I'm not too sure if any of the following are official cheats or just plain bugs. If they are bugs then please note that some of these may only work on early versions of the game. This is due to the fact that later copies are allegedly bug free.
If you select a system around 650 light years away from your position you will get an in range fuel reading allowing you to make jumps of that distance making things much easier on long hauls.
To fly anywhere in the galaxy without exhausting your fuel supply. First go to the map and move the cursor down to between 620 - 660 light years until you come across a system which stays in range and hyperspace. It also works going up. Which is between 720 - 770 light years. It also works from side to side at approximately the same range.
To get enough money to buy anything you want start at system Lave, sell your hyperdrive, buy a passenger's cabin, get a passenger, and then try to buy a cheaper ship (you may have to press '1' instead of clicking for this to work). Frontier has got a bug, the money you'd receive if selling your ship to get a cheaper one is added to your credits, but you never get that cheaper ship because you can't give your ship away if there are passengers onboard. Repeat this often enough and you'll never have money problems during the game. This bug seems to be fixed in the 1.05 version of the game for the Amiga and in the American PC version.
Go to any spaceport, buy a ton of rubbish (this seems to only work with rubbish), leave the station and then hyperspace to another system (that's for not being fined for illegal dumping). Make sure you are in free flight (you can't dump with the autopilot turned on, and we really are gonna dump something) and accellerating (for not being hit by dumped cargo). Now do the following: Go to your ship's inventory. You see all your cargo, and the last should be a ton of rubbish. You also see the buttons for dumping the Cargo. Look at the rubbish button, imagine there was one more button below that and click right there. You just dumped cargo that you haven't loaded, and your ship gained one ton of space.Do this as often as you want, but be prepared that dumped cargo might damage your ship.
When the military ask you to destroy a target, fly to the planet and spot the target from space. Then lock on to the target and fly towards the edge of the planet above it with the time control set to three arrows. As soon as the distance to the target is below 4,000Kms, fire a missile and the target will be destroyed. This is an easy way to gain money and rank.
When you carry a risky passenger or parcel and you're told you're going to regret dealing with someone, lock onto the ship that sent the message and switch to autopilot. The attacking ship will not fire or fly in your direction, enabling you to destroy it safely.
To become ELITE in no time. Buy a mining laser on your front gun mounting and fly to a suitably sixed body i.e Phobos in orbit around Mars. Fire at the moon from a range of about 3km and press the Accelerate time button to the second top setting, whilst holding down fire. Shortly, a message will appear from the Interpol saying "Well done, commander" or some such other thing. Click on the time button again and in a wee while, you will be promoted up one rank! Keep on doing this and you will become a ferocious ELITE warrior in no time! P.S If this one takes a few minutes to tell you the message, don't worry. Also, if the LASER doesn't work on the front, fit it too the back.
Making Frontier run on any screen mode is possible with Frontier2AGA.lha from AmiNet/game/patch/. This patches Frontier to use the same Screenmode base as your frontmost screen. Might even work with graphic boards (not tested).
There also exists a frontier trainer on AmiNet/game/patch/: FrntTrn2.lha. This patch allows you to activate a special cheat mode by pressing the 'DEL'-key. Then you can change many of your ship's attributes, you can even try to fly a thargoid! Having a little falcon with 8000 tons of cargo space, four big plasma guns, any possible equipment, the acceleration of a missile and a size 8 hyperdrive for jump distances over 400 ly is no dream any more.
For all those of you that always wanted to exit Frontier back to Workbench / Shell frontierpatch.lha on AmiNet/game/patch/ is what you've been looking for. This patch allows you to exit Frontier by pressing X in the main screen.
For German Frontier/Elite2 users FrontierGerman.lha on AmiNet/game/patch/ (where else...) fixes some mistakes in the German translation and adds an exit patch which allows you to exit Frontier from the mainscreen back to Shell or Workbench by simply pressing X.
And the last one out there for all those Trekkies playing Frontier: FrnTREK1.1.lha on AmiNet/game/patch/ changes any screen texts to make you feeling Trekked. The Imperium changes to Romulan, Imperial Courier to Warbird and so on.
