle mis­sion. If you man­age to find a full wing and every­one has a stack of 10 mis­sions each, that’s as much as 2 bil­lion cred­its for every­one who takes part.

8. Don’t worry about having a full 20 stack for yourself or others

Get­ting a large stack is nice but not always pos­si­ble, and every mis­sion you take is on a 7 day timer before it expires. You’ll have much bet­ter results if you get as big a stack as you can then go find some CMDRs to share. Chances are you’ll get some more mis­sions while you’re wait­ing any­way. Also, don’t require oth­er CMDRs to have a full stack before you share with them – it’s unrea­son­able and you’re basi­cal­ly cheat­ing your­self out of free cred­its. Even a stack of 10 mis­sions with only 2 CMDRs in a wing is worth up to a bil­lion cred­its for each CMDR.

9. Don’t park your own Fleet Carrier in active WMM systems

If you do WMMs you’ll afford a Fleet Car­ri­er very quick­ly. Please resist the urge to park it in a PTN WMM sys­tem – you’ll just make it hard­er for our Fleet Car­ri­ers to get in and out and keep the mon­ey tap flow­ing for every­one else.

10. Remember Elite is a game and is meant to be fun, and the PTN is a community

Par­tic­u­lar­ly if you’re new to the game, oppor­tu­ni­ties to make this much mon­ey at once may seem over­whelm­ing and seri­ous, but once you spend some time in the Pilots Trade Net­work you’ll get used to mak­ing enor­mous for­tunes rel­a­tive­ly eas­i­ly. Try to relax and have fun with it and don’t take things too seri­ous­ly. Pri­ori­tise being friend­ly and help­ful when it comes to mis­sion shar­ing rather than try­ing to max­imise your prof­it, and you’ll make friends who’ll stick by you for your entire Elite career – plus you’ll enjoy things a lot more!

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