Airmen offers six different types of contracts, which pay different amount of resources each. You can get the contracts from six different points of interest on the map. All contracts are available in four different levels of difficulty, starting with D for the easiest and ending with A for the hardest.
Once you have sufficient reputation (explained below) at all forts, the following contracts are available:


Ghost ship hunts at the Obelisk work similarly to regular hunts, however you won't know the location or the payment in advance. They also give 50% more reward, but have 100% hp and 100% damage instead of the normal 75% hp 100% damage on hunts.
Player fortresses may have deliveries, harvests and/or hunts, depending on which boards are installed.

Every contract's payment is the result of base payment * contract factor * random variance.

The base payment is chosen from one of the following, with these approximate chances of appearing on the board:


The exact numbers are 400 divided by x, i.e. 400/2, 400/3, 400/8 and 400/11.

Resources not listed here cannot be obtained through contracts.

The contract factor is:


For deliveries the numbers in brackets denote the total number of parcels and how many locations to deliver them to. E.g. 48/3 means a total of 48 parcels which you have to deliver to three different islands. Thus the largest load is not the best paid one, since it only requires you to travel to one destination.

For rescue, capture and smuggling contracts the distance is taken into account for the payment, the numbers above are based on an average distance. For deliveries, hunts and harvests the distance has no influence.

For harvest and smuggling I haven't gathered sufficient data yet.

Multiplying base payment and contract factor gives you the minimum pay. The random variance ranges from 100% to 133.33%, factoring it in results in the final payment displayed on the board.

What can we deduce from all these numbers now on how to best earn resources?

• As you can see, the A type contract pay best and they all pay equally well.
  
• Rescue and captures task you with bringing a ship back to the fort. This takes time, requires a harpoon and you can usually only do one at a time. Thus these contracts are not recommended, unless you can schedule them as the last one to do on your way back.
  
• Hunts are easier and faster to complete, since they merely require you to destroy an enemy ship. If you have a sturdy heavy ship, they are thus a good choice.
  
• Deliveries however can be accomplished right from the start. Even the biggest deliveries can be completed with a light ship (e.g. the one below). When you start the game you'll only have access to the smaller ones. Once you complete some contracts for Tsuchev Ruins the bigger deliveries become available, allowing you to earn resources faster. As soon as you can access the 48/3 contracts I recommend to take four of them at a time. Since the destinations often overlap or are close to each other this allows you to profit from economies of scale and earn lots of resources quickly.

This ship carries 192 parcels, meaning you can get four of the best paid delivery contracts of 48 parcels from Tsuchev Ruins (Spears) at once:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1955687687

Other tasks which allow you to gain resources are:

The most straight-forward way, grab a ranged weapon (for pigeons), a boarding axe (for wood, demon flesh and ancient bone) or a pickaxe (for everything else) and hit the resource. It will drop parcels as per the table below.

If you control it as the timer runs out you gain 100 synthest and five times the base pay of another resource. You need to be within 100m of the active synthesiser to gain control and stay within 400m to maintain it. They are located on Ridgeline, Burrow, Anvil, Volcano, Hollow, Spearhead, Igloo and Glacier, only one of them is active at any time.

Installation caches contain 3-4 resources with their base payment multiplied by factor which depends on the difficulty, which again is dependent on the mass of your ship and your allies. For a single 30k ship the factor can be e.g. 5.5.
Here there is no random extra. You might get 2-3 times the same resources, which will automatically be summed up. Some installations (namely Tablet, Burrow and Cauldron) also carry cargo, which means you can loot it after defeating it too.

For each wave which you succeed at, you get a random resource's base pay multiplied by an increasing factor. For the first wave this factor is 6, for the second it's from 9 to 12 (depending on the difficulty) and for the third between 10.5 and 16.5. (These are the numbers I have encountered so far, if you have had others please let me know.)

The artefact is charged by ships which lose all engines and wells while being within 800m of it. It follows the heaviest ship within 200m and once delivered to a blue trapezium will pay the build costs of the absorbed ships plus 20 arcenite.

Every calendar day you have three daily quests, upon completing them you gain the resources listed there.

Originally posted by Bronze Johnson:

[...] ships with skull bounties can destroy each other for a resource reward based on the build cost of the victim. [...] The pirate king gets double rewards for claiming skull bounties but their skull bounty can be claimed by any other crew (even if they lack a skull bounty themselves) and is doubled. [...]
Destroying a skull bounty ship while lacking one yourself now grants every member of the crew a special new resource called bounty coins. Bounty coins can be exchanged at Tower Reckongale for one of 4 basic resources or Smuggler's Den for one of 4 rare resources.