A few useful black market ads:
Sol ------------- | Li Qing Joa --- | Robins Holdings
Barnard's Star -- | Boston Base --- | Haynes & Son Inc
Cemiess --------- | Mackenzie Relay | Patricks Exchange
Capitol --------- | Fort Donalds -- | Honest John Thatchers
Van Moanen's Star | O'Connor City - | Perry's Holdings
Y2 Cawis Minoris- | Fort Wagner --- | Honda's Trading
Delta Pavonis --- | Duval --------- | Steven's Goods
Farece ---------- | Fortress York - | Goldstein Merchandise
DONGLES AND OTHER STRANGE BEASTS: There have been reports of problems with Frontier on an Amiga if a dongle occupies the 2nd joystick port. If you cannot control your ship because it starts to spin uncontrollably remove the dongle and try again.
SHIPS IN SYSTEM MAPS: Ships are marked in the system map as little crosses in the color in which the ships would appear on the scanner. Your own position is marked with a purple dot regardless of the type of your ship and your hyperjump cloud will be marked with a blue dot. You will see the blue dot also for the hyperjump clouds of ships that you had selected before they jumped out of the system. Sometimes it is even possible to use your cloud analyzer on such clouds. You can not center the map relative to ship marks.
PLANET SELECTION: A planet or station can only be selected if it is annotated with its name. This annotation is only performed when the game assumes that the object is clearly visible. The heuristic that is used for this decision sometimes fails badly. Therefore some planets can only be selected if the system is zoomed and rotated until the observer's position is near the planet. Try it with Pluto in Sol '0, 0'. It really is selectable!
AUTOPILOT: Your autopilot tries to fly to your target in a straight line. If there is a planet between you and your target, the autopilot will happily try to fly through the planet, crashing you in the process.
If you don't want to risk crashes because of high gravity or other mishaps that could confuse your autopilot you should always land using time acceleration at least at level 2. If you don't watch it too closely your autopilot definitely performs better.
DOCKING: Docking your ship in a space station without causing damage can become a quite complicated task for large ships. You have to remember that your forward view from a ship like the Panther Clipper is not centered in the ship but instead you look out of your forward window that may be high above the center axis of your ship. As a result you have to aim not at the middle of the docking bay of a station but at a point somewhere in the upper half of the back wall of the dock. One nicely working trick is to use the outside view to look at your ship from a point in front of it and align your ship such that you look at it from within the station and it keeps well clear of the dock walls. In a station you may keep your landing gear up to keep your ship as small as possible.
INITIAL TRADING: As a beginner you will want to make fast cash to be able to buy a better ship that brings you to all the wonders of the universe. You can earn your money with trading. As a beginner you should choose a trading route where there is no risk of being attacked by pirates. Sol and Barnard are two such systems. You can carry luxury goods from Sol to Barnard and robots back. Sell all of your initial equipment you don't need, to make room for merchandise. You won't need missiles, laser or your scanner. As soon as you have left Merlin (on Ross 154) you can sell your atmospheric shielding too at the next starport, if you avoid planets with atmosphere in the future. On the route between Sol and Barnard this will pose no problem, because there are enough space stations in either system. Be sure to check the bulletin board when you bring robots to Sol. Very often you can get a better price there than on the stock market.
You cannot afford Luxury Goods or Computers in the very beginning. Carry Fruit and Vegetables to Barnard instead until you have enough cash to switch to more profitable goods. Buy a bigger ship as soon as you have enough money to pay it AND enough cash to buy some initial cargo for your new ship too.
Another good route in imperial space has been reported to be Facece to Vequess and back. You can perform military missions on one way and carry slaves back, if you don't mind the moral implications.
CREW MEMBERS: Every day at midnight the bulletin board is updated and may show new potential crew members.
It is a very bad idea to fire someone of your crew. Your reputation will suffer badly. If you repeat this several times, it will take you a very long time (sometimes years!) to hire crew members again.
