Beginning Players

Okay, I'm brand new and this game has the worst explanations EVER!

• Remain calm!!! In the words of Douglas Adams, "Don't Panic!" This game is insanely complicated and you'll find people that have played for nearly a decade that are still learning about it. Bottom line: only a savant could know everything. The beauty is, YOU DON'T HAVE TO! Most of this game can be gotten through almost haphazardly as far as making it to the end of the episodes in general on Normal difficulty. Your best bet if you're just starting out is to try everything and learn what you can from each experience. When you're really in a bind, ask the fleet or armada. Everyone will be delighted to try to answer your question.

• Below are several subheadings of various aspects of the game that can be especially tricky, followed by a few extremely common questions with direct answers.

• There is no "Right Way to do it". You will hear a million opinions and an untold number of strategies. Almost all of them are valid and functional to varying degrees. At the end of the day, you need to decide how YOU want to play the game based on your available information and find what works for you.

• The bad in-game explanations are never-ending. You will see these everywhere you look. If you don't understand it, ask an experienced player before you commit to something that probably does not work the way you think it does. It can be very very costly.

Which Character Profession is "better"?

Wrong. Right from the beginning this is the wrong attitude. There is no "better" character profession. There is only "The character profession that you can most easily play with your own style." Even to that extent, each profession can be played in different ways to achieve different effects. There are the typical roles that each is "best suited to" but this isn't necessarily the only way to do it. An easy breakdown of the simplest aptitude might be:

Tactical: think of this profession like a focused Laser. A Tactical character is usually exceptional at picking one target and making them disintegrate before they can fire back at you. Against very heavy targets, a Tactical character can also provide a punishing degree of firepower that whittles their HP to nothing rapidly. The typical drawback of this is that Tactical characters are often very lightly defended, meaning that they can destroy a target efficiently but often cannot survive a large amount of aggression aimed at themselves (in fantasy games this would be similar to a "Rogue", "Ranger", or "Berserker" type of class).

Science: this is easily one of the most difficult professions to describe since they have such a wealth of variety in their skills and functions. The Science captain is often considered similar to "Clerics", "Mages", or "Wizards" in RPG-style Fantasy games in that they are typically lightly guarded and do not often give damage through straight equipment, but make use of their skills to change the course of battles (often in very dramatic ways). A Science captain is both the most powerful "healer" and the most efficient user of "AoE" (Area of Effect) type skills that can decimate entire hordes of foes. As a trade-off, science ships gain the strongest benefit to their shielding systems - because they really need it - and some science consoles are built with a modifier to reduce the amount of aggro (or "Enemy Attention") they accumulate.

Engineering: another very difficult profession to describe. Engineers have a great wealth of versatility because their kit modules and skills allow them to either become major fortresses of defense for tanking, overwhelming (but slow to reload) damage dealers like artillery, or potentially even healers to a certain degree. In space, in particular, Engineers have a wonderful ability to literally just snap their fingers and repair their ships completely up to two times per couple minutes. This makes them invaluable for drawing enemy fire to spare other teammates the punishment or allows them to create fast, maneuverable gunships that normally could not survive much enemy aggression. Engineers also have an incredible ability to generate power in their ships, meaning that all systems can function at a very high level and release punishing amounts of weapons damage with high shield regeneration or, if skilled correctly, they can even blast out science abilities nearly on par with a Science captain.

Now here's the funny part: NONE of that has to be true. It is completely possible to make a Science captain that is especially good with a rifle and can't launch a tachyon beam to save their life. It is absolutely possible to make a Tactical captain that can tank but can't fire a phaser. It is certainly possible to make an Engineer that is amazing at launching Gravity Well and Torpedoes to finish off an opponent but has no clue how to repair their own hull.

Other people can tell you how They Did It and as a baseline it may help you get started, but in the end you'll do it your own way when you've gained the experience and knowledge to try new things.

How do I get to level 65 in two weeks? I saw someone else do it!!

Episodes, episodes, episodes.