You can find the exchange rates below.

• Looting AI ships They drop up to 64 parcels of gold, wood, aetherium, cyprium, magnesite, nitranite, oil and arcenite. The more difficult ships drop refined resources.
  
• Looting AI forts: Similarly to AI ships, some with higher parcel count (up to 110).
  
• Looting whales: They drop one to two dozen parcels, mostly refined magnesite and some refined aetherium.

Originally posted by Bronze Johnson:

if you are mining whales you want to do damage in small increments. There is a parcel drop threshold that resets when it gets passed so using a boarding charge to do a ton of damage will make you over shoot the threshold and get less drops by the time the part is destroyed.

Looting and harvesting means that you have to pick up parcels and extract them, which requires you to have sufficient cargo space. For the other tasks the resources are added directly to your stockpile.

The parcels contain the following:

Gold and arcenite parcels can only be obtained by defeating AI vessel. Synthest parcels are not available anywhere yet (they would contain 10 resources per parcel). Parcels you get from delivery contracts are not worth anything when extracting them.

Refined parcels are worth three time as much as regular ones. They can be found on some AI vessels and you can refine wood, aetherium and nitranite yourself on a player fortress with the respective refinery. For some resources there is no refined variant, as you can see from the table above.

Synthesisers, installation caches and artefact gains are shared with allies. All gains are shared within the crew, according to the shares set by the captain. The only exception are parcels on board a player fortress, which go only to the owner.

For more details regarding the different contracts and tasks you can consult King Jo's guide:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1607031613
Bounty coins can be exchanged as following at Tower Reckongale:


The following exchanges are available at Smuggler's Den:

Not all contracts are available from the start, most will be unlocked as your reputation at the respective fort increases. You can gain reputation by either fulfilling contracts from that fort or by extracting cargo there. Extracting only cargo (without the ship) is not a recommended way to gain reputation though, since you will lose part of it (unless you are at maximum reputation, in which case it doesn't make a difference anymore anyway).

The following benefits become available as your reputation increases, usually one (sometimes two) per level you gain.

Castle Orenvaald:


Tower Reckongale:


Tsuchev Ruins:


Smuggler's Den:


The Obelisk on Horizon does not have reputation levels, instead once you complete the highest available contract (pact) you unlock the next one. Other than the four hunt contracts there are no other actions available there.

Player fortresses don't have reputation levels either, all contracts are immediately available. To
build fortresses and the respective boards you will have to unlocked through research though, unless you find a friendly player whose fortress you can use.

The following 21 islands constitute the archipelago, sorted by how they appear in the teleportation control of a player fortress. Islands without their own teleportation destination appear at the end, with their closest point in brackets. If you don't have access to player fortresses yet you can ignore this column.
The number of tunnel entrances is especially interesting for smuggling contracts, since it tells you how many locations you might have to check out before finding the contraband. E.g. with a contract to Spine you know for sure where it's going to be, whereas on High Tide you might have to check out three tunnels.


Of the eight synthesiser only one is active at any time.
Possible locations are shown in brackets: The installation is always on one of the islands listed above.
For the carcasses it is determined randomly whether they are on an island or not.

The archipelago is 10 * 10 km big and the water is up to 100 m deep.

AI ships spawn as following:

Originally posted by Bronze Johnson:

• the synth can spawn 1 ship and it will do it if there is a player ship nearby and 5 minutes or less on the timer. This ship has 50% hp on all parts and does 100% damage. if an AI spawns naturally on an island with a synth it will use the same buff/nerf levels as the synth ships do 100% damage 50%hp.
  
• Islands can spawn 1 ship/fort. [Island with blue forts on them do not spawn any though.] If it's a fort defeating it, destroying a cargo pad, or taking a cargo parcel will spawn its reinforcement which each fort can only do once. These ships have 50% hp and do 50% damage.
  
• Forts that do 100% damage get refined parcels which are triple the base parcel.
  
• AI "cargo ships" have a 5% chance of spawning in open water tiles when they go from 0 player ships nearby to 1. "Cargo ships" can be a specific fort, a mini mechalodon or a normal cargo ship. Normal cargo ships only shoot at ships with a bounty and spawn with a preset path that they will not stop following. These ships have 100% hp and do 100% damage.