How to get EC REALLY fast?

[kirb]

Does anyone know any methods or loopholes to get large amounts of EC in a decent time span? I am wanting to get a lockbox ship (I'm absolutely not shelling out $15-$30 for a ship! That's ridiculous!) and have figured out that you can buy singular Lock-Box Keys on the exchange, but they are 4 Million EC, and, over my entire course of playing this game, have only gotten as high as 2 Mil, without any major purchases. Is there any methods/loopholes to get a good amount of Energy Credits?

(No, i'm not just gonna buy the keys with ZEN, I don't have that kind of money. Besides, the money I DO have is MUCH better spent actually getting something worth $15 or $30.)

[VoodooMike]

No.

If there was any fast and easy method to get enough EC to buy a difficult to acquire ship, then the EC price would be proportionally higher. That's how markets work, generally speaking... the prices are determined by the supply and the demand.

[HK714]

Doing Tour the Galaxy can yield 1mil + EC, depending on the speed of your ship. There really isn't a "fast" way to get EC. That's why they call it grinding.

[Cain]

Don't buy keys to use them, the odds are against you. Only do that if you want to get lobi, and if you do decide to go down that route know that lobi ships (any worth 900) are valued at roughly 200m, so if you have keys that value that you would be better off just joining a trading channel and trading the keys for the ship of your choice. I recommend the infinity lockboxes if you want to open for lobi.

As others have said grinding for EC in this game is just like any other game - there are faster, more effective ways than others but nothing that will net you insane amounts of money fast will be made publicly known intentionally for the obvious. Many people make alts and grind dil to refine then exchange for zen across characters on an account. This is tedious and the dilex is horribly volatile however it does present you a way to gain zen without spending money as well as providing a route to making EC by turning that zen into keys which can then be listed on the exchange normally.

The absolute first step however is to make sure you have the Energy Credit Cap Increase service from the C-store, which raises your cap from 15m to 2b. It is account wide.

[CBR JGWRR]

Learn how to play the exchange, and you can go from your 2m starting fund to the 240m to 300m you'll want. If you'd like I can post my Ferengi's accounts; few years old as after a while I couldn't be bothered to keep track of it, but the principles still work even if the items change. The number one principle - figure out what players are willing to pay big money for, and find a profitable way to meet that supply; preferably one nobody else is doing.

But right now, given you are starting from basically nothing, do Horga'hn Hunts and the dance on Risa - every 999 stack of Lohlunat Favors you get you will be able to sell for around 3m now, 6m in a month or so, and 10m by December/January. Potentially 16m if you sell them at next Summer Event.

The terrible rental/50 Favor floaters you should get 3 characters through each hunt. Maybe 4, it has been a very long time since I last did it with the basic floaters. With the impulsive floaters you can assume 5 characters through (the record is 7, but realistically 6 is doable subject to connection/load times) however you will need to weigh up the cost vs the remaining earning potential with just 11 and a bit days left - it is technically possible to get there by the end of the event, but it will mean devoting the next eleven days to grinding out as many Favors as possible, and you won't have time for real life. (planning on getting it for December makes it a lot more feasible, that only means doing 8 hours a day on STO getting Favors)

Alternatively, use the EC from Favors as start up capital for exchange trading; even if you only get 50m from Favors, that will make the task of flipping stuff to 300m much easier than starting from 2m.

Other than those two, the remain ways to generate a lot of EC you are almost certainly not in a position to pay the set-up costs on.

----

Secondly, buy the ship at the right time of year - during an infinity lockbox event. That is when supply is highest, and therefore, cost is lowest because of competition.

And while this only applies to certain ships, if it is one of the faction specific ships that comes with the cross-faction box, always check the price of the cross-faction box as well as the actual ship itself; this can be a huge saving for some Romulan/KDFships because far, far more people play Fed and open the boxes on a Fed, meaning the reduced supply for the Rom/KDF versions makes the price higher.