Some veteran players right now are going crazy with the open availability and ease of access with Patrols. Hitting a patrol once per day to get the dilithium bonus is definitely a great idea - a solid 1,000 dilithium ore in fifteen minutes or less is a nice start to your day, but after that bonus, there's no good reason to live on the patrol system. The amount of experience that it gives off is simply not as good or as quick. Episodes take longer, yes, but they pay out such a substantially larger amount of experience in one shot that it outweighs the expediency of patrols. If you have ships to master, the patrol system is fantastic. If you're looking to get marks, don't use the patrol system. You'll get 30 for your first run and everything after that will only pay 15. It's not worth it. It takes 30 to load a daily reputation project when you've gotten them unlocked and you'll never get enough this way to actually get ahead. If you want marks, play TFOs. Find a good team of friends and smash them together if you can.

Episodes will level you the fastest of any method in the game and, as a bonus, many of the episodes contain excellent mission rewards that will be useful to you even in the endgame. If you get them early level, most of the really great ones will continue to upgrade (FOR FREE) to Mark 12 alongside your own progress. Many episodes also contain mission rewards like traits, costumes, titles you can use, one in particular even gives you a ship you can actually fly and use in the Admiralty system, another gives a ship card you can use in the Admiralty system (and is incredibly useful for a freebie).

Don't neglect the Doff System (Duty Officers). As soon as you have it unlocked, load as many various types of Doff Missions as you can all the time. Not only do they pay out in experience that you don't really have to work for, they'll pay out in currency to a small degree, a portion of dilithium ore that does actually add up, and sometimes you'll get critical results that can really pay off. When you've built up a duty officer school to a new level, you'll get a free duty officer from that type of higher quality and these can also give you great bonuses in space or ground combat if you set them to "Active". Others, like Quartermasters, Research Lab Scientists, Fabrication Engineers etc, are necessary for creating items in your R&D schools. The higher the quality, the better the chance of you obtaining a critical result or an item with a higher quality rating (which means more modifiers, better sale value, and possibly "Unique" modifiers that cannot be altered, but often put a real Punch behind great equipment).

Which Reputation Should I work on, Now That I Have Them Unlocked?

Answer: "Yes"

It's not a question of "Which". Once you have the reputations unlocked, you should be massacring them ALL 100% of the time until they're done. I cannot stress enough the value of completing each and every single Reputation all the way to Tier 6.

Upon claiming Tier 3 in several reputations there will be class-specific Kit Modules you can create and almost unilaterally these are very affordable and EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD. Upon claiming Tier 5 in all reputations, the character will gain an exorbitant amount of dilithium ore, several hundreds of marks, a number of elite reputation project items, and a special skill from that reputation usable in battle (It cannot be overstated that the accumulated total of dilithium ore from this, all reputations combined at Tier 5, is nearly half a MILLION. It will take you Months to refine all of this). Upon claiming Tier 6 in all reputations, each skill given at Tier 5 will now automatically increase in its effect, your captain can claim a retrain token (for skills - and this is invaluable if you realize at some point you wish to try something different or made a mistake), your captain can claim a Fleet Ship Module that is necessary towards buying one of the Fleet line of ships that are some of the best in the game, and the various weapons you can requisition from that reputation will be available in a second damage type in case you don't like the one they normally come in.

Probably the most useful part of obtaining the higher tiers in reputations is that at Tier 5 you will obtain "Sponsorship status" with that reputation. This used to have a very different meaning in the game that has since been changed. It's current meaning is that for any future character YOU create, they will obtain twice the degree of experience within that reputation towards Tier Progress. In other words, you slave your way to the top the first time and for every future character you ever make your progress will only take 3/4 as much work (Tier 5-6 will gain this bonus on your first character too).

It cannot be stressed enough: DO THEM ALL.

All These Weapon Types. Which is "Best"?

Wrong attitude again.

There are, technically, the types of weapon energy or torpedo damage that are "presently" able to produce the greatest effect, but when you're talking in terms like that you're really referring to getting numbers like 100K-300K DPS (damage per second) and honestly, you just don't need this nonsense to get through the game or even be "awesome". Any character should be able to make it through every episode of the game, on Normal difficulty, to the end if they're capable of 10,000 DPS. This can be very easily achieved with practically any combination of weapon damage types and some judicious planning. In order to be capable of handling "Advanced" difficulty TFOs, a character should really try to obtain at least 20,000 DPS and again, this is still very very obtainable with basically any damage type. Your average "Pretty Strong" player is capable of between 70K-100K DPS and they've been working for years to get that far. At this level of play, you're still going to see every kind of permutation because all of them can get you there.

