@Shadowmeph Couple other things that aren't obvious.
1. Contract persistence -
What is earned from a contract, reputation, aUEC (money), items, is persistent. However contracts themselves are not. So if you start a contract and log off part way through, the progress in that contact is lost and when you log back in it will be like you never took it. You won't have any accepted contracts in your mobiGlass on log in. However if the contract is part of chain, you will keep the progress as long as the individual contract in the chain is completed before you log off. For example if a contract chain has five contracts to complete the chain, and you complete 1, 2, and 3 and then log out, contract 4 will be available to you when you log back in, so you keep that progress. At least until they do a larger scale wipe.
2. Not all freight elevators are created equal -
There are freight elevators inside your hanger, and there are external freight elevators on the outside of space stations. Cargo that is part of a contract, as in go here, pick up cargo, fly it to other place, deliver, has to be dropped off and submitted through the internal hanger freight elevators. If you are just buying, hauling, selling cargo yourself, or wanting to store items to that location's inventory, that can be done through either internal or external freight elevators as I understand.
3. Inventories are unique -
There is no shared inventory in game any more, as in a full infinite inventory that you can access from anywhere. When you start the game for the first time, all the items you have are with you in the location inventory at the location you selected as your home location. You start from that inventory and take stuff with you as you venture out. There are the following primary inventory locations:
- Personal inventory = what you have on your person, in your backpack, armour, etc.
- Location inventory = you have your home location, but you can store items nearly any place where you can land - planetary locations, space stations, mining outposts, any place that has an inventory access kiosk.
- Ship/vehicle inventory = you can store items, weapons, components, etc. in your ship or vehicle. All have varying amounts of available space, plus they also have dedicated weapons/utility items lockers and eventually suit lockers. The latter are in a lot of ships but not working yet.
There is an inventory manager in mobiGlass, and it used to work, but it isn't right now. It allows you to search and find items no matter where they are across those inventories so if you lose track of something you know where to go, what ship it is in, etc. so you can go and get it.
Those might save you some confusion.
One warning about larger cargo contracts. I have occasionally had it happen that it looks like you've loaded all the contracted cargo, nothing left visibly on the freight elevator at the pickup location, but then you go to the delivery location, unload, and attempt to turn in and you end up be one box short. It very frustrating since loading and unloading cargo can be time consuming, and there is no way to fix that issue currently that I know of. Anyway... alpha. So it goes.
