Post by ryvaken on Jul 25, 2014 0:00:58 GMT -8
As the eighty-ninth Rule of Acquisition clearly states, ask not what your profits can do for you, but what you can do for your profits.
So Idej recommended I post the details of dilithium farming theory. Why not?
First off the bottom line: the most efficient mechanism of farming dilithium is the Special Task Force: Infected (Elite) space queue. The other two original space STFs (Khitomer and Cure) come in a close second and third, in that order. The Voth battlezone is your best bet for ground combat.
Secondly, with 9.5 out, dilithium rewards have been attached to almost everything that gets marks, usually around 420 dilithium or so. Sounds nice, but most of that content is pretty slow and/or tedious "go to place and push the button" stuff. You're not going to get a big payout that way, but it means great alternatives when the more lucrative options get so repetitive you can't stand it.
There are three primary mechanisms for gaining dilithium: Reputation Projects, Duty Officer Assignments, and Missions. We'll cover each in turn.
Projects are the big earner. Every reputation mark and token (Neural Processors, Cybernetic Implant, whatever the 8472 is. Isomorphic somethings?) can be traded in for a major payout. The tokens in particular are worth 333 dilithium each, and unless you're trying to outfit your entire fleet building a stockpile of these is a hat trick. Marks are a trickier conversion, as there are multiple options. If you need a quick boost, you can turn them in for 10 dilithium each in a matter of seconds. The daily experience earners, on the other hand, trade marks at 11.3 dilithium each. The hourly earners vary a bit between systems, but are all less than 10 dilithium per mark. (After 3 hourlies a day the project is replaced with a 17:1 conversion, but feeding that many marks of a single type is tricky unless you have a stockpile). At tier 5, however, the system offers an hourly project that offers 22.7 dilithium per mark. The payout is slow, yes, but at more than double what you'd get otherwise, it's usually worth it. This is the one you want running in every reputation you can as often as you can. The 55 mark daily bonus PER REPUTATION is your best friend to feeding these projects.
Assignments are the icing to this cake. 5 dilithium per assignment is a joke, but they crit up to 125. There are a large number of assignments, particularly under the Engineering and Tactical departments, that offer 50 dilithium a pop, and crit up to 250. There's one engineering assignment that offers 250 on a normal success. But these payouts are the weaklings of DOFFs. What you really want is assignments that get you contraband: each one of those is worth 400 dilithium. These assignments are quick and easy. If you're willing to go the extra mile, the dilithium mine fleet holding offers a daily assignment with 350 dilithium on success. Even better, that assignment rewards dilithium mine provisions on a crit, which are really helpful with the fleet projects.
You can also trade in colonists for 100 dilithium each. Klingons can send prisoners to labor camps in most clusters, about 116 dilithium each prisoner (and marauding gets a lot of prisoners).
Ultimately assignments can make up a third of your dilithium at best (when you're burning your contraband stash like crazy) but the minimal time investment makes it viable.
You used to be able to trade in data samples for dilithium with your science officer's special assignments, 8.3 per sample and 33.3 per trace, but I haven't checked to see if the new craftables have analogous options. Right now they're probably better used for crafting, anyway.
Missions, naturally, are where everything starts. You usually won't get a solid dilithium payout that doesn't also come with marks, but there are a couple exceptions. There are three daily missions against the Breen that are probably the best payout under-50s can hope for, and the Foundry offers some solid rewards but the time investment tends to be way too large for that to be viable. Everything else we break down by reputation like so. Remember, you'll want to do one of each for those daily bonuses.
I'll confess some ignorance on profitable ground missions. They're not my thing, so I haven't done the research. That'll probably change with the new crafting system. C'est la vie.
Borg/Omega Force: An elite STF awards 75 marks, 1 token, 720 dilithium. After trades that's 2753 dilithium. 8259 dilithium (9505 with the daily bonus marks) for all three original STFs. Should take you half an hour, maybe a bit more. I want you to read those numbers again. Yes, this is your bread and butter. Learn to tolerate it.
Romulan Republic: The Romulan's are kinda screwy. Azure Nebula Rescue is your best bet to earn the marks the old fashioned way, and get that daily bonus, or you could hit up one of the ground zones on New Romulus to pop the daily and be done with it. There aren't any really good earners, except epohh tagging. The epohh chain is long and needs a couple doff assignment slots. First, you take the daily mission and need to tag 30 epohh within a minute or so. With a partner it's doable, with three it's a snap. Klingons will want to bring a friend as you can be waiting a long time for a partner. If you get the 30, you earn 4 epohh tags as your reward. These then feed into the doff assignment which takes 4 tags and rewards 1 research (3 on a crit!). 5 research lets you buy an epohh pup. Three more daily assignments raise the epohh to an elder, and you can sell that for 400 marks. If you keep the chain going, with a nominal 20% crit chance on that research, you're looking at 112 marks a day for about 2 minutes' work. That's 2538.7 dilithium for 2 minutes a day.