For newer players, I typically recommend that Federation and Federation-allied characters try to stick to Phasers and Quantum torpedoes if you're using projectiles at all. The game has some great episodes that will give fantastic versions of these weapons as rewards as well as consoles that will support their function handily. Romulan characters get a barrage of Plasma-based weapons as mission rewards early in the game, and this can work for a while, the game even has more plasma-based rewards later in episodes that can be pretty good and right now the Borg and Ferengi Plasma weapons are pretty excellent. If you plan to dump money into the game to get to the point of buying those soon, maybe sticking to Plasma is great for you.

End of the day: every damage type can be made functional enough to get you where you want to go. There is no "best" really and in the near-future, the ST:O developers may always inject some new console or weapon that changes the balance somewhat. Use the weapons you like or can obtain easily until you can get the ones you want to use. But the most important thing is to pick sort of a "theme" and stick to it. You don't want to mix too many types of weapons on one ship. This is often called "making a rainbow ship" because you'll be spewing all the different colors. It doesn't really work without some outrageous investment and even then, it's just not as good. You'll want to choose probably only one type of energy damage - for cannons or beams - and at most 1-2 kinds of projectiles. Some players ignore projectiles entirely and pick a single type of energy damage and this is called making either a "Beam-Boat" or a "Cannon-Boat". Some players go the exact opposite way and completely ignore energy damage in favor of loading ONLY Projectiles and this is called making a "Torpedo-Boat" logically. Torpedo boats are very hard to make, but if you get it right, they're devastating. Beam boats are extremely simple and incredibly effective (as well as inexpensive). Cannon boats are a bit more costly because they're harder to equip right now. The market has cannons very expensive because they're highly prized, they tend to do an absurd amount of damage when set up correctly.

Why Am I Seeing Completely Different Versions of My Statistics Everywhere?!?!?!

Something very funky about this game: Many of your statistics bonuses don't apply in many situations.

When you're standing on the ground, even if it's inside your own ship, your ship bonuses are all basically "turned off", so when you look at that screen, none of those numbers are even close to accurate. Likewise, when you're in your ship or shuttle your ground bonuses are all "turned off". If you want an accurate reading of your stand-alone starship statistics, you can enter Sol Orbit of ESD (this is most people's standard method because it's so simple and quick to get to and you're not actually in a combat zone) or you can enter the Dyson Sphere Contested Zone or Undine Space Battlezone. Any of these options will adjust your statistics to your "True readings". Likewise, if you want to see your accurate ground statistics, you need to enter a genuine ground combat zone. A simple one to access after level 50 is the Dyson Sphere Ground Battlezone. You'll beam into the command center which Voth hardly ever truly invade and when they do they get cut down in seconds - it's actually hilarious.

Yet a THIRD possibility for your statistics also occurs: when you're teamed with other players, you will often receive bonuses based either on your own skills and traits or theirs. This means that every single time you warp or beam into a TFO with random people your combat abilities can be vastly altered. If the rest of the team is fairly low level or has little as far as team buffs, your numbers won't change much. However if they've applied a lot to team benefits or you have yourself, your statistics can be as different as though you were playing someone else's character entirely. The change can be shocking. This is also the reason that if you go to have your DPS Parsed (which is done in one of two different TFOs, explained further down) your numbers can be just staggeringly different each time. Sometimes you'll spike to a reading that's simply impossible and other times you'll pitfall to a depressing amount that you just can't believe. The goal is to parse several times and develop an average as a "Mean Total". Your DPS is never perfect, it can only be an approximation.

Alright, I'm max level and I've got all the free ships - and I'm getting WASTED. Where do I get a better ship?

