Beyond Episodes

This section covers content beyond episodes such as events, task force operations, alternate characters, customization, and difficulty settings.

Throughout this guide, look out for items marked ALERT in red text for special cautions and italicized picture captions for related images. 

8.1 Accelerating Your Career

If you feel like you are mastering the game’s systems and the grind is losing its appeal, or you're more interested in endgame play and progressing through the story has less appeal, let's talk about ways to accelerate your character.

The first place to look if you have multiple characters is the Temporal Agent at your faction’s hub to see what rewards you have earned from other characters who have special recruitment rewards. Completing many of these quests makes account-wide rewards available to every other character on the account. You can learn more about recruitment events in 6.5.

Rewards menu from Temporal Agent

The next thing to consider is the use of boosters. STO has a number of boosters available from three main sources: the Zen Store, under boosters (see 4.7), various lockboxes and better purchased through the Exchange (see 4.4), or the Phoenix Prize Pack (see 4.6). 

• Experience booster (Zen Store, Exchange, First Contact Event)

• Reputation or fleet mark booster (Exchange, Phoenix Pack)

• Salvage booster (Recruitment Event)

• Fleet credit booster (Exchange)

• Commendation experience booster (Zen Store or Phoenix Pack)

• R&D booster (Zen Store, Exchange

Using these will accelerate leveling, Reputations, fleet credits, or whatever applicable system you have boosted. To use a booster, simply double-click it from inventory. Running events and doing endeavors can also earn you boxes that can contain specialization points or in the case of endeavors ¼ specialization point to help with that grind. The bar at the top left shows what boosters are active and how much of the booster remains.  With Reputations, you can pay Zen to complete a Reputation, prorated against the amount of progress you have in that Reputation. This is discussed further in 6.6.

Several boosters are active to help accelerate this character's career.

If you really want to accelerate your captain’s progression, you can buy Legendary Captain Packs that instantly boost a captain of the appropriate faction to level 65 in the C-store.  There are also Starter Packs in the C-store that come with an impressive variety of options for boosters, inventory slots, skill retrain tokens, etc. at various price points. None of this is necessary, but if you want to go faster, they are an option.

Starter Packs in the C-store

Another thing you can do to accelerate your progression is to acquire a Tier 6 (T6) ship. All tier 6 ships level with you, so you can start with them at low level and they will gain stats and capabilities as you do. These are powerful ships with endgame features eventually, and you can start in one of them whenever you gain access to one. You can earn a T6 ship through certain periodic events or buy one through the C-store. We discuss events more in 8.3 and the C-store in 4.7.  We also discussed ship tiers in 7.1.

8.2 Task Force Operations

Task Force Operations (TFOs) are STO’s teamed content, with difficulties ranging from a few that are very new-player-friendly at level 10 to the game’s hardest endgame content on Elite difficulty. In a TFO, you and usually four other players will work to overcome enemies and complete objectives. TFOs generally award marks which are used in the Reputation and Fleet Systems. You can expect a TFO to take between 10 and 20 minutes on average. To access TFOs, open the TFO menu from below the minimap. 

Left: TFO button below the mini-map; Right: Annotated TFO menu

You’ll see a list of available TFOs there. Starting from the top left of the menu, there are different tabs for different modes of play. 

1. The top banner shows all of the activities that are part of the current event. We discuss events more in the next section (6.3), but they’re generally worth doing. 

2. On the left side, there’s a selectable filter you can choose to narrow down TFOs to find the one with specific rewards you’re needing. 

3. On top of the TFO list is a “Join Random” button. This button will enter you in the queue for most of the TFOs. It is NOT a truly “random” button, it’s a “fill” button, where you’ll team up with players who are already queued for other things. Queueing random will earn you additional rewards in the form of marks, dilithium ore, and on Elite, components for Advanced Engineering/Science consoles, but you truly are at the mercy of whatever is being queued for by other people, whether ground or space. There is a difficulty dropdown by the side of this button, which contains Normal/Advanced/Elite. New players should avoid queuing for Elite until at least you have a solid build with Reputation and/or Fleet gear. A Tier 6 ship will likely be necessary as well, unless you’ve really done your homework. 

