It's a simple puzzle, with a solution that may not be so obvious. Use Poisoned paranid start as it's already hard and has a very specific initial goal (to get your reward for the game start mission) which must be completed in a specific time. Here's the restrictions for the puzzle:1. You start with trade rank "Opportunist". Trade all you want, but at no time must your trade rank increase.
2. You start with fight rank "Harmless". At no time must this increase.
3. You must complete the initial mission.
4. At the time you complete the mission, you must have the highest notoriety possible with at least one race.
5. No damaging, destroying or capping other ships by any of your ships.
6. No think missions
7. No starting any main or corporation plots.
8. No mining
9. No claiming any abandoned ships
10. No collecting floating wares of any type
11. No taxi/courier/toxic waste type missions
12. No escort missions
13. No mods/scripts required. If you want to use performance enhancing mods (low poly asteroids, Litcubes follow replacement etc) that's fine.
Following is what I had in mind originally:
Spoiler
Show
A combination of a four things, each relying on another except #1. Some things are great for raising rep but don't make money. Others make money but need the rep first. Others still both make money and raise rep, but you don't have what you really need at game start to do them.
STEP 1: You will need to accept one or more missions of type defend/protect/patrol position/station/sector. For this you don't need credits and if you can accept the mission, then you've got sufficient notoriety to complete it. This mission is critical to raising your notoriety sufficiently to get the resources you need for step (2), which comes down to notoriety enough to buy an M5 from the shipyard. If working a Split sector, this means "Friend". As you are entering a sector, if you don't see missions of that type, you can either try a different sector or re-enter the sector, or SETA until one is offered. These are spawned regularly so it shouldn't take you long to find one or more. If the difficulty setting is "average" or above, you'll need only one of them. Accept one or more of these missions but make no attempt to kill. The enemies will sooner or later ram themselves into a station, or the local military ships will kill them. At minimum fight rank this can happen in less than a minute, but more often several minutes.
STEP 2: Buy a cheap, fast M5. To purchase a ship you will need credits. Sell your shields and weapons at an Equipment Dock. You won't need these to satisfy the puzzle and for a Poisoned Paranid start, it will be barely enough to buy a Jaguar S, as well as having enough cash over to succeed with step (3). So don't outfit it with anything it doesn't need. And truly you don't need anything but the bare ship. For the small cost you might as well keep the 1MJ shield, and it's nice to increase speed. Transfer the upgrades from Demeter Hauler to Jaguar (SETA, boost extension etc). As you already have sufficient notoriety and credits to do so, you could buy a used M5 rather than a new one at shipyard. Ignore hull condition and buy on ship type and cost alone. It takes only seconds to fully repair any M5. Credits saved in this step (even 1K) can result in less time taken for the next step.
STEP 3: This one requires the credits from selling your original shields/weapons, and the M5 purchased in step (2). Its purpose is to increase your notoriety, which is needed for step (4). At completion of this step you will sell your TS, which will provide the credits you need for step (4). It will give you maximum notoriety with local race extremely quickly. When there's a station that is getting very low in resources (like 5 percent or less), they will very often spawn a special mission that requires you to supply that resource. So this is one of those very rare generic missions that is semi-predictable, rather than 100% random. Once this starts, it will keep spawning such missions until either NPCs supply the ware, or you accept one of these missions. Once you do, NPCs won't supply until such time that the mission finishes. When you see this situation about to happen, fill your TS with as much of that ware as you can afford and dock it at that station. The key to retaining minimum trade rank is to never pay less than average price and never sell for more than average price. That is normally easy to achieve. You also need to arrange yourself to be in your M5 at the nearest gate. This is why it's better if the station is within comms distance (25KM) to a gate. In Patriarchs Conclusion, there are several of these. Heavy Shields is the best one. It is usually short of Raster Oil, and like any other can run out of ECs. Entering the East gate, you are also within comms distance to chelt space aquarium beta and the shipyard, which will assist step (4). Once the station gets into this situation, it may spawn up to 3 (maybe 4) of these missions each time you enter the sector, or just at any time during your stay in a sector. Rarely will it not spawn at least one. Fly out of sector and immediately back in, check for more of these missions and accept all. Don't waste time. Do this until either the most urgent mission that you've accepted is close to timing out, or you've already accepted 18 of them. In a Jaguar Raider, you can travel at 596 m/sec. That's 35 km/minute. If you hopefully get a station within comms range (25km), you can get there in less than a minute game time. Add maybe 10 to 15 seconds to (manually) dock, plus up to 10 seconds for the mission director to notice that you're ready to hand the wares over. So 2 minutes to be safe. Continue to fly out/in gate and accept up to 18 of these. Trigger another, but don't accept it immediately. Fly directly to station and dock, then swap into your TS. Within 10 or so seconds, all missions will complete and your notoriety should raise from Friend to maybe 2 - 3 levels up in the space of 20 seconds or so. To raise notoriety to maximum, repeat this step. To do so, wait until you have completed the missions that you accepted, and then immediately accept another from same station, of same type for same resource. Remember you left one still on offer? As soon as you do this, you'll again get the "exclusive" for supplying this resource. As your trade rank is still minimum, each mission offer will require only 1 - 10 units of the ware. So even with 18 of these missions, that's hardly enough to get the station producing again, and before long it will be spawning more of the same mission for same resource. If the ware happens to be ECs, it will almost always spawn these again immediately. Thus, your hold on the station is ongoing, providing that you don't delay between mission completion and accepting of at least one more. If you make a mistake in any way, the whole thing suddenly goes out of reach. Even with the trade rank increase that can happen by selling one EC (yes one!) for near maximum price, the number of units of ware required in spawned missions will severely limit the number of these missions you can accept, due both to insufficient cash on hand, and not having sufficient cargobay space to satisfy 18 of these missions. It's not practical to do multiple freight runs. As you need to purchase for average price or more, the supplying stations will have half or less of max quantity of this product. So everything works against you. To satisfy the puzzle, repeat until you have max Splt notoriety. It won't take long. Once you achieve this, sell your TS. If you still have wares in your TS, either sell them for average price or less to a station, or leave them in the TS and you'll be paid minimum price for them as the TS is being sold. Either way your trade rank won't increase.