To start with, the free ships that the game provides are pretty much just to get you moving and give you a taste of the different kinds of ships out there. It isn't even remotely the full range of possibilities and none of these ships is really powerful enough to carry you in the endgame. CAN you make it work for a while? Yes, sort of... but you'll be suffering the whole time and if you're running TFOs your teammates will be doing a lot of the heavy work to cover you. In the end, there are a number of interesting ways that you can acquire ships and none of them are specifically better than others, but it depends on what you have to work with and what you're trying to get out of it. Some examples are:

1. C-Store (Zen) Ships: If you're able to pay out real world money for Zen or farm a huge amount of dilithium to trade for Zen on the exchange, you can simply purchase Zen and use it to buy starships from the C-Store in the game. If you're just starting out and looking for your first big powerful ships to get moving, you should take a long hard look at the ship bundles. They have their own tab in the store and each bundle is a collection of ships following a theme of some kind or another. You'll want to be pay very close attention to what that theme is and whether or not it works for your purposes. For example, there are "Cross-Faction" bundles that include the same type of starship (with minor differences) from all three of the primary factions; Federation, Klingon, and Romulan. Now, since they've made Romulan ships available to all three factions, that means that no matter what you'll get two starships out of this for any character you possess, but Federation captains can never possess a Klingon ship and vice versa, so if all you have is one or the other, you're buying a wasted ship unless you make a new character in the opposite faction. Romulan captains eventually must choose an allegiance, and this similarly limits their starship options. The four big advantages of C-store T6 starships are that they will give you a "Starship Trait" which is a skill that will affect your piloting or combat abilities throughout any space encounter; they will come with a Universal Console of some kind unique to that ship but which can most likely be used anywhere else (some exceptions apply, READ CAREFULLY); they can be claimed on all characters in your account immediately after finishing the tutorial in Perpetuity; finally, if there is a "Fleet" model of that type of ship, you will then be able to purchase it from a shipyard for only One (1) fleet module and 20,000 Fleet Credits as opposed to the normal Five (5) module and 20,000 Fleet Credit cost.

2. Fleet Ships: If you cannot afford Zen or find an interest in a Fleet Ship that does not have a C-Store counterpart (there are a small number like this) Fleet T6 ships are amazing. If you don't have a Zen ship already related to the ship you want (or there isn't one anyway) you will need to possess Five (5) Fleet Ship Modules and 20,000 Fleet Credits to purchase a Fleet Ship. Additionally, the fleet shipyard must be high enough tier to create that starship (We are approaching Tier 4 soon and will only have one more to go after that - and it is our top priority at the moment for fleet projects after the Tier 3 Dilithium Mine Upgrade) and the fleet must also have at least one Starship Requisition Provision for you to make a purchase. Acquiring Fleet Ship Modules: You can obtain Fleet Ship Modules through the C-Store for a ridiculous price that isn't actually a savings. If you're going to spend the Zen on the ship modules to buy a Fleet, you should just buy a C-Store ship instead and have it for all characters for all time with Traits and a Console. The better method, although it takes a lot of work, is to develop your Reputations to Tier VI (explained above) and requisition the free modules. In the time you'll require to get these reputations developed, you will really know which ship you truly want and it will be all the sweeter when you finally get it. The Advantages: Fleet Ships are usually very closely related to many of the C-Store T6 starships and provide a different "skin" for the hull as well as basically the same bonuses, however, a Fleet T6 starship will have one additional console slot and greater hull capacity than its C-Store counterpart. This effectively means that the Fleet Ship variant is the stronger ship, since it can be added to more and it has innately better defenses. The Disadvantages: a Fleet T6 starship is technically more powerful than a C-Store ship but it Does Not Come With A Console and it Does Not Give You Starship Traits. This means that if you already possess the C-Store variant and already have these things, you aren't missing out, but if the console and starship trait from this ship are things you want, buying the C-Store version FIRST is very very strongly advised. Additionally, unlike C-Store T6 starships, a Fleet T6 is NOT available to all of your characters from then on. Each character you wish to possess this starship must buy it individually themselves.