4. Below is the TFO list, which shows the name, the rewards, and an individual difficulty dropdown that selects the difficulty for that TFO. The next column shows how many players are needed for the TFO. For most, it’s five. For some, you’ll see notations like “5,5”, meaning that the TFO needs two teams of five players to start. The rightmost column is a checkbox, and selecting this enters you in a queue for that TFO. Once enough players are also queued for that TFO and that difficulty (or pulled from the random players queue), the game will pop a menu indicating that the TFO is ready, at which point you can either accept to start loading into the mission (sometimes after a delay while the game loads the map), or decline to be removed from the queue.  Once a TFO is either completed or failed, it goes on cooldown for 30 minutes, with the exception of event TFOs, which do not have a cooldown, but only reward credit for the event on a daily basis. If a TFO is on cooldown, it’ll be highlighted in red. 

5. At the bottom of the menu, you can use the first filter button to choose between space, ground, or all (both) TFOs. There are no TFOs with both space and ground elements. The next dropdown will filter the list on the selected difficulty, and if you check “Only Selected Difficulty,” only TFOs matching the difficulty selection will be shown in the list. 

6. The view cooldowns button will show you the time remaining on any TFOs that are on cooldown. “Clear Queues” cancels all TFOs you are queued for.

If you are on a team and queue for a TFO, your entire team will join the TFO at the same time. 

The next tab is patrols. We talked more about patrols in section 2.4; but a quick refresher is that patrols are faster types of content typically 5-10 minutes. They award less marks and dilithium than Task Force Operations and no Elite Marks, but are better for leveling up mastery of Tier 6 ships to unlock starship traits as discussed in 7.1. Patrol difficulty is based on the team leader’s difficulty setting; if you’re solo, it’s based on your difficulty setting, discussed more in 8.10. 

Patrol menu

We are going to skip over the PvP (Player versus Player) tab. There is a small but dedicated community devoted to PvP in STO, but it is not a major focus of the game, has no exclusive rewards, and is extremely difficult to get into as a new player, with an enormous skill and knowledge climb to even be remotely competitive. This site does not cover PvP; we recommend looking up STO BretsGamingChannel on YouTube to get started in that space if that is of interest to you. 

Private Lobby menu

In the private lobby, you can form your own Task Force Operation groups, optionally with other players, that will not include players queuing from the main Task Force window. When forming groups this way, you usually do not have to meet the player count restrictions, meaning you can queue most TFOs solo this way. If you’re strictly about solo play, this is a way for you to play TFOs without interacting with other players. It might be harder to earn rewards and there is no random TFO option (or rewards) this way, but it is an option.

The private Task Force Operation group is also how you can team with players of the opposite faction (i.e. KDF and Federation), again at the cost of not having access to the Random TFO queue type. If you want to do a private PvP match, or for certain TFOs that require two teams, ensure you change the team dropdown for each player on the right. 

While not a TFO, there are chat channels (see 5.7) that organize “Colony Defense” missions, a 30-wave ground hardpoint defense of four locations on the fleet colony against several different enemy types. This takes about an hour and is locked to Normal Difficulty, but the difficulty ramps up every 5 waves and you’ll earn incredible rewards if you’re after fleet credits: 1,200 fleet marks, and 2100 of each colony provision. This is a windfall for everyone building up their fleet colony holding (see 5.9 for discussion on fleets), and for you as a player since a successful defense awards nearly 81,000 fleet credits when you can turn everything in. The channels you want to join are FedSim, Simulation, and KDFSim, and there are no extra points for goofing around!