PASSENGERS: Passengers want to be delivered to their destination in one month or less. If they get impatient, they will tell you so, leave at the next starport and refuse to pay. The main problem is, that your reputation will suffer badly and future passengers may even refuse to be transported by you. You can persuade them sometimes by asking several times. You should be careful with passengers that tell you, that they owe someone money. They will most probably refuse to pay at the destination port. For some systems you need a permit to enter. The only way to get a permit is to transport a passenger or parcel to such a system. The people that give you military missions assume that you already have a permit.
CHARITY: If you give money to charity, you will get a better reputation and people will trust you more. This means that you can get 10% more money for deliveries, get all or part of the money in advance and more people will want to work for you (?). Your reputation will also grow if you succeed with passenger transports without receiving too much damage to your ship. Therefore giving away your money is not really necessary if your reputation is not too bad for passengers to accept you carrying them.
DUMPING RADIOACTIVES: One way to get rid of the radioactive waste from military drives is to dump it into space right out of your cargo bay. If you are in a system where a strong police force is watching, this can get you in trouble even if you dump directly after your jump into the system. In such systems you should simply sell your waste or (if radioactives are illegal) find a reliable merchant on the black market who takes it back.
You can have loads of fun if you try a few highly illegal dumping places. A space port is a very nice place to dump your waste on. Some people prefer to dump their radioactives into the still open landing bay of an underground spaceport. You can even fling your waste into a long range cruiser that waits outside of some space stations. Of course you can do the same with mines for the thrill of finally seeing a mine hit something!
There seem to exist systems where you can get real money for your radioactives. Look out for systems in the state of civil war. Sometimes you can sell your radioactives there on the black market.
COUNTRYSIDE LANDING: Lower your speed and raise your nose until you fall with approx. 3 m/s. When you are down to 10-15 m, cut your speed to 0 and align your nose with the horizon. Don't forget to lower you landing gear!
MINING: Select a system with little or no registered settlers, look for an unnamed planet above 0 degrees and below 200 degrees without a starport or station and unload your MB4. Wait a few months and land near your mining equipment. Pick it up and leave. If you try again at the same place you will find less and the third time you will find nothing. This is not dependent on the time you let your machine work or the amount of minerals the machine has produced. Only the number of trials counts.
A builtin camera (you get it for your first reconnaissance mission) does not prevent you from using the mining machines. Just use the camera icon in the near of the mining machine. Frontier will know, that you don't want to take pictures.
FUEL SCOOP FROM A GAS GIANT: Autopilot to the target, aim at the horizon and set your speed to 15,000 km/h. Use time acceleration and decelerate to keep the target tunnel frames coming at constant speed; when the atmosphere gets visible, aim for the middle and reduce your speed to 4000 km/h, go back to normal time. The fuel scoop will first fill up the cargo space and then the internal tanks.
FIGHTING: There seem to exist a lot of misunderstandings with respect to fighting. The first one is, that your movement vector has to point to your enemy to move towards him. This is not true. Your movement vector is shown as the vector of your movement with respect to the currently selected reference mass. This is totally insignificant for a fight, because there only the relative velocities of the fighting ships count. This also means, that you don't have to decelerate for a fight. Your attacker will have a similar velocity vector as you or he wouldn't stay in your vicinity for long.
Important are the tiny differences in your movement vectors that result in movements of your ships relative to each other. If you both fly parallel with 10,000 m/s in the same direction and accelerate towards each other, this will have the same effect as when you don't move at all and accelerate towards each other. What counts is the resulting relative movement. To make a long story short: Simply ignore your displayed velocity during a fight. It doesn't matter at all!
What does count is your velocity relative to the attacking ships. You cannot measure it directly, but you can select an attacking ship and watch the distance change to get an estimate of your velocity. This is the only velocity information that helps you to maneuver during a fight.
I have developed a standard sequence for fighting that uses a little cheating to compensate for the very poor HUD and the bad interface to the functions you need during a fight:
Some players find it sufficient to use the id labels, so they don't have to deselect the original flight target and select the attacker. I found the distance information the selection provides very helpful though. Especially when I have to use a powerful laser economically because it can be fired only a limited time until it overheats and needs time for cooling.
