Does carrying valuable cargo increase odds of being attacked?
Yesterday while playing No Man's Sky, I found an oceanic planet that contained a multitude of Sac Venom. Whenever I scanned for resources nearby, these popped up everywhere as far as my scanners would go.
A Sac Venom's average value on the market goes for ~26k per item, so it was only natural to stock up on as many as I can. Afterwards, I was carrying about 500K worth of inventory and I made my way to my ship to travel to the closest space station.
Moments after I left orbit, my scanners picked up hostiles nearby and turned off my pulse engines. Typically I would shoot them down and continue, but about 12 ships warped into my area and took me out like I was nothing.
When carrying an abundance of valuable resource, do you have greater odds of being attacked or was this merely bad luck?
Best Answer
From my experience, I've found that having more valuables increases both the chance of pirates coming to attack you and the amount of pirates that do. Recently, before I switched to earning a profit from trading, I found a few planets with Gravitino Balls, and, with my combined 30-slot inventory, harvested as many as I could. I found that the second I got out of the atmosphere, I immediately had four pirates chasing me. I was able to get to the space station just above in time, however this was no coincidence.
I proceeded to test my theory by coming up with different amounts of balls, and, although the time it took for them to appear varied slightly, I found that the amount of pirates depended on the value of the goods you're carrying and the (approximate) time depended on the amount of valuable goods you have in storage.
Due to this, I don't recommend harvesting sac venom or any other valuable trading items for money once you have over 500,000. Buy low and sell high, especially with dynamic resonators.
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