Star Trek Online Dilithium (Free-to-Play) Farming Guide 2023

Farming Dilithium in Star Trek Online is one of the best ways to earn energy credits, upgrade gear and stockpile rare and limited resources. You can only refine 8,000 Dilithium per day so you’ll need to farm Dilithium on multiple characters and refine on each daily to get access to your raw ore sooner. You’ll also need to manually refine the Dilithium unless you’re a veteran or lifetime member. You can auto-refine up to a week of Dilithium on each character with that benefit.

Lifetime membership goes on sale, it’s really worth it in the longrun!

Some information is long out of date, including the in the official 101 Dilithium farming guide. There is no more gold members for instance. There’s no refinery anymore. Many sources have dried up over the years to combat inflation.

You can open the Dilithium exchange and sell Zen (at roughly 500 refined ore per 1 Zen) at anytime. So 100 Zen would be 50,000 ore or thereabouts. That’s all there is to doing that, this is for free-to-play players who want to get Dilithium to turn into Zen or use for things like fleet consoles, etc. It’s much better to farm Dilithium and turn it into Zen and then energy credits.

Of course, to refine Dilithium you’ll need some and farming it is the only way. It’s also how free-to-play players get ships and Zen. So let’s get to the best sources of Dilithium in STO.

Step One: Don’t Spend Dilithium.

It goes without saying, but Dilithium is a premium resource and you shouldn’t spend it without putting thought into it beforehand. Always think very hard before spending any of your Dilithium.

If you’re not level 65 then DO NOT SPEND IT. You’ll get tons of gear from missions and a T6 ship or the ships you get from the game itself will do you fine. You don’t need to spend it until you know a good reason as to why.

The Basic Advice: Admiralty, Duty Officers, Etc.

Admiralty gives you a considerable amount of Dilithium. The Ferengi Trade Alliance gives 30,000 ore as a reward for the Tour of Duty (10 ToD missions). It also gives you lots of everything else, including Energy Credits. So definitely a place to start.

Duty Officer Missions offer a trickle of Dilithium.

Doing missions, TFOs and Patrols along with Sector Space events will earn you Dilithium.

All of this is repeatable and easily farmable daily. There’s also the Vlugta Dilithium Mine which lets you earn roughly 1,000 a day for playing the mining minigame 5 times.

Contraband Mission – 2,000 every 20 hours, but it can be kinda pricey.

Reputations – 2,500 if you keep up with ~5 of them

Marks (Reputation): 50 Marks = 500 Dil, 100 Marks = 1,000 along with 1x Special Item = 1,000 (adds up fast). This requires you to get tier 5 on the rep and then grind on your other characters, which can take a minute.

More Advanced Advice

This is where it gets hard. There isn’t a ton of AMAZING advice in this regard. Here’s what you really do though to get lots of Dilithium fast. You’ll want to do the current event daily every – single – day. You can do it every 20 hours and naturally that’s asking a lot. Every – single – day though login and do the daily. When the daily runs out and you get the event reward, you’ll start stockpiling Dilithium .

The daily is usually a TFO. The TFO is going to give you marks, which in turn equal more Dilithium. The character that logs into the game that day gets the ore. For instance, the 13th anniversary event gives 8,000 a day and then 1,000 per day extra. Most players finish with about two weeks remaining. That means you can easily login as a different character each day and get the reward. When that event ends, the next event (if you keep up on the dailies) will start outputting Dilithium. Rinse and repeat.

Do that with the general advice of just playing the game and you’ll be rolling in ore in no time.

Maximum Dilithium Farming

If you really need more ore and have more time there’s a few more things you can do.

Battlezones (Gamma Quadrant and Dyson Sphere) are a good endless grind of ore.

Patrols grant 500 each or thereabout.

Elite TFO is 1,440 per run. Advanced is 720. Normal is 360. Running elites can be time consuming though.

Daily PvP missions grant 1,440 but PvP can be difficult to run.

Being a time-based currency, outside of special events like Dilithium Weekends, there isn’t much you can do to bypass the time limit. Cryptic has claimed its about 480 every 15 minutes. So no matter what you do, you should be earning about that much.

If you really need it and have done the mining, event for the day, etc. I’d say run random TFOs or group up and run some quick advanced TFOs back-to-back.

Counting Your Dilithium

You can find Dilithium in your inventory under assets. You can refine 8,000 ore per day. 800 day veterans AND lifetime members auto-refine (up to a weeks worth) all 8,000 each day they login. It starts one day after the last time the button was pressed.

Good luck in space! This guide applies to all factions and both PC and console.