MILITARY MISSIONS: Be careful not to accept military missions that clearly cannot be finished in time. You will have to look at the destination starsystem, estimate your travelling time through hyperspace and the time you need in the target system to reach your destination. A good distance estimate is to add 10 AU to the orbital distance of your destination. If your destination is orbiting another planet use the orbital distance of this planet instead and add the orbital distance of your destination to the result.
If you don't get missions from your local military agent, don't despair. Often it is sufficient to change the starport in the same system to get missions. If all else fails and you don't want to change the base for your military career, simply make a small hyperspace jump out of the system and back. In the mean time your military agent may have changed his mind. If he still has nothing to do for you you should ask yourself a few questions. Would you give someone like you military missions? For whom have you worked in the past? Are you really trustworthy? See, you know the reason!
ASSASSINATION:With these points in mind I have succeded with every contract (civil or military) that I have accepted so far. In every case a victim didn't show up I could find a reason from the list above and succeeded in the next trial.
On the other hand there have been reported lots of problems with victims not showing up or refusing to land at the port of destination. Some of these problems seem to stay even if you use every trick in the book. In such a case your only chance is to reload a saved game from the time before you accepted the contract.
RECONNAISSANCE MISSIONS: One problem with such missions is, to find your target at all. It should work if you approach the planet until it nearly fills your screen. If the military base is visible, you should see it as a grey pixel that can be selected. If you don't see it, fly to the back of the planet or simply wait a few hours (in accelerated time) until the planet rotates the base into your view. The maximum distance to take pictures from is about 80 km. You get excellent pictures if you fly below 10 km. One nicely working method for an approach is:
On planets with high gravity this is the most difficult part. I always save a game before actually reaching the planet so I can try different routes to the target station. The problem on planets with high gravity is, that you don't get height information until you cannot decelerate anymore in time to avoid a crash. You have to approach such planets very carefully. Another problem is, that you can control you descent only via the velocity readings because you cannot see your actual velocity vector or the target tunnel with your nose up high enough to make a controlled descent to your target. You can aim at your target with your nose up, if you use the outside view.
A few times I managed to rough land between the buildings of a target station. The stations don't seem to have a starport, but only a hangar out of which the interceptors start. It is interesting to watch them materialize in front of this hangar (and crash shortly afterwards).
Reconnaissance missions to imperial stations are most difficult, because you are attacked by Imperial Couriers with 20 MW lasers. For my Asp with up to 10 shields this means that you are history with only one direct hit. If you fly very low between the buildings of a target station you must be extremely careful, not to be rammed by an enemy ship that suddenly appears directly in front of you.
BOMBING MISSIONS: If you have succeeded with reconnaissance missions and shot a lot of excellent pictures you will find bombing missions very boring. You can fire your nuclear missile from 500 km distance or even more without adverse effects if the station lies within your line of sight. The crater that replaces the station after a successful attack is no hole in the ground. It hovers above the planet just where the station used to be. If you rough land at the position of the station you land actually below the crater. Very strange...
RATINGS: If you want to improve your combat rating fast, there is one simple trick. Buy a Panther Clipper and equip it with about 300 shield generators. It is nearly invincible now. Select a system with lots of pirates. Anarchies are very nice and some dictatorships also work very well. Jump into the system and switch off your engines. Accelerate time to the maximum and wait for the pirates to come. When they arrive, simply wait. They will crash into you and you will get the bonus for destroying them. Only one ship can get dangerous to you and this is the Imperial Courier which is very often equipped with a 20 MW laser. Fight this one and do it carefully because once this gun starts to hit you, your shields will degrade very fast and you don't have the engine power to evade quickly.
After you have cleaned up the system, jump to a neighbor system and back or still better, simply jump to another anarchy. Repeat until you run out of fuel, are bored too much or have advanced to ELITE after 6000 destroyed ships.
