Freight elevators in Star Citizen have been both a boon and a pain. My friend CakedCrusader was just reminded the hard way that Star Citizen is a game in development and not to be trusted as he spent over a 1 million aUEC to buy gold from an outpost in an act of free-trade but has thus far been unable to acquire his purchase because no one can get the freight elevator to work at that, or possibly any, outpost. The hope is that the gold will still be there when CIG gets around to identifying and fixing the issue, although it’s just as likely that any fix they apply will reset the contents of all or specific warehouses, sending that 1 million aUEC bounty into the aether. Although this sounds painful to anyone, level-headed Star Citizen players know that this kind of thing is sadly par for the course; as Caked said this morning, “I’ve made money before, and I can do it again”.

While Caked was lamenting his past and future fortunes, I was in the process of selling my recycled material composite (RMC) for 504,000 aUEC. My workflow was to take my salvaging Vulture out to salvaging contracts, scrape as much as I could hold, and stockpile the RMC in the warehouse of the LEO station above a major city (in this case, Port Tresseler above New Babbage, microTech). Once I feel I have enough cargo, or just want something to do, I load everything from the station into a cargo ship like the Mercury or a Caterpillar (depending on the number of boxes) and drop it off at New Babbage’s warehouse where I am able to sell. Prior to freight elevators, a Vulture had little recourse except to salvage what it could and sell immediately; in a pinch, a player could transfer salvage to another player with a larger ship in space, but then things got murky in terms of who owned the crates, who could sell them, and how to split the money. For a while, it might be possible to rely on persistence and leave the cargo in a cargo ship until next login, but that was a pretty big gamble especially if CIG released a patch that forced players back to character creation and reset a bunch of other things that ideally should have stuck around.

Talk to other Star Citizen players and many will tell you that trafficking drugs is a better money maker, or working with the significantly larger Reclaimer salvaging vessel, or going somewhere and just searching for non-contract salvage (contracts have a buy-in cost that eats into profits, but is always reliable) but I’m not trying to min-max profits here; I’m trying to work within the conceit of “Star Citizen as simulation”.

Really, the point of the post is that freight elevators, when working, offer a way for players to put off immediate profit for a time when they really need it. It also can allow players with smaller ships to move cargo around over a longer period of time and, assuming they have no bills coming due, can treat their cargo as “an investment” in a way.