3. Lockbox/Exchange Ships: If a player spends an exorbitant amount of money on Zen, buys a few hundred Master Keys, and furiously opens Lockboxes, they will eventually get a special requisition for a starship, and most of these are the really heavily desired hulls for what people call "Space Barbies" - (Looking really pretty, "substance" not necessarily guaranteed). Things like T6 versions of Constitution class starships come from this kind of gambling. The bottom line is, the odds of actually getting yourself a good ship out of a lockbox are so abysmal you'll go broke a few hundred times and maybe manage to pull a ship out once in five years. It's simply not worth trying to get lucky. Instead, these ships are sell-able on the Exchange market and many players do this specifically to make an enormous amount of Energy Credits for whatever else they're trying to do. These ships (the ones really worth buying) will cost you literally Hundreds Of Millions Of Energy Credits. If you're already planning to throw an absurd amount of money into buying Zen and then buying Master Keys and selling them on the exchange to build up your Energy Credits, get to work on that and expect to spend a few weeks or months doing that so that you can buy this One Ship. The Pivotal Question: Ok, it's probably a good ship, but is it a great ship that's going to really change my life? NO! Lockbox ships are horribly expensive, they're highly sought after, some of them will, indeed, give some pretty amazing traits or consoles or have a beautiful design for starship setup, but you do not NEED these ships to be successful and they will not INSTANTLY make you a God(dess). Additionally, like Fleet ships, Lockbox and Exchange ships are only available to the character that actually purchases them and opens the box itself. You will need to buy one of these ships for each of your characters that you wish to possess it. The majority of powerful players never needed these things to really crush the game. They are for fun, and they are fun, but get them LATER when you're established.

4. Lobi Store Ships: Lobi crystals are an "added bonus" to opening lockboxes, described above. For every lockbox you open you will receive anywhere from 4-20'ish Lobi Crystals that can be used to make purchases at the Lobi Crystal Consortium (easily found on Drozana Station). Many interesting items can be found at the Consortium and they are worth taking a browse and planning for the future, but obviously none are more expensive than the ships that can be bought. They're going to cost you 900 each. As a reminder, the lockboxes will likely give you an average of about 8 crystals and it currently costs either 125 Zen or 6,750,000 Energy Credits to buy a single Master Key to open a single box. YOU WILL GO BROKE trying to do this if you're still young in the game and you won't NEARLY get close to accomplishing it. The Lobi ships can be pretty fantastic, and if you want to plan ahead to your later game, you should take a look, but do not make this a goal until you're very well established. Additionally, these ships are exactly like the Fleet and Lockbox ships in that they do not become available to all of your characters upon purchase. Every character you wish to have this ship will need to buy it separately (ULTRA EXPENSIVE).

5. Phoenix Store Ships: It used to be that the Phoenix Event was a special thing that only happened for a one week period every once in a while when the developers decided to launch it. They have decided late (2019) that the Phoenix Event would become a static part of the game and Phoenix Voucher Boxes can be purchased directly from the Dilithium store at any time. You can buy these singly for 4,500 Dilithium or you can buy them in a bulk purchase of 10 for 40,000 Dilithium (the savings is worth it). When you open one of these boxes you will receive a "Phoenix Voucher" of a certain quality following the established system for all items in the game. The Ultra Rare and Epic quality vouchers will give you the options to buy a ship if you contact Grim on Drozana Station. Many of these ships are very interesting and have "Niche" value for people interested in certain types of ships that are not normally available in other parts of the game. Some of the Epic ships include highly sought after consoles or traits that many players will spend absurd amounts of dilithium trying to obtain. If you're newer to the game, you don't want to blow all of your dilithium doing this as, just like the other methods of gambling, your odds are terrible and it's insanely expensive. This is one of the draws that's intended to coerce players into spending money to buy Zen to exchange for Dilithium to buy these boxes in mass quantity. Just like all of the last several ship types we've described here, Phoenix Voucher ships are NOT available to your entire account upon obtaining them, they are only available to the specific character that actually purchases them.

Dilithium, dilithium, dilithium!!! How do I get more of this stuff?!

So you've been playing for all of ten minutes and you've quickly come to realize that this game operates on the dilithium trade and you just can't make anything happen without a LOT of it. They did that on purpose. Consider how the economy functions: Dilithium itself cannot be traded between characters directly, you can hold a huge amount of ore on every character but you can only refine 8,000 crystals per day (with variation depending on your veteran or subscription status - or making use of a fleet dilithium mine project). Dilithium can be traded directly for Zen on the Dilithium-Zen exchange but the price is just absurd. Everything you want to do with dilithium costs an absolute mountain of the stuff. And finally, Energy Credits and Gold-Pressed Latinum don't really have any exchange value for dilithium at all, directly anyway.