As soon as you get reconnaissance missions from the military, you can advance even faster. Pick a mission to a station on a planet with low gravity and fly towards it. From approximately 500 km downward you can watch interceptors start continuously. All you have to do is to reduce your velocity or switch off your engines and wait until they start crashing into you. In the near of imperial stations it is not as easy, because you will have to actively fight the attacking Imperial Couriers that would cut you into pieces otherwise. They are quite easy to destroy, if you adapt your course until they approach you in a straight line. Then you can activate the autopilot and fire as soon as they are in range. As long as you move to follow one of the Imperial Couriers the others are usually too clumsy to hit you hard enough to cause damage. Other ships can safely be ignored. They will crash into you from time to time or reduce your shields a few percent if they hit you with their lasers. Keep well above the planet to avoid crash landings.
You can accelerate all this still further if you use an energy bomb to wipe out a lot of enemies with one keypress. This works most satisfactory if you are surrounded by lots of police vipers after some little disagreements with the local authorities.
SLING SHOT: Aim just past a large gas giant and get fast enough (700 km/s for Jupiter). Switch off your engines and watch. Speed and distance are critical. You will have to practice a bit to get the feeling.
SIGHTSEEING: You can fly through all the domes on planets without a breathable atmosphere and land between the buildings. If you do this for the transparent domes at Ross 154 you will find in one dome administration buildings of Vega Line, Sirius Corporation and other trading houses and in the second dome the usual combination of concrete blocks and green patches in between with scattered brick houses. It is definitely fun to fly between the buildings and look at your surroundings. Agriculture domes are a bit boring, because they contain nothing more than lots of green balls at ground level.
Domes that are not tranparent, can be entered too but contain absolutely nothing. It is interesting, that they are no obstacle for you though. At least they are good for some very strange graphical effects if you land in one of these domes and use your outside view to look at your surroundings.
In every major city with more than the space port and a little industry you can find little churches with working clocks. The cities are structured as large blocks of ugly concrete buildings and patches of green between them with scattered brick houses and every now and then a little church. Try to rough land in the vicinity of such a church and watch the clock on the church steeple. Use time acceleration for better effect. If you are close enough you can even read the roman numbers on the clock face. The buildings give you an interesting impression of the size of your ship. A Cobra MK III looks huge compared with this tiny little church. And have you ever seen a huge space ship standing in the graveyard behind a church? It looks definitely strange.
At some time in the future I will look for one of the bridges you can see in the intro sequence of the game. This will be my last action before voluntary retirement. A kind soul already gave me the tip to look in the near of New San Francisco on Earth, Sol '0, 0'. Do you really want me to retire?
OTHER GALAXIES: If you use the galactic view and zoom out of the galaxy you can see lots of other galaxies that are arranged in a regular grid. These galaxies are all copies of your home galaxy, so it is really not worth the effort to try and find wormhols to distant galaxies. There is only one galaxy and a lot of mirror images.
THARGOIDS: A lot of oldtimers from the era of the original Elite game still remember the menace of the Thargoids and miss them in Frontier. Nobody has seen a Thargoid in Frontier yet but in an interview David Braben shall have told that there is a single Thargoid ship in a system far out in the galaxy. I personally think this is only a trick to keep us playing Frontier until add-ons appear. But who knows?
If you fly bombing missions to federal bases you can sometimes see two big violet octagonal ships that look just like the good old Thargoid ships but they are not disturbed by your approach. Perhaps the Thargoids sleep for a few hundred years after the exhausting fight with mankind?
ENEMIES ONE AT A TIME: Maximum time acceleration will separate groups of ships to get them in line, waiting for you.
PERFECT AUTOPILOT: Your autopilot always succeeds if you use maximum time acceleration.
PLANET LANDING WITHOUT FUEL: While you still have fuel, use the autopilot to align with your target planet, switch to maximum time acceleration and wait for the landing sequence. Switch back to maximum time acceleration and you are save.
ZERO TIME SHOOTING FROM GUN TURRETS: If an attacker approaches, get him in sight of a laser turret, stop time, select the attacker, aim the laser and test fire (you see the blue or the explosion light effect if you hit). Keep firing while releasing the time stop. Repeat if necessary.