Tholian/Nukara: Crystalline Catastrophe (Elite) is about as good as it gets, sorry to say. 60 marks and 720 dilithium means 2080 dilithium, but this one's a slog. Might as well run Azure Nebula twice and pop the Romulan daily bonus once and the Tholian the next. But really, this one is the least earner of the lot, and really easy to skip.
Voth/Dyson: Grab your rifle and try and remember how ground combat works, you're headed to the battlezone. The daily missions award 1680-2640 dilithium and 85 marks, while the capture points offer their own bonuses of about 60 dilithium and 10-20 marks each. The big payout at the end is 5 cybernetic implants and (I honestly don't remember) dilithium and marks. If you don't get enough to sustain your projects for a few days after the first hour, you're doing it wrong.
Undine/8472: Take everything I said about the Voth battlezone and apply it to the Undine, except you're back in space and the big daily payout is conspicuously absent. Unfortunately it's against Undine, which means spacial anomalies and weird acid bubbles. Not fun. I'm not going to lie, the space battlezone is an annoying place of melting video cards and stuttering sound effects, but if you want to get this reputation taken care of this is the least painful in a series of bad choices. And they wondered why my enthusiasm for STO died a bit with season 9.
By now you're probably twitching to point out that the big payouts are all time gated. That's very true. The hardest thing about surplus dilithium is getting it started. This is a guide to reliable, sustainable income. You grind out marks in bursts and then go do something else, log back on every hour or so and spend a minute to cycle your reputations. It's crazy simple to eclipse the 8k a day limit and once you have a surplus, maintaining it is relatively simple. Even with other projects draining your marks, you'll want to focus more on those marks and usually generate enough dilithium and tokens to compensate. Now, if you try to do this for multiple characters, then you run into time limits. That's a big investment and a lot of managing. But let's say you play two characters a day and get 5k from each. You're not at your max, but you're outpacing a single character. You can use the dilithium exchange to transfer dilithium between characters and pool it where you need it most, so you don't need each character maxing out to get a considerable yield.
So Idej recommended I post the details of dilithium farming theory. Why not?
First off the bottom line: the most efficient mechanism of farming dilithium is the Special Task Force: Infected (Elite) space queue. The other two original space STFs (Khitomer and Cure) come in a close second and third, in that order. The Voth battlezone is your best bet for ground combat.
Secondly, with 9.5 out, dilithium rewards have been attached to almost everything that gets marks, usually around 420 dilithium or so. Sounds nice, but most of that content is pretty slow and/or tedious "go to place and push the button" stuff. You're not going to get a big payout that way, but it means great alternatives when the more lucrative options get so repetitive you can't stand it.
There are three primary mechanisms for gaining dilithium: Reputation Projects, Duty Officer Assignments, and Missions. We'll cover each in turn.
Projects are the big earner. Every reputation mark and token (Neural Processors, Cybernetic Implant, whatever the 8472 is. Isomorphic somethings?) can be traded in for a major payout. The tokens in particular are worth 333 dilithium each, and unless you're trying to outfit your entire fleet building a stockpile of these is a hat trick. Marks are a trickier conversion, as there are multiple options. If you need a quick boost, you can turn them in for 10 dilithium each in a matter of seconds. The daily experience earners, on the other hand, trade marks at 11.3 dilithium each. The hourly earners vary a bit between systems, but are all less than 10 dilithium per mark. (After 3 hourlies a day the project is replaced with a 17:1 conversion, but feeding that many marks of a single type is tricky unless you have a stockpile). At tier 5, however, the system offers an hourly project that offers 22.7 dilithium per mark. The payout is slow, yes, but at more than double what you'd get otherwise, it's usually worth it. This is the one you want running in every reputation you can as often as you can. The 55 mark daily bonus PER REPUTATION is your best friend to feeding these projects.
Assignments are the icing to this cake. 5 dilithium per assignment is a joke, but they crit up to 125. There are a large number of assignments, particularly under the Engineering and Tactical departments, that offer 50 dilithium a pop, and crit up to 250. There's one engineering assignment that offers 250 on a normal success. But these payouts are the weaklings of DOFFs. What you really want is assignments that get you contraband: each one of those is worth 400 dilithium. These assignments are quick and easy. If you're willing to go the extra mile, the dilithium mine fleet holding offers a daily assignment with 350 dilithium on success. Even better, that assignment rewards dilithium mine provisions on a crit, which are really helpful with the fleet projects.