Some endgame players use TFOs as their main activity in the game, having completed all of the episodes. TFOs represent the most challenge and, especially when queuing Random Elite, have the most rewards in terms of dilithium and marks (which can also be turned into dilithium ore). Another subset of players takes it even further, using specific, short, non-time-gated, all-combat, singular enemy TFOs as benchmarks for testing builds for damage-per-second (DPS). They’ll use a third-party program called a parser to measure their DPS output by reading the game’s CombatLog. The recommended parser is Open Source Combat Reader (OSCR). The most common maps in space for DPS testing are Infected: The Conduit (either Advanced or Elite), or Hive Onslaught (generally Elite). On ground, Bug Hunt Elite is a common DPS check map. If you see abbreviations like ISA, ISE, HSE, or BHE, that’s referring to these benchmark maps.

Player DPS starts very low, maybe 10K in space on a level 40 character, but the most optimized, coordinated players can do millions of DPS on Infected Space Elite completely solo. Others can get even higher DPS with other players coordinating around them and supporting the main DPS player with buffs and debuffs on enemies. There are community leaderboards that track such things, but there are no prizes or ranks to achieve. References to the “DPS meta” are discussing builds and concepts used at the highest ranks of the DPS leaderboard and are generally not something we chase super hard on this site. Chasing DPS is completely optional, and has just as much to do with piloting and skill as gear. Players parsing hundreds of thousands of DPS will also see significant impact from the team composition they’re running with; the speed of the TFO  and buff/debuff of the team will heavily swing any public queue DPS results. 

8.3 Events and Weekends

8.3.1 Mainline Events

STO is almost always running an event of some kind that you can participate in for time-limited rewards. Events involve running one of several options of missions or assignments daily for a certain number of days, ranging from 5 to 20. The event windows are pretty generous, so there’s a buffer if you can’t play every day. 

To view the active events, open your journal (J) and navigate to the Events tab to see the active events, which will include their calendar, show your progress, and allow you to queue for activities that give event credit directly from this menu.

Left: Events tutorial tooltip pointing to the tab in the journal; Right: Seasonal Event shown

Some events are standalone, while others are part of a larger event campaign, a series of events spanning the calendar year that award progress to a grand prize: 2 T6 C-store ship tokens (these ships are account-wide), 1,500 Lobi Crystals, and your choice of a single promotional or lockbox tier ship for one of your characters, in addition to the reward for the individual event. Ships earned this way are limited to ships released the prior year or earlier, but this is a fantastic way to gain some otherwise difficult-to-obtain ships, completely for free, just for playing the game. You can view event campaign progress from the lower tab on the left of the menu:

Event Campaign Progress

It’s important to note that for event campaign-qualified events, you continue to earn progress by playing the event even after claiming the individual reward. 

While the developers try to offer a variety of events, there are a few recurring ones that players expect every year:

• The Winter Event every December takes you to Q’s Winter Wonderland, a whimsical, icy environment. Completing this event will earn you a Tier 6 ship. The currencies earned here (winter ornaments) are used to buy several powerful kit modules, a personal trait, and some bridge officer abilities.

• The Summer Event is typically in July and August on the tropical resort world of Risa. This event is also fairly low-key but longer duration and will earn you a Tier 6 ship. There are many powerful ground kit modules and frames obtained with the unique Lohlunat currency used here.

• October brings the Halloween Event, a spooky-themed ground exploration that typically awards ground gear. 

• The Anniversary Event occurs in February every year, and provides the opportunity to collect Omega Particles, which can be used for making Omega Tech Upgrades.  This event also usually features daily giveaways over the course of a week.

• First Contact Day is usually celebrated in April and has a variety of prizes. There are limited-time ground patrols and TFOs for this, including a model rocket contest and a time-traveling fight in Bozeman with Seven of Nine against the Borg. 

