Elite Dangerous Horizons: Guide to Making Money with Robigo Shaodow Delivery Missions

Robigo Shadow Deliveries

Robigo is a fringe system about 350 Lightyears outside of the inhabited empires space. It’s a small civilian platform hovering around some small ringed planet in the middle of a nameless star cluster. But they have a lot of illegal goods and need you to long distance smuggle them into stations 350 Lightyears away. This is where it gets tricky, because there’s a catch: You can’t get scanned. If you do get scanned then all of your Shadow Deliveries fail. The 1-2 hours spent just on travel alone, gone.

First of all here’s what’s needed. If you’re covering planetary missions as well you’ll need an Advanced Discovery Scanner, and a “Detailed Surface Scanner” to scan the system and then the planets. Also a high quality fuel scoop is a requirement. This also greatly helps make some extra cash on the long trip by scanning the systems you go through.

As noted in the above picture, the ship shown is a python with A class FDL drive and full combat regalia. This is by choice but completely optional. The more shadow deliveries you take on, the more ship scans and interdictions you’ll receive on the long 350+ LY journey. Fast thrusters and lost of boost will greatly help. If you go no shields for weight, well good luck. I get about 16LY jumps on the way there and 14 for delivery. This takes longer, but with 160tons cargo space I can take A LOT of missions, defend myself and spend another hour or two delivering (making cash) once back. It’s all about balance and what you desire to achieve.

Next up is the ship to use. Most people use a stripped down (no shields) cobra for it’s long distance FTL and inexpensive cost to replace should things go bad. I’m not saying they’re wrong, but the cargo limitations can hurt you. Shadow Deliveries are anywhere from 1 Ton to 35+ tons each. Some higher paying missions are upwards of 110 tons cargo. If you’re on a budget, go cheap and work your way up. The Asp Explorer is one of the best options for cost, jump distance and cargo space. A Python is an ok ship, but if you want to Fight, Explore and Trade, this is the ship of choice for all intents and purposes.

Lastly is just selecting the missions. Switch between Open Play and Solo Play to refresh the Bulletin Board and find lucrative missions. This may take a bit of time. Also don’t grab the first $1.6m mission you see. There’s other missions for 2, 3, 4 up to the rare $10 million missions (I’ve yet to see more than $5M but the rumors are out there).

Your Journey back will be rife with people trying to trick you into following them out of Hyperspace, interdictions and rerouting to find stars you can scoop. There’s a lot of dead Dwarf stars out there to make your day suck. If you’re interdicted quickly get your guns out (turrets highly recommended) and shoot the mofo. Especially target the System Authority that is scanning you. Then either kill them, or boost away and escape. Since 90% of the systems are anarchy, it’s ok to shoot the police.

Lastly, deliver. Chances are most of the systems you are delivering to are “unexplored”. Meaning you have to scan it. Further if you are landing on a planet, you have to discover the planet and then scan it in order for the base to show up. The system map will show you what planet the base is on. Once you Scan it, you can see the base, select it and land.

That’s pretty much it for the Robigo runs. There’s also Sothis, Almagest and Takurua on the same route that also offer Shadow Deliveries.