----

Finally, I'm willing to loan an amount of starting capital should you decide on the exchange route, but it will come with the terms and conditions of seeing that you have a viable plan to get the EC, and a 100% return. (but, you'll also have my advice on what to go for, which I would be really disappointed if it didn't bring in more than it cost; I'd be looking for a 150% return if I was investing for my own purposes)

[Wisecasper]

The problem with asking is that people who know how to make lots of ec fast aren't going to tell you in public chat anyway because the methods usually are from selling classes of items on the exchange and telling the whole world about them would immediately increase competition and they would no longer be able to make ec that way. I can give you another grind though called the scrap heap challenge. The junk people win in PVE is often listed on the exchange for rubbish prices that people buy to make salvage. But they often undervalue some of the higher grade items. When you discard items you get back 40% of their value. So if an item on the exchange says it's value is 100,000 and someone is selling it for less than 40,000 you know you can buy and immediately discard it for profit.

It's not a big money maker but it's slightly faster over a short space of time than running TFOs to get your own items to scrap until your ship is capable of running elite or advanced.

[CBR JGWRR]

Dude, sell it to an equipment vendor, you'll get 50% then.

[Wisecasper]

Originally posted by CBR JGWRR:

Dude, sell it to an equipment vendor, you'll get 50% then.

For the TFO rewards sure, but do you know any that are right next to the exchange console? it's a lot of running around else.

[CBR JGWRR]

Originally posted by Wisecasper:

Originally posted by CBR JGWRR:

Dude, sell it to an equipment vendor, you'll get 50% then.

For the TFO rewards sure, but do you know any that are right next to the exchange console? it's a lot of running around else.

Deep Space K7 and Ganalda have equipment vendors that are fairly close - few seconds travel - to the exchange. K7 is the better of the two.

[HK714]

Originally posted by Wisecasper:

Originally posted by CBR JGWRR:

Dude, sell it to an equipment vendor, you'll get 50% then.

For the TFO rewards sure, but do you know any that are right next to the exchange console? it's a lot of running around else.

On ESD? There's a row of people on the lower level where you manage your ships. The last one on the right will buy your stuff for %50.

[CBR JGWRR]

Originally posted by Mootill:

Originally posted by Wisecasper:

For the TFO rewards sure, but do you know any that are right next to the exchange console? it's a lot of running around else.

On ESD? There's a row of people on the lower level where you manage your ships. The last one on the right will buy your stuff for %50.

I presume that ESD has already been discounted as too far.

Also, there is a closer one on ESD than down in the ship area; in the ground equipment requisitions area - turn right out of the exchange and it is a short sprint in front of you.

[Red Dox]

Since it is currently still Risa, my freebie tip would be: Dance your ass off.

-Park a designated toon on the Risa dancefloor
-You have just to check when Dance Offs are in your timezone. If you for example would have one at 2pm the next one starts exactly 90 minutes later at 3:30pm. And so on and so on. You can make timetable and then set a alarmclock for 2 min. before it begins at your smartphone, PC or whatever to actually catch a lot of them.
-After logging into your dance toon, pin your emote tab for easy clicks and then just dance for like 12 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nru7c0nx-1o
This will net you 100 lolnuts. Sure, you could save them to buy stuff on Risa which might interest your toon (kitmodules, the three very rare doffs, other stuff) but you could also sell the Lolnuts in the exchange. Last I chekced the price dropped from 800k at start of the event to around 550k. But if you ance 4 times a day and get 2 million for it, it is still a solid ammount of money if you don't have hundreds of millions to actually play the exchange game proper.

You could finance some lockbox keys that way, but I have to advise you: NEVER try to get ships from lockboxes by gambling. It is always better to pay the EC in the exchange directly for the wanted ship. Getting a ship from a lockbox is something around a 0,1% chance, so you have to understand that most of the time you would just waste 4 million EC for a key and you might only get stuff out of it that you can sell for like a 100.000 EC.