In between the larger events, the developers will sometimes run Red Alert events. These are very short space combat encounters against your choice of either Borg, Tholians, Na’kuhl, or Tzenkethi, typically less than 5 minutes. Playing a shorter Red Alert event and earning daily credit for five days will award an Ultimate Tech Upgrade and Specialization Point, while playing the longer Red Alert events and earning daily credit for ten days will earn you an Ultimate Tech Upgrade, Specialization Point, and an Experimental Ship Upgrade Token, which you can use to improve your T5-U or T6 starships.

8.3.2 Bonus Weekends

STO will periodically offer various time-limited weekend events and rewards to incentivize interacting with various in-game systems.

• XP weekend doubles the experience gained by your characters

• Dilithium weekend adds a 50% bonus to the amount of dilithium earned through gameplay, duty officers, and normal admiralty missions. It doesn’t work on Reputation rewards, Reputation projects, or the Admiralty Tours of Duty.

• Bonus Marks weekend offers a 50% bonus to reputation and fleet marks earned from task force operations. 

• Endeavor Bonus events increase endeavor experience gained by 60%

• Upgrade weekend doubles the amount of technology points needed when applying an upgrade to an item. 

• Admiralty weekend offers 50% more campaign experience on admiralty assignments, as well as 2,500 dilithium ore on every completed tour of duty.

• R&D weekend grants 50% more research experience for R&D schools, and provides additional R&D materials in TFO rewards and Promotional boxes. There are also chances for these boxes to award Research Catalysts to improve your crafting.

• Junior Officer weekends grant 50% commendation experience and provide events at your faction’s academy to earn more duty officers. Duty officer packs (purchased or from lockboxes) opened during this event have an additional duty officer.

• Phoenix Events allow you to collect a Phoenix Prize Pack for free from either Drozana or Deep Space Nine, and convert Phoenix Tokens to Experimental Ship Upgrade tokens. 

You can view the current active bonus (if any) by opening the journal and going to the Overview tab. 

Upcoming Event: Item Upgrade Event weekend

8.4 Alts (secondary characters) 

Another way to experience the game and freshen up the gameplay is to make another character. The game offers up to 10 slots for free, and you can buy more with Zen, up to 47. You could try a different career, a different faction, or both. This could be to try a different character fantasy, or experience other parts of the game’s storyline from other points of view, or just for fun. 

Character Selection Screen with many alts

There are advantages and disadvantages to having multiple characters. Having more characters allows you to accrue more resources (chiefly refined dilithium, energy credits via admiralty), and juggle different loadouts easier, especially on the ground. It allows you to try out different abilities or playstyles. The downside is that per-character unlocks become a lot more costly if you want each character to have approximately the same power level. Lobi gear, Lobi ships, and items from the Exchange are generally per character. You can choose to have a “main” character and have the alternate characters mostly be secondary, or try to have them all at the same power level. It’s up to you, but it will take more investment in time and resources to keep everyone up to par. 

Of course, the game does happen to offer strong incentives periodically to make new characters in the form of . . . 

8.5 Recruitment Events

Recruitment Events are offered periodically to incentive creating and playing new characters to unlock account-wide benefits. There are four different recruitment events, all associated with different factions:

• Delta (2409 Federation, KDF, and Romulan)

• Temporal Agent (TOS Starfleet)

• Klingon Defense Force (KDF)

• Gamma (Dominion)

With each one, you’ll be asked to make a new character, and you’ll have the duration of the event to pick up a specific recruitment transponder from an early quest and finish the tutorial. Once you have the transponder, you can take as long as you want to finish the quests associated with that recruit, but the key is getting the transponder while the event is still alive. It’ll stay in your inventory.

Right clicking the transponder in inventory, you’ll see all the quests and rewards available to the character. You can click each one to see your progress on a given quest as well as the reward associated with it. Most of the rewards are just for that recruit, but some of the larger rewards offer rewards that can be obtained for every character on the account, including fleet marks, energy credits, refined dilithium, reputation marks, and unique traits and duty officers. The most impactful premier awards are from Temporal Agent, where progressing 10 Reputations to T5 unlocks Reputation Gear being purchased at Mk XIII Ultra Rare instead of Mk XII Very Rare, which is a huge discount on upgrade cost for those items, and where progressing all the designated story arcs unlocks a valuable trait for energy builds: Critical Systems and Improved Critical Systems. 