You can also trade in colonists for 100 dilithium each. Klingons can send prisoners to labor camps in most clusters, about 116 dilithium each prisoner (and marauding gets a lot of prisoners).
Ultimately assignments can make up a third of your dilithium at best (when you're burning your contraband stash like crazy) but the minimal time investment makes it viable.
You used to be able to trade in data samples for dilithium with your science officer's special assignments, 8.3 per sample and 33.3 per trace, but I haven't checked to see if the new craftables have analogous options. Right now they're probably better used for crafting, anyway.
Missions, naturally, are where everything starts. You usually won't get a solid dilithium payout that doesn't also come with marks, but there are a couple exceptions. There are three daily missions against the Breen that are probably the best payout under-50s can hope for, and the Foundry offers some solid rewards but the time investment tends to be way too large for that to be viable. Everything else we break down by reputation like so. Remember, you'll want to do one of each for those daily bonuses.
I'll confess some ignorance on profitable ground missions. They're not my thing, so I haven't done the research. That'll probably change with the new crafting system. C'est la vie.
Borg/Omega Force: An elite STF awards 75 marks, 1 token, 720 dilithium. After trades that's 2753 dilithium. 8259 dilithium (9505 with the daily bonus marks) for all three original STFs. Should take you half an hour, maybe a bit more. I want you to read those numbers again. Yes, this is your bread and butter. Learn to tolerate it.
Romulan Republic: The Romulan's are kinda screwy. Azure Nebula Rescue is your best bet to earn the marks the old fashioned way, and get that daily bonus, or you could hit up one of the ground zones on New Romulus to pop the daily and be done with it. There aren't any really good earners, except epohh tagging. The epohh chain is long and needs a couple doff assignment slots. First, you take the daily mission and need to tag 30 epohh within a minute or so. With a partner it's doable, with three it's a snap. Klingons will want to bring a friend as you can be waiting a long time for a partner. If you get the 30, you earn 4 epohh tags as your reward. These then feed into the doff assignment which takes 4 tags and rewards 1 research (3 on a crit!). 5 research lets you buy an epohh pup. Three more daily assignments raise the epohh to an elder, and you can sell that for 400 marks. If you keep the chain going, with a nominal 20% crit chance on that research, you're looking at 112 marks a day for about 2 minutes' work. That's 2538.7 dilithium for 2 minutes a day.
Tholian/Nukara: Crystalline Catastrophe (Elite) is about as good as it gets, sorry to say. 60 marks and 720 dilithium means 2080 dilithium, but this one's a slog. Might as well run Azure Nebula twice and pop the Romulan daily bonus once and the Tholian the next. But really, this one is the least earner of the lot, and really easy to skip.
Voth/Dyson: Grab your rifle and try and remember how ground combat works, you're headed to the battlezone. The daily missions award 1680-2640 dilithium and 85 marks, while the capture points offer their own bonuses of about 60 dilithium and 10-20 marks each. The big payout at the end is 5 cybernetic implants and (I honestly don't remember) dilithium and marks. If you don't get enough to sustain your projects for a few days after the first hour, you're doing it wrong.
Undine/8472: Take everything I said about the Voth battlezone and apply it to the Undine, except you're back in space and the big daily payout is conspicuously absent. Unfortunately it's against Undine, which means spacial anomalies and weird acid bubbles. Not fun. I'm not going to lie, the space battlezone is an annoying place of melting video cards and stuttering sound effects, but if you want to get this reputation taken care of this is the least painful in a series of bad choices. And they wondered why my enthusiasm for STO died a bit with season 9.
By now you're probably twitching to point out that the big payouts are all time gated. That's very true. The hardest thing about surplus dilithium is getting it started. This is a guide to reliable, sustainable income. You grind out marks in bursts and then go do something else, log back on every hour or so and spend a minute to cycle your reputations. It's crazy simple to eclipse the 8k a day limit and once you have a surplus, maintaining it is relatively simple. Even with other projects draining your marks, you'll want to focus more on those marks and usually generate enough dilithium and tokens to compensate. Now, if you try to do this for multiple characters, then you run into time limits. That's a big investment and a lot of managing. But let's say you play two characters a day and get 5k from each. You're not at your max, but you're outpacing a single character. You can use the dilithium exchange to transfer dilithium between characters and pool it where you need it most, so you don't need each character maxing out to get a considerable yield.