STEP 4: As your reputation is now maximum with the local race, buy used ship offers will be spawning regularly. This will still happen with minimum trade and fight ranks. These will include M3+ and M6 ships, which can provide 1M+ profit per ship and as high as 6M+ profit. You can partially overlap step (4) with step (3) dependant on cash on hand. Make your purchase decision based on ship type and price and not by hull condition or speed. Almost every ship with hull <50% is a bargain, while almost every ship with 100% hull will be a loss. There are exceptions. Check sectors that that either have a shipyard, or adjoin one. Look for used ships in the space around gates and even behind them. The longer it takes to fly ships to the shipyard, the longer the time you will have to wait to have the cash to buy more. If you buy ships at the shipyard itself, it's much better again. Although you can profit from trading ships without doing repairs, the profits you make if you fully repair all hulls will roughly double. As your ability to purchase larger ships depends on profits from previous, it's important to maximise profit from each ship in order to complete the puzzle in shorter time. To do this in an efficient way, command all purchased ships to fly to one position between a shipyard and the closest station that sells SETA's. When you need to sell, fly to your bunch of used ships, eject yourself and eject a SETA from one of the ships (last choice being your personal M5). Pickup the SETA in your spacesuit, aim at each ship in turn and hold down left-control and J keys at same time. In seconds you can fully repair anything up to a TS. Given a minute or two you can do the M6s and large TSs. When all ships are fully repaired, command them to the shipyard, get back in your M5, fly to the TP/EQd and purchase another SETA if you were forced to eject it from this ship. Repeat step (4) as required to complete the Poisoned Paranid initial mission. Success!
STEP 1: You will need to accept one or more missions of type defend/protect/patrol position/station/sector. For this you don't need credits and if you can accept the mission, then you've got sufficient notoriety to complete it. This mission is critical to raising your notoriety sufficiently to get the resources you need for step (2), which comes down to notoriety enough to buy an M5 from the shipyard. If working a Split sector, this means "Friend". As you are entering a sector, if you don't see missions of that type, you can either try a different sector or re-enter the sector, or SETA until one is offered. These are spawned regularly so it shouldn't take you long to find one or more. If the difficulty setting is "average" or above, you'll need only one of them. Accept one or more of these missions but make no attempt to kill. The enemies will sooner or later ram themselves into a station, or the local military ships will kill them. At minimum fight rank this can happen in less than a minute, but more often several minutes.
STEP 2: Buy a cheap, fast M5. To purchase a ship you will need credits. Sell your shields and weapons at an Equipment Dock. You won't need these to satisfy the puzzle and for a Poisoned Paranid start, it will be barely enough to buy a Jaguar S, as well as having enough cash over to succeed with step (3). So don't outfit it with anything it doesn't need. And truly you don't need anything but the bare ship. For the small cost you might as well keep the 1MJ shield, and it's nice to increase speed. Transfer the upgrades from Demeter Hauler to Jaguar (SETA, boost extension etc). As you already have sufficient notoriety and credits to do so, you could buy a used M5 rather than a new one at shipyard. Ignore hull condition and buy on ship type and cost alone. It takes only seconds to fully repair any M5. Credits saved in this step (even 1K) can result in less time taken for the next step.