MISSILE FIRE WHILE DOCKED: You can fire missiles even from within a space station. This might help in case of the passenger/no crew problem described in the Bugs / Bugs section.
CERTAIN MISSILE HIT: Switch to maximum time acceleration after firing the missile. Your missile will hit even if you use a nuclear missile and/or have 900 km distance to your target.
ENGINE UPGRADE FOR IMP COURIER OR IMP TRADER: The only way to get an upgrade for the non-removable engine in an Imperial Courier or an Imperial Trader seems to be to let it fail due to maintenance neglection and then put in a new engine. The new engine will be fixed just as the original drive. To let time pass in a controlled way select a route between two star systems an perform lots of jumps. If you select Barnard <-> Sol, you can sell all your equipment except for the autopilot and load your ship with fuel for the jumps. After 10 or 11 months you should stop jumping around to avoid a misjump. The few remaining days you can simply wait outside a station until your drive falls off.
AUTOPILOT BREAK: You can activate the autopilot for immediate deceleration from arbitrary high velocities in the vicinity of your selected target, if you use maximum time acceleration.
CRASH AVOIDANCE: Assume you have to perform a mission on some planet, reached it and find out that you are too fast to be able to decelerate in time to avoid a crash landing. What can you do? The correct way is to watch the crash, reload a previously saved game and try again. The Frontier way is to use time acceleration to avoid the crash. Simply switch to maximum time acceleration just before the crash. You will make a big jump through the planet and be safe at some distance at the other side.
This is not really a bug but more or less a consequence of the implementation of time acceleration. Collisions are detected if your ship collides with an object at a given time frame of the simulation. When you accelerate time these time frames are farther apart and so are your positions in space if you are moving. If your position at one time frame is above a planet and at the next time frame on the other side of the planet Frontier will not detect the collision that should have happened in between.
FAST ASCENT TO ELITE: You can use the properties of time acceleration to acsend to ELITE status very fast, once you get foto or bombing missions. Just buy a Panther with lots of shields, get yourself an imperial foto or bombing mission and stop about 10 km above the target station. Next destroy all ships in your near. You can use your turrets and the zero time shooting feature to achieve this. Now you can select the first level of time acceleration. The ships that now start from the station fly directly into your shields and are destroyed. The only thing you have to watch very carefully is your height above the planet. You can expect a 'right on commander' message every 7 to 10 minutes. These messages reset time acceleration, so you will have to destroy all ships in your near again and select time acceleration until the next message comes up. After a few hours of work you will have advanced to ELITE status.
You can not use higher time acceleration levels because then the destroyed interceptors are not counted.
NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE POLICE: If you have been caught selling or buying illegal goods or having them on board, the police will fine you. If the officer is not corrupt, you can always lower your fine to the original amount if you claim you "haven't done it".
Most of the bugs can be circumvented in one or another way. The only bug that really annoyed me is the crash that happens after you have unloaded a mining machine and leave the system (PC only). This bug makes the mining part of the game unplayable and should have been found if the game had been beta tested at all. The many program confusions and crashes during heavy fights are a nuisance that can only be partially avoided with frequent game saving.
Reconnaissance missions to such systems are very difficult, because you cannot use the teleport-and-decelerate trick. Furthermore the drawing of the target planet gets totally inconsistent with the drawing of the station to be filmed, resulting in "flying" stations that seem to be located above the planet and other strange effects that make navigation by hand a matter of pure luck. I got such missions to Micanex C,Da '3, -4' and Hoethan A,B3b '3, -5'.
For some of these methods a few retries might help (save the game before you try anything!). If nothing else helps, select a target for a hyperjump and force a misjump via 'ALT' + 'F8'.
The effect can be reproduced if you buy a new ship and immediately buy a new drive for it. If you now enter the repair screen, all your thrusters are reported to be damaged. You can try to repair them with very strange effects that cause repaired thrusters to get damaged from the repair of other thrusters. If you have succeeded with the repair and no thruster is reported damaged anymore, you will get the old damage reports again the next time you enter the repair screen.
The effect can be ignored and will vanish after you have refueled and taken off to the next starport.