SC Trade Compendium
SC Trade Compendium (SC-TC for short) is an application written to run on mobile devices which enables you to make better, faster trade decisions in the popular computer game "Star Citizen."
How the application works
The application queries a set of server-side APIs which contain data related to the game. When you lookup ships, stores, products and trade routes, you're getting live, real-time data from our SC-TC databases. Those databases are kept up to date by referencing data submitted and vetted by users.
Currently the application has several modes, explained in the sections below.
Main App Screen
This screen is the main landing page of the app, and will show you your most recent trade transactions. Eventually, we will fill the bottom entry, but it's currently not implemented.
If you click the "Hamburger" (the three lines at the top left) you'll be shown a menu with the primary features of the application:
Route Search
Route search enables you to find the best deals in the 'verse. Currently one-way search is implemented, and we're working on circular routing now. When you click the Route Search option, you'll be greeted with a form like this:
Start out by selecting a ship. If you have already visited the Vehicle List, you may have already selected ships to live in "Your Hangar." If you have, then the dropdown will be populated only by ships in your hangar.
Once you've selected a ship, you'll automatically have populated the default quantum drive and the default maximum cargo for the ship into the fields. If you have upgraded your quantum drive, you can select an alternate drive from the dropdown. Only Quantum Drives that fit into your quantum drive bay for the selected ship will be shown.
If you'd like to search for routes that begin at a particular store, pull that store out of the dropdown list. You can leave this blank if you don't want to start at a particular store.
Enter the amount of money you wish to use for this trade route in the "Starting Capital" field. This will be used to calculate your profit margins.
Finally, select the sorting method, which is one of these options: - Overall profit: "to hell with how long it takes, just make me the most amount of money" - Profit Per Minute: "give me the route that makes me money the fastest, even if it isn't strictly the most profitable" - Safest: "give me the route with the best guarantees that the shop won't be out of stock, or be too flooded to accept my products."
Once you hit "Search Routes", you'll be greeted with a screen like this:
There is a lot of information shown above, but here's how to dissect the info:
- Astatine -- the product you should buy
- buy: 576 -- it's telling you to purchase 576 SCU of that product.
- profit: 115200.0 -- That's the total profit this route will give you
- ppm: 18524.26 -- This is the theoretical profit-per-minute for this route.
- HDMS-Ryder -> Lorville - CBD: This is telling you to buy at HDMS-Ryder, and sell at Lorville - CBD
- (373.13 secs) -- This is telling you that this route will take, at minimum best speed, 373.13 seconds to run. This time is a calculation of many factors, including but not limited to:
- Ascent time out of the atmosphere of the starting location
- how many times you need to wait for a quantum drive spool-up and cool down
- how much time it takes from landing your spaceship till you can actually make it to the trade terminal
- s-ratio: 0.01 -- seller-ratio -- This is indicating that you're buying from the terminal 1% of all available stock at that store. This means you're almost guaranteed to buy all of the cargo you're trying to buy, and wont have to wait for the terminal to restock. If s-ratio approaches 1, that means it will probably take more than a few minutes to get all of the available cargo you're looking for.
- b-ratio: 0.19 -- buyer-ratio -- This is indicating that you're selling to the terminal 19% of the max quantity on hand. The higher this number gets, the more likely you'll have to wait for the location to "consume" the product so you can sell them more.
Store List
The store list gives you an alphabetized list of every trade terminal we're aware of. If you select a store, you will see a list of all the products that store buys or sells:
Product List
The product list gives you an alphabetized list of every product in the game. If you click on a product in the list, you'll get a detail page that shows every store that buys or sells that product:
Vehicle List
The vehicle list page shows all vehicles that exist in the game. If you click on a vehicle, you'll receive a page with statistics about that ship:
You will notice on this screen that there is a button that says either "Add to hangar" or "Delete from hangar." This is a quick way of setting up any of the Ship dropdowns that we show in the app, to only show ships that you own. If you add ships to your hangar, the ship dropdowns will only show the ships you've selected in your hangar.
Submit Trade Report
In the post report screen, you can post a buy/sell that you've made in the game. Doing this will allow you to keep a history of your trades, and it will also help us to keep prices in the game accurate. We can use the info you provide to help divine average stock amounts as well as average prices of items throughout the verse. Putting in reports helps us!
When the report is submitted, you'll see a message at the bottom that says "Report Transmitted!"
Options menu
On the upper right corner of the main screen you'll see three dots. If you click that, you'll be shown the options menu:
- Logout: logs you out of the application.
- About: shows information about the current version of the app you're running. Useful if submitting a bug report.
- Help: shows latest news and help info.
- Maint: a system-level menu that is for approved users only. This menu enables the ability to do some cartographic functions like populating our database with distances between stores and planets, etc.
Where to get help
If you need help with this application but it is not answered here, please join our forums -- this is where all user support will occur.