i want to start a fleet

[Daniel]

what do i need to do and how

[VoodooMike]

I mean, you can... but the time, effort, and resources needed to build up the fleet holdings of a new fleet are pretty staggering - you'd need quite a few people willing to dedicate themselves to the task to have any hope of getting worthwhile holdings in... I dunno... a year? two years? more?

You're much better off joining an established fleet until you absolutely don't need anything more that requires fleet holdings, before starting up your own.

[Vellari]

To create a fleet you need 4 other people currently not in a fleet. You can find an NPC in each faction homeworld (ESD, New Romulus or Qonos) to begin the process.

After that, you will start the massive (no joke) resource sink which is the various fleet facilities. Which will have the stores where you can get fleet gear from. To get everything to top tier though will literally take years (3-5 years I would estimate with a healthy 30-50 people contributing on a fairly regular basis).

[cap-boulanger]

As Vellari said... with some expansion:

- you need to form a team of 5 player characters
- all must be the same faction (Fed or KDF)
- all must not be currently in a fleet
- all must be on one of the three homeworld maps where the Fleet officer is located
- all must be present in the same "instance" (use instance swap if necessary - upper right corner button on minimap)
- all must be on accounts that have, at some point, had a zen balance (even if it's 1 zen via dil conversion)

Once you have all of those, go to the fleet officer, pick a name for the fleet, and once you have selected an allowable name the fleet will be created. The player who interacts with the officer will be set as leader, others as minimum rank members.

You can then kick them immediately if you wish (if you are the leader). Only one member is necessary once the fleet is created.

One slight mitigation on the fleet buildup as mentioned earlier: it is possible to shop on another fleet's bases while invited as a guest. In such cases it uses your own fleet's provisions and permissions, but the host fleet's level is used to determine vendor lock/unlock status. In those cases you will only NEED to get to Tier 1 (in order to be able to generate vendor provisions).

This doesn't work for certain items (the most obvious example being fleet ships), but does (to my knowledge) work on everything available from the Mine and Spire and possibly the Research Lab. It also works for everything on the Colony except, I believe, the Lukari and Kentari BOFFs and the Dranuur Scout Ship; and everything at the Embassy except the Bridge Officers.... so if you can either get those first or decide you don't need them, you could skimp on those bases as well.

Also, once the Colony reaches Tier 1, it will autogenerate the "Colony XXXX Provisions" it needs, in amounts that will supply about 2 projects per week.

[CBR JGWRR]

The recommended route has already been stated above; get to tier 1 in all holdings and just make use of map invites to buy things.

But, if you want to get ships from your fleet for example, you will need to leave your fleet and join another, or go through the grind to build up your own fleet. If you do intend to level the holdings up, do the Dilithium Mine holding first; it makes the Dil requirements much lower. And you will want that.

Here's a link to the various projects you'll have to be running. Even if you get every project started out on the exact finish time of the previous project you are looking at a year or more, and if you were to just dump the cash in to speed up progress it'll take thousands of dollars worth of Zen to rush through stuff, and a lot of things you'll have to get can't actually be speeded up by cash. (Fleet Marks for example)
https://sto.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Lists_of_fleet_projects

The going rate for recruiting people by spamming ESD or somewhere is to offer at least a million EC to get people to help you create the Fleet.

Joining an armada will help, as the people from the bigger Fleets will want to dump some stuff.

[cap-boulanger]

Originally posted by CBR JGWRR:

The recommended route has already been stated above; get to tier 1 in all holdings and just make use of map invites to buy things.

I didn't QUITE say that... in my listing I deliberately did not mention the Starbase, as it has the most tier-walled stuff AND invite-walled stuff. It also takes the least dilithium to build up.

Even if you're going to leave everything else at T1, building up the Starbase beyond that may make a lot of sense.

I also did not mention K13, as it also has some nice invite-walled items (including the non-random R&D doffs).