Elite Dangerous - Bounty Hunter's Guide

If you want to be a bounty hunter, but are either completely oblivious of your objective, or simply wanting to know more, this guide is for you.

Contents

Preparation
The Objective

Preparation

All credit goes to Juice!

Obviously, before you go out and start bounty hunting, you’ll need to know what you need for preparation. Luckily, it won’t require as much things as other roles, but there is still a sizeable amount of things that you will need in order to be a bounty hunter.

Ships

There is a large variety of ships that are suitable for bounty hunting. You can literally use whatever ship you’d like, as long as it is at least remotely related to combat, and preferably over 100,000 credits in price.

Satisfactory

Adder
Beluga Liner
Eagle
Keelback
Orca
Type-6 Transporter
Type-7 Transporter
Type-9 Heavy

Ill-Advised

Hauler
Sidewinder

I highly recommend choosing a ship from the first section. The others are lightly armored and/or have few hardpoints.

Hardpoints

For people who are new to the game, or people who suck at aiming(like me :P), I recommend using gimballed weapons. They automatically aim for you, as long as you are at least remotely fixed on your target’s location. However, they are more expensive and deal less damage than fixed weapons.

Fixed weapons deal slightly more damage than gimballed ones, and are reasonably cheaper. However, they require immense aiming skills to land properly.

I, myself, like to use Multi-Cannons and Beam Lasers.

Multi-Cannons are basically miniguns. They fire rapidly and deal kinetic damage, little by little. Their trajectory is a bit ahead of the target ship, as it takes a moment for the bullets to reach the enemy ship.

A Beam Laser could easily be compared to Zarya(from Overwatch)’s weapon. If you don’t know what her weapon does, it’s pretty much a continuously firing deathray. However, in Overwatch, she uses ammo, like the Multi-Cannons in Elite do. The Beam Laser in Elite, though, can fire forever until the ship hits a “thermal overload”. Firing too long, or being near a heat source, can induce this. But, while the Beam Laser can fire, it can deal loads of damage to enemy hulls and shields alike. So, hook up two of these on a small or medium gimballed mount, and you’ve got yourself a damned killing machine.

Modules

Modules are a big part of every role, and every one has some modules that are required!

Essential

Hardpoints
Shield Generator

Optional

Frame Shift Drive Interdictor
Auto-Field Maintenance Unit

I also recommend upgrading your core modules, especially your bulkheads. But, there’s no specific core modules you need, since you need all of them in order to run your ship, and you can’t even replace them. So, upgrading your modules is always a good idea no matter what your career is. I suggest upgrading your bulkheads to Military-Grade Composite.

That’s pretty much all you need for preparation as a bounty hunter. Now, let’s talk about the premice of bounty hunting.

The Objective

Your objective as a bounty hunter is to find wanted ships and kill them for their bounties. But, there’s more to it than that.

Finding wanted ships

You will find the most wanted ships near nav beacons and resource extraction sites. For beginner bounty hunters, I recommend looking in nav beacons, as there are far more security ships.

The Do’s

Fully scan ships before opening fire
Stay fairly far away, as wanted ships will become hostile if you open fire, or if they are pirates and want to steal from you
Stay near as many security ships as possible. They will assist you in combat against the criminal.
Look for strong ships, as they provide greater bounties. If you are in, say, an Eagle and start firing at an Anaconda, start running away immediately. Keep running away until it focuses its fire on a security ship.
You can also attack “enemy” ships if you have pledged to one of the powers.

The Don’ts

Don’t start firing until you have fully scanned a ship. You may assume it’s wanted if you see other ships firing at it, but scan the ship first or you’ll gain a fine and guard ships will become hostile.
If you kill-warrant scan a ship and find they have bounties in another system, only fire at them in that system. If you fire at them in another system, you’ll gain a fine and guard ships will become hostile.
Especially don’t do any of these in multi-crew. If the pilot’s ship is destroyed, you’ll be kicked out and the owner will be very mad.

After you have a good amount of bounties, return to a station and cash in the bounties to actually earn the money. This will also increase your reputation with the station’s controlling faction and its affiliated superpower. Then just rinse and repeat from then on to earn your money.

Elite Dangerous – Bounty Hunter’s Guide