I finally got around to trying exploration, and enjoyed it. Mapping systems way out in the black is a very chill activity, and goes well with some good music and light web browsing. Finding your first undiscovered Earth-like world is exciting, and having your name attached to it when you return the data is a nice reminder of the experience. I don't know much about mining or exobiology yet.

Advice for returning players 2025 thread:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/advice-for-returning-players-2025.632431/

In case you weren't playing when it appeared, there is now an engineered frame shift drive that you can just walk up and buy if you have the right materials from your earlier gameplay. It might be helpful while figuring out what you want to do. (The even newer supercruise overdrive models let you boost in supercruise, but the already-engineered ones require more effort to get, and you probably don't need them for now.)

New ships: Type-8, Mandalay, Cobra Mk V. The first one can be bought for credits if you have Odyssey; the others are still in early access, requiring ARX to buy. They're designed for better handling in supercruise overdrive, and word is that they're all very good at their specialty.

You don't need a fancy expensive ship for effective exploration. A Diamondback Explorer with a good FSD will take you a long way.

Pioneer Supplies branches sometimes have upgraded suits and weapons that can give you a jump start in on-foot work. All you need for these are credits, but inventory is small and shared by everyone in the game, so good luck is a factor as well. New stock is randomly distributed every Thursday. Here's a thread where people post their finds:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-great-pre-upgraded-gear-sharing-is-caring-thread.576352/

Materials for engineering are generally more abundant and easier to get now.

EDDB is gone, but Inara is still with us, and still very useful for finding things:

https://inara.cz/elite/

You can still contribute to the community-sourced information databases that drive tools like Inara's, by running a utility while you play the game. Having it upload data to Inara is also handy for tracking how your ships are outfitted and what materials you have.

https://github.com/EDCD/EDMarketConnector

ED Shipyard and Coriolis are still around, for experimenting with ship builds:

https://edsy.org/

https://coriolis.io/

Power Play 2.0 has completely changed how the major factions interact and award their special ship modules. It's better overall, but very new and still has balance problems. I pledged and am mostly enjoying it. You can ignore it entirely without having your gameplay affected in any significant way. The forum is here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/forums/elite-dangerous-playstyles/

I think Luriant's ToDo List is still relevant:

https://old.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/15a0c69/luriants_todo_list/

Galnet News Digest has nice audio summaries of what's going on at any given time:

https://www.youtube.com/@GalnetDigest

The Pilots Trade Network often offers carrier loading & unloading jobs that pay well:

https://old.reddit.com/r/PilotsTradeNetwork/new/

The Fleet Carrier Owners Club often offers free ferry rides between the bubble and Colonia:

https://old.reddit.com/r/FCOC/new/

You don't need to min-max to get into any of them except maybe exploration (min-maxing your jump range is kinda important out in the edges of the galaxy where stars are quite far apart). Just jump into it and mess around. Exobiology is the weird one for me in my experience. Guides tend to point you to the things you wanna scan, but I don't know how up to date they are; most of the things I was using last time I was playing a few months ago were very wrong about what systems/planets had what. It's mostly just driving around on planets and scanning for particular things that are extremely far apart, so I found the whole experience to be the most boring thing I've ever done in the game.

I came back into it a few months ago. I played at launch or pre launch way back in the day. But I just bought a diamondback explorer and a good frame shift setup and explored new planets. Exbiology is fun for a while, very relaxing, and very lucrative.

I make reference below often to searching for things. This is primarily done through inara, a 3rd party website. It can sink to your elite profile and makes life easier. I also use ED Discovery (windows app) that uploads to EDSM. That can be useful for exploration but I don't really use that site actively. I like the stats and the feeling I'm adding my mark to the game's galaxy. Not sure if you're on pc or console.

I liked using some of the early engineers as my guide as to what to do. Some need you to travel (the Maia one? Farseer?), so that was my call to make a basic exploration ship and try it out. Everyone loves the DBX (with good reason) but I've been clinging to my Dolphin, my 2nd ship with slightly less jump range. I just love the look and the sounds of S-K ships.

Someone else needed combat bounties, so then I did that loosely. Pirates trickle in at nav beacons but search out a compromised Beacon for steadier flow. Do NOT add 1t of juicy cargo to call them over to you. They will gang up very fast and you won't be ready for the medium and large ships coming at you. A medium ship full of lasers will probably vaporize small ships in a few moments. Watch your heat though. While inefficient after engineering, I do love my Krait&Barrels with 4 multi cannons. The one laser does slow me down with ships that have prismatic or bi-weave shields. I added the heatsink engineering effect or whatever, so I can lay on the laser all day and just get colder as long as it's hitting.

Similar thing with the one that specifies you must mine some mineral. I think I spent one trip in a cobra before building a medium miner. Can't remember which. I eventually built an orca or beluga and found that any size ship takes 1-2 hours of gameplay to fill. The bigger cargo holds come with more/larger lasers for surface mining and more limpets. Not sure how it scales with core mining. It's been a while since I mined but that was calm and enjoyable during my first billion credits. I just searched for stations paying like 3x market average and searched for sources less than 20ly or so (full cargo can really hurt range).

For credits, my go-to has been robigo passenger runs or I think ceos data runs. While it's grindy, I'll just go and play that until I get bored. No particular credit goal, just a consistent source of money.

Long story short, I'll use guides to figure out how to min/max my current activity as best as I can, but not much more. I don't have a FC after 1000 hours. I could have, but then it would have been parked for about 2 years now anyway. The most min/max activity I think I've ever done was I stumbled into a squadron and did some wing missions. Made like 1bil in a few hours. It was more fun to talk to these players than it was mulling around with some stubby cargo runs from a station to a FC and vice versa somewhere else.