Here's how the Developers see it: if you the player spend a certain amount of cash dollars or Euros or Yen or whatever currency your country uses to buy Zen directly in volume, they make money to continue producing the game. You in turn, with your Zen, can either purchase items directly in the game or you can trade your Zen for a huge amount of dilithium from other players that cannot afford hard money for in-game items. Currently (May 15, 2020) the Zen exchange is trading a single Zen for ~366 dilithium crystals on PC. Let's do some really fast math here: You can refine 8,000 crystals per night and so can all other players. If you're the Zen seller and you're trying to gain dilithium from players, they can trade 7,686 crystals per night to buy 21 Zen coins from you. Following the typical rates, this means you can spend about $10 real world money to buy 1,000 Zen coins and you can further make this same exchange for dilithium 47.6 times (47.6 trades with other players for their dilithium). This amounts to nearly 400,000 dilithium (with some fluctuation, because the rates change almost nightly). And if you're near the bottom of the market, your Zen will disappear VERY FAST. This is not a "sit and wait" kind of transaction. Almost as soon as you post it, if you're near the low side of the market, your Zen is GONE and you're dilithium rich - for now.

If you're wanting to buy literally 100 Phoenix boxes to go hammering after equipment or Phoenix Upgrades (the most efficient in the game after an item reaches approximately MK X or XII) you can spend $10 and sell your Zen to other players and Cryptic gets a few bucks to help them keep rolling. This system is fantastically advantageous for the people willing and able to spend money and it is slavishly terrible for those that cannot or don't wish to - but if you're playing the game for free, you should probably just be grateful that it's even possible.

But I'm on that other side that IS playing for free and I need Dilithium to buy Zen or enjoy upgrades or buy T1-4 ships: You have a very long road ahead of you. It is not terribly difficult, but it is somewhat repetitive and it can become Work. It is important that you as the player be conscious of your limits and not get too carried away with this task or you will experience Player Burnout for certain and quickly come to hate this game or wreck your life trying to play it too hard. Below are some quick tips for getting Dilithium the fastest you really can (hopefully without killing yourself in the process):

1. The Dyson Sphere: Make full use of the Battlezones once you've passed level 51, but preferably level 65. The fastest and easiest to take advantage of is the Dyson Sphere Ground Battlezone in which you will capture points from the Voth to make progress towards controlling the entire zone. At the end of this battle of attrition, there will be three Godzilla-like monstrosities that will attack the city in three separate locations. These are raid quality enemies and you will not do well fighting them by yourself if you are not very very strong. The trick is to be relatively close to one of their spawn locations near to the time they will arrive (A progress meter makes it very clear and Commander Arnold will explain how it works the first time you arrive). You'll want to smash the dinos as quickly as you can, then make your way to a teleporter and to another area of the city to hopefully take out another of them, and possibly all three if you're fast enough or very lucky. When you have completed conquering the zone, running all four of the zone's daily missions, and taking out at least one "Godzilla" you should have accrued approximately 5-10,000 dilithium ore (You can actually make MORE than you're able to refine per day!!!). You will also have obtained several hundred Dyson Sphere Reputation Marks and a host of Voth Cranial Implants. These can be traded through the reputations system for even more dilithium ore. And you can achieve all of this within approximately 10-20 minutes depending on whether or not you went with a team. Team bonuses are always better and progress is always faster. The more friends you bring with you, the better a day you're going to have. You can do this once per day on each of any characters you own, so if your current goal is to farm an absurd amount of dilithium to advance your primary character, you can attack this zone once per day with each character you have at the expense of possibly 15 minutes on the average per each. This means that if you have a full roster of characters and want to invest a total of two hours, you can max out their daily dilithium with no problem at all and even develop a surplus with each character (so that sometimes you can just take a break from all of this WORK). This gets labor-intensive, but if you want it, it's the fastest way.