Also noteworthy: This year Cryptic is handing out a lot of ships for free.
-We had the Anniversay ship + the three cheap ZEN ships they gifted us then
-Then they introduced the free T6 token game through featured TFOs, last round should start next week with Sompek to earn probably the last 1550 token if someone is still not finished.
-We got the Summer ship on Risa to claim
-They announced that a free Elachi ship is coming up
-They announced that we get our hands on a free Jellyfish ship after that
-And of course there is the usual Winter ship on the horizon.
https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/11222463-2019%2F2020-roadmap%21
So if you just want to fly a T6 ship, this year was pretty good and is not over. If you rather want to fly some specific lockbox ship, yeah, then you have to work the longterm game to get it for "free" through saving EC up and/or learn how to make money at the exchange while all the Ferengi (including me) will not give you the good tips out of fear for competition ;)

[CBR JGWRR]

Dancing if you are in for the whole period has one character through for the full 100 Favors, and a second character for an extra 25 Favors.

Theoretically, you could swap characters every 8 dance moves to get 135 Favors, but between load times on character changes you'd struggle just to match the aforementioned 125 Favors, so it's prudent to go for the reliable 125 Favors.

Or, if you have 15 characters, theoretically you could get 150 Favors from swapping every 3 dances, but you would need really good load times.

[Dave of Infamy]

easy money= farm dil buy keys sell on exchange
or
get fastest engines and grind tour the galaxy

however the best way is to have a shared account bank and everytime u get 100k (which is stupidly easy) put it in there in a week you can easily have 2-3 mil ec just from doing that add that to the tour the galaxy every day and dil farm for keys you potentially can make anywhere from 20 to 50 mil a week or more

[Maj_Cyric]

I took a short break on the 24th of July from STO, splitting time between FONV (New California mod), The Witcher 3, and Dying Light enhanced edition (was on sale).. Logged in today and i had 100 million more EC than i did when i signed out on the 24th..

I sold two crafted items (if you're wondering how).. And you don't even need a level 15 in an R&D field to craft an Epic Mk XV item (you will have higher overhead cost if you can't make your own upgrade techs though)

But buy yourself some Particle Traces/Slivers (what you can afford) make Omega tech upgrades from the exchange (ATM reds traces are over normal rate by 10k each, Yellows are slight over market rate, and blues are well below market rate), then buy R&D packs from exchange (they avg 1 million EC each) and you can get 0 to 4 Major Research Boost 2x Quality)

Then combine both in a vase with goats blood, wormroot.. oh wait wrong book
Combine both with a Mk II ( or I) item that currently in demand (meaning also sells for a lot of EC)

*Disclaimer*
The exchange rates for items can flip up or down with nothing but a single game patch or a single person (or persons) lacking an understanding of what long term planning by flooding the market with "X" item..

The wise (and EC overly rich) players will do is corner the market of a given item(s), buy buying any others that are or get listed below what they are wanting it to be sold at, and then relisting it at said wanted price (easy to spot when an item listed only in stacks and all with the same price, like the Datachip Vol 8 Ch. 3 & 8 are price control'ed Ch.3 is 650k and Vol.8, Ch.8 over 7 million)

*Free Advice*
Always drag an item into the exchange search when buying/selling to see what the Low Med High listings for it are (you can edit the stats to see what the "less than" listed are)... Also a wise course to check the market for certain high value items, cause more often then you would think people list something not knowing it's value..
My best find to date (epic steal of a bargain) was seeing & buying a stack of 650 Intermix Chamber components for only 260k EC (they cost 5k Dil each to craft).. Guessing they were using that "New Math" i've heard about, or they failed to understand that the price entered is divided by each item in the stack (not per item in stack)...

[Gorok Delvedeep]

Originally posted by Brockster17:

Does anyone know any methods or loopholes to get large amounts of

farming.

make maximum dill per day on maximum character slots. use that dilithium to buy more character slots until you have max slots. fill them with dil farmers

then "play" 14 hour shifts where you make daily dil limit on your 30 characters per your 6 accounts. with a bank fleet to keep all your ♥♥♥♥ in

that's the only way to get ♥♥♥♥ for free reasonably. otherwise you're just going to be waiting forever.