STEP 3: This one requires the credits from selling your original shields/weapons, and the M5 purchased in step (2). Its purpose is to increase your notoriety, which is needed for step (4). At completion of this step you will sell your TS, which will provide the credits you need for step (4). It will give you maximum notoriety with local race extremely quickly. When there's a station that is getting very low in resources (like 5 percent or less), they will very often spawn a special mission that requires you to supply that resource. So this is one of those very rare generic missions that is semi-predictable, rather than 100% random. Once this starts, it will keep spawning such missions until either NPCs supply the ware, or you accept one of these missions. Once you do, NPCs won't supply until such time that the mission finishes. When you see this situation about to happen, fill your TS with as much of that ware as you can afford and dock it at that station. The key to retaining minimum trade rank is to never pay less than average price and never sell for more than average price. That is normally easy to achieve. You also need to arrange yourself to be in your M5 at the nearest gate. This is why it's better if the station is within comms distance (25KM) to a gate. In Patriarchs Conclusion, there are several of these. Heavy Shields is the best one. It is usually short of Raster Oil, and like any other can run out of ECs. Entering the East gate, you are also within comms distance to chelt space aquarium beta and the shipyard, which will assist step (4). Once the station gets into this situation, it may spawn up to 3 (maybe 4) of these missions each time you enter the sector, or just at any time during your stay in a sector. Rarely will it not spawn at least one. Fly out of sector and immediately back in, check for more of these missions and accept all. Don't waste time. Do this until either the most urgent mission that you've accepted is close to timing out, or you've already accepted 18 of them. In a Jaguar Raider, you can travel at 596 m/sec. That's 35 km/minute. If you hopefully get a station within comms range (25km), you can get there in less than a minute game time. Add maybe 10 to 15 seconds to (manually) dock, plus up to 10 seconds for the mission director to notice that you're ready to hand the wares over. So 2 minutes to be safe. Continue to fly out/in gate and accept up to 18 of these. Trigger another, but don't accept it immediately. Fly directly to station and dock, then swap into your TS. Within 10 or so seconds, all missions will complete and your notoriety should raise from Friend to maybe 2 - 3 levels up in the space of 20 seconds or so. To raise notoriety to maximum, repeat this step. To do so, wait until you have completed the missions that you accepted, and then immediately accept another from same station, of same type for same resource. Remember you left one still on offer? As soon as you do this, you'll again get the "exclusive" for supplying this resource. As your trade rank is still minimum, each mission offer will require only 1 - 10 units of the ware. So even with 18 of these missions, that's hardly enough to get the station producing again, and before long it will be spawning more of the same mission for same resource. If the ware happens to be ECs, it will almost always spawn these again immediately. Thus, your hold on the station is ongoing, providing that you don't delay between mission completion and accepting of at least one more. If you make a mistake in any way, the whole thing suddenly goes out of reach. Even with the trade rank increase that can happen by selling one EC (yes one!) for near maximum price, the number of units of ware required in spawned missions will severely limit the number of these missions you can accept, due both to insufficient cash on hand, and not having sufficient cargobay space to satisfy 18 of these missions. It's not practical to do multiple freight runs. As you need to purchase for average price or more, the supplying stations will have half or less of max quantity of this product. So everything works against you. To satisfy the puzzle, repeat until you have max Splt notoriety. It won't take long. Once you achieve this, sell your TS. If you still have wares in your TS, either sell them for average price or less to a station, or leave them in the TS and you'll be paid minimum price for them as the TS is being sold. Either way your trade rank won't increase.
STEP 4: As your reputation is now maximum with the local race, buy used ship offers will be spawning regularly. This will still happen with minimum trade and fight ranks. These will include M3+ and M6 ships, which can provide 1M+ profit per ship and as high as 6M+ profit. You can partially overlap step (4) with step (3) dependant on cash on hand. Make your purchase decision based on ship type and price and not by hull condition or speed. Almost every ship with hull <50% is a bargain, while almost every ship with 100% hull will be a loss. There are exceptions. Check sectors that that either have a shipyard, or adjoin one. Look for used ships in the space around gates and even behind them. The longer it takes to fly ships to the shipyard, the longer the time you will have to wait to have the cash to buy more. If you buy ships at the shipyard itself, it's much better again. Although you can profit from trading ships without doing repairs, the profits you make if you fully repair all hulls will roughly double. As your ability to purchase larger ships depends on profits from previous, it's important to maximise profit from each ship in order to complete the puzzle in shorter time. To do this in an efficient way, command all purchased ships to fly to one position between a shipyard and the closest station that sells SETA's. When you need to sell, fly to your bunch of used ships, eject yourself and eject a SETA from one of the ships (last choice being your personal M5). Pickup the SETA in your spacesuit, aim at each ship in turn and hold down left-control and J keys at same time. In seconds you can fully repair anything up to a TS. Given a minute or two you can do the M6s and large TSs. When all ships are fully repaired, command them to the shipyard, get back in your M5, fly to the TP/EQd and purchase another SETA if you were forced to eject it from this ship. Repeat step (4) as required to complete the Poisoned Paranid initial mission. Success!