2. Vlugta Mining Asteroid and Fleet Dilithium Mine Holding: The Vlugta Mining Asteroid is a non-combat map owned by an NPC Ferengi that basically allows you to mine a certain amount of dilithium directly off the surface of an asteroid once per day. You can acquire a decent amount of the stuff this way, and the benefits of doing this are reasonable, but not impressive. The nice thing is, because it's non-combat and it's accessable to players of all levels, you can actually create "farmer" characters that will just live on this asteroid and mine dilithium for you and have no other purpose. You don't have to equip them, play them, use them, or anything. Log in, mine, shove your dilithium in the Zen Exchange, and get off that character for another 24 hours. Similarly, the fleet's Dilithium Mine is able to let you do the same thing basically and it's very nearby in space (Both places are within a few sectors of each other in the Alpha Quadrant). You can easily bounce back and forth between them, and the Mine also has an NPC that gives a Duty Officer mission that allows you to refine an additional 500 Dilithium Ore per day, making your potential total 8,500. It sounds paltry. It adds up. Additionally, whenever a "Dilithium Weekend" comes around at the developers' whims, the amount of dilithium you can mine from the Vlugta Asteroid will be increased, making your daily income more beneficial.

3. Ferengi Tours of Duty (Admiralty): While completing certain admiralty missions will give you an amount of dilithium anyway - and some give quite a bit if they have special conditions such as "Lucky Vein" or "Rogue Dilithium Asteroid" - the Ferengi Tours of Duty will end at tour 10 of 10 with a special bonus. Upon completing this tour your character will receive a "Dilithium Bonus Pool". It used to be that you would simply receive a lump amount of 30,000 dilithium ore and that was the end of it. Cryptic has decided that they wanted to encourage players to actually PLAY the game more, so instead of giving you an immediately usable sum that you could just refine for 4 nights, a bonus pool doesn't work the same way. Every time you do something in the game that typically rewards a dilithium amount, such as playing TFOs or completing an episode, the amount of dilithium you earn from this action will be increased by a percentage and that amount is deducted from this bonus pool of 30,000 until it has been used up. Since you should be doing Admiralty missions anyway, and they only take about 5 minutes to set up, it can be very worth it to obtain this bonus and passively gain more dilithium than you normally would from regular play. At this time, the Fleet has requested that all capable characters attempt to make use of the Klingon Tours of Duty instead and put the bonuses from these tours towards Fleet Projects, HOWEVER obtaining personal dilithium is an equally important goal and no one will blame you for doing what you have to do. Particularly if you are a newer player working on your own advancement, Admiral Christie actually encourages you to divert your focus towards the Ferengi tours to build yourself up. Get stronger! It's good for everyone else as much as it is for you!

4. Doffs, Doffs, Doffs, Don't Neglect the Doffs! Doff missions typically pay out a small quantity of ore, but a few of particular note can pay out 500 for a normal success and can give critical successes that make a big difference. Again, Doff missions only take up approximately 5-10 minutes of time to set up (unless you're doing it haphazardly and then it only takes 2 or 3). In particular, Colonial missions given by your operations officer always pay out 500 ore when it is a relocation of Colonists to a new planet. You will first have to possess Colonists in your inventory, so it's actually a two-part mission. The first obtains colonists for you, the second resettles them and pays out dilithium ore. You should also always be on the lookout for a "Personal" Doff mission in specific: "Confiscate Contraband From Your Crew". This mission does not directly pay out in dilithium ore, but can give you either a specific item labeled "Contraband" and/or very rare quality items that are actual contraband. If you receive these items, some of them can be extremely useful consumables for ground combat and you should consider whether or not you'd actually use them yourself. If not, they sell on the Energy Credit Exchange for a decent sum and why not take the money? "Contraband" in specific is the highly prized item though. With five of these you can initiate a special Doff mission given by a Starfleet Security Officer (there is one on Earth Spacedock near the windows across from Admiral Quinn's office). This mission takes 20 hours and pays out 2,000 dilithium ore. Passively. It's practically free money. On the flip side, if you don't care to save for this or don't need or want the dilithium but instead need a lot of Energy Credits, EACH "Contraband" item will sell on the EC Exchange for ~30,000 Energy Credits (always check prices before posting, because they fluctuate constantly).

How Does This TFO WOOOOORK?!?!