One of the most frustrating things in X3AP is the run-around you have to go through to locate and buy things, either for one of the many fetch quests *cough* Microchips *cough* *cough* The Beryll *cough* or just to equip your ships with latest and greatest weapons. Finding things that are in stock is one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of the game.

Yes, you can look online to see what a station should sell, but the only way of seeing whether the ware is in stock is to have a presence in the system, either by flying there yourself, having a friendly ship in the system or having a satellite. Looking it up from out of system will just give you ???? as seen here:



There’s nothing more frustrating than flying across the galaxy or flying to every sector one by one just to find out the good you wanted is not in stock.

The solution is having a ship set up with Best Buy.

Not only will this gizmo tell you where to find which station has nearly any product in the game in stock, as an added bonus, it'll also be the cheapest in the (known) galaxy too! But let's be honest at this stage you probably don't care about the $$.

All you need for this is a ship with a Best Buys Locator. See here [roguey.co.uk] and screenshot below for a list of available stations which stock it.


In terms of ship choice, be advised that you can only look up wares that the ship itself can physically buy, so don’t bung it on a Discoverer or M3 because it won’t be able to buy anything larger than ‘M’. If you try and select an untradeable ware, it will just be red in the ‘Ware Select’ screen:



Don’t worry about speed or cargo space because the ship won’t actually be performing the trade.
I just put it on one of the Haulers I use for universe trading anyway. Just don’t forget to set it back to what it was doing after you’ve ordered it to do the remote buy (see section on Finer Points for more details).

Once installed:

1. Open up the command console and click trade --> Buy Ware for Best Price.
   
2. Select a location that you know that ware is sold at, even if you don’t know if it’s in stock.
   
3. Select the ware
   
4. Set the maximum jump range to 999 so that it considers the entire galaxy.

Note 1: You are limited to wares the ship can physically carry i.e. L, XL, M size.
Note 2: It is still limited to trading within the area of the galaxy you have physically discovered.

The ship’s panel will then change to reflect that it is performing a ‘Remote Buy’ and it will tell you the location it is going to on the properties page.



You can also expand it by going to the ship’s info tab.



This system isn’t foolproof though and sometimes it may fail because there are no goods available in the area of the galaxy you have discovered. In this case you’ll get a message advising you that it can’t find anything a few seconds after you get the ‘command accepted’.

Make sure you cancel the command afterwards because if the ship is able to (i.e. has a jumpdrive, sufficient energy cells and is permitted to jump under the properties tab) it will attempt to complete the trade! Normally it can be a bit sluggish in responding and jumping isn’t enabled by default, in which case all it will do is waste its time as it will still attempt to get there and perform the trade even after you’ve bought the ware.

Another key point is that you can use either the point of production or the point of sale as valid locations to find the ware. So, for example if I wanted to buy energy cells, I could select a solar farm or a military outpost. However, it must be a place where the ware is sold (i.e. a good and therefore purchasable) and not used as a resource.

You can use the wiki or Roguey’s guide to find where an item can be produced or sold as it can be quite confusing for some weapons e.g. determining which weapons are sold heavy weapons complexes or seeker missile factories.

Although a damn side better than manually searching yourself, there are a few limitations.

• You won’t know how many of the good are in stock unless you have a presence there. This means you may fly halfway across the galaxy to buy 1 Gauss Cannon – but that may be the last one you need! This doesn’t make the system entirely useless as it will be the best price as well.
  
  
• You can only search for goods that are manufacturable by the player outside the PHQ i.e. resources/wares/lasers/missiles/shields and not for ships or upgrades.
  
  
• The ship uses its own network so it magically knows whether the good is in stock even if you the player are unable to determine it. However, it can only access areas which you have explored.
  
  
• As per the section on ‘What you need’, you can only search for wares that your ship could physically buy.

Hopefully this guide has been useful for you and saved you some frustration and wasted time flying to a sector only to discover the good you're looking for isn't in stock.

Let me know if you think I should add or change anything, otherwise happy hunting!