Star Trek Online Energy Credit Farming Guide 2023

Farming energy credits in Star Trek Online can be a daunting task when there isn’t any direct indication of how you can do so in the game. You need EC (energy credits) to buy items from the exchange. You’ll need them even if you don’t plan on making your EC (energy credit) fortune farming yourself and instead earning them vis-à-vis the exchange. You’ll need at least a few million in seed money to get going and that in of itself can be quite hard, especially when first starting out.

This guide is assuming a full free-to-play experience. Players who wish to exchange real life money for energy credits can do so via master keys in the official Zen store. The keys can be sold directly or you can open Infinity Lockboxes to earn lobi crystals and sell the content, although you can get boxes that provide almost no value EC wise.

The below applies to PC and console.

Goal One: Obtain a T6 Ship

Star Trek Online sells T6 ships for $30 when they’re not on sale, but that’s not the only way to get a T6. You can get a T6 via seasonal events, each seasonal event usually requiring 14 to 30 days of play. Without a T6 ship you’re going to have a harder time doing everything in the game that involves space combat. No matter your level, a T6 scales with you. This is critical for new characters.

There are tiers to ships in STO and “T6” or “Tier 6” is the best currently. They, as mentioned, scale with your level. T6 ships come with level scaling weapons and consoles. They usually have a powerful console by default. It’s just so intensely helpful that it should be priority number one.

You can buy T6 ships with EC, but the event ship is going to be always your best bet. Events are always running that offer a ship that will more than get you started doing whatever you want to do in STO.

Energy Credit Daily Quests / Missions

There’s a few daily tasks you can grind out that’ll get you energy credits reliably.

Duty Officer missions give very few energy credits but still reward you with some so always be doing them.

Tour of Duty (in your mission log) grants a few hundred energy credits daily. This is a really strong source of EC, especially early in the game.

Admiralty, at level 50, will start churning out large sums of energy credits. You may not be effective at it with only a few ships at the start, but keep playing. You’ll get more ships and more slots to run missions.

Bind on Equip into Energy Credits

The salvage system makes bind on equip gear desirable for players who are working on the crafting system. There’s also a variety of uses for bind on equip gear that’s particularly low level (more chances to roll upgrades). Lots of duty officer mission reagents go for quite a bit and aren’t account bound. Duty officers themselves sell for quite a lot, if you have duplicates of a specific rarity you can offload them often for 250,000 EC easily for blue and 800,000 for purple.

Energy Credit Farming Locations

There aren’t any specific locations to farm EC directly. Many players, myself included, consider sector space to be a rather easy place to fly around and just farm EC. You pop into patrols and sector space events which usually drop a lot of bind on equip gear. Taking the loot and either discarding it (into energy credits) or selling it on the exchange can net a hefty profit.

This isn’t ideal, but quite fun. Playing the missions gets you lots of EC as well.

Advanced: Dilithium Farming to Zen to Keys

It’s 125 Zen to purchase one master key. At 500 Dilithium per 1 Zen, that’s 62,500 Dilithium per key. Each key is worth ~12 million and you can refine 8,000 Dilithium per day per character. Doing the math, it would take 8 refines to get enough Dilithium to get one key at default rates.

The Dilithium exchange can be slow, taking weeks to process, as fair warning.

If you only play one character then it’s 8 days to get enough Dilithium refined. If you play two then it’s now 4 days. Three take you to 3 days. Four takes you to two days and eight takes you to one key per day. If you list it regularly, it’ll process at a regular rate and within a few weeks you’ll have a constant influx of Zen.

Players who are lifetime or veteran members have auto-refine and just need to logon every few days on each character. Everyone else has to logon every day and press “refine” to turn the refined Dilithium to refined Dilithium which can be sold.

Considerably more time efficient, but again due to the “DILEX” or Dilithium Exchange times, it can be a bit of a pain to see returns quickly.

T6 ships are required to farm Dilithium efficiently. Do not use Dilithium to upgrade outside of Phoenix Packs. Do not use Dilithium in crafting unless you know what you’re doing. Conserve Dilithium. Dilithium Weekends make the “DILEX” even slower.

Energy Credit Location

If you ever can’t find how many energy credits you have then press your inventory button (I on PC) and go to assets.

If you’re thinking on making a new character, see our guide to the different federation options for new characters.