You can claim rewards from other characters from the Temporal Agent on Earth Space Dock for Federation characters or First City for KDF characters. 

8.6 Episode Replay

Once you’re done playing an episode, you can go back and replay the vast majority of them. Simply open the Journal (J) and select the episode you want to play. A handful of episodes, usually at the start or end of an arc, cannot be replayed. These are called “wrapper” episodes and have minimal gameplay aside from checking in with your faction contact. 

Why replay an episode? Maybe you’re after a particular accolade. Maybe there’s a particular reward you’d like to obtain at a higher mark. Some episodes, particularly in the Iconian War, Yesterday’s War, and New Frontiers arcs, have multiple useful rewards and you only get one per playthrough. Some of these rewards grant additional stats when paired with other rewards from that mission; this is called a set bonus. Or, maybe you just really enjoyed the acting and storyline. STO is filled with callbacks and actors from across the various series so sometimes it’s worth replaying a mission just to hear Robert O’Reilly tell you to Experience BIJ! one more time! 

This one gets replayed a lot for its ground set. 

8.7 Tour The Galaxy

Every faction has access to a daily repeatable mission called Tour The Galaxy. Tour The Galaxy tasks you with going to sector space and traveling to as many highlighted systems as possible in 15 minutes. You can pick it up from your journal under “Available” or find the contact at your faction’s hub.

Left: Tour the Galaxy in Available missions; Right: Objective screen for Tour The Galaxy.

There are no breaks or pauses for loading screens. For each system visited, you’ll earn 25,000 energy credits. Completing a whole row or column will earn you additional credits. This is best done once you’ve unlocked slipstream at level 50 with a Tier 6 ship (preferably a Miracle Worker for its improved slipstream drive) and an upgraded warp core. 

Beta Quadrant Tour the Galaxy map; yellow circles are destinations. 

Some players like to optimize this more with gear and trait selections to boost , and you can earn 925,000 energy credits for completing the tour. This isn’t something we’ve been at the forefront on as there are  more time-efficient and fun methods of earning energy credits at the endgame, so we’ll point you to this link for gear recommendations and routes instead. With a T6 Miracle Worker Ship, Competitive Prevailing Regalia Engines, and the Gamma Reputation Warp Core, your author was able to make 775,000 EC, completing all of the Beta Quadrant and about half the Alpha Quadrant. This can be done per character, per day, but 1) is kind of a slog, and 2) this is an okay EC source if you need some small amount but anything truly expensive on the exchange is going to require far too much time to earn sufficient EC this way.

A couple of final tips for Tour The Galaxy:

• You’ll spend a lot of time with the map open, getting ready to click on the next destination. Be aware that auto-navigation, while usually decent, has some bugs around New Romulus and you may have to manually steer to planets near there.

• Slipstream Drive dramatically lowers your Sector Space turn rate and it has a decent cooldown, so only use it on long straightaways.

Partial completion of Tour The Galaxy 

8.8 Character Customization

STO provides a huge, diverse palette of options for character customization. Most of the options are the same as those presented at character creation, but we’ll cover a few things in greater depth here. 

The first is that you can have multiple outfits per character. Each character by default has two slots. Joining a fleet earns you another one, and then you can also buy additional character outfit slots for Zen. Each is completely separate so you can try radically different styles or looks between them. Note that you cannot change captain species, gender, or faction between outfits. Those are permanent characteristics unless you purchase and apply a captain alteration token, which might break some of your outfits.

Captain with five different outfit slots in use. 

To change your outfit, simply select another one of your saved outfits and choose “wear” at a tailor. To create a new outfit, you need an empty outfit slot. Then, choose “create” at the tailor. Modify allows you to change one of your existing outfits.

You can also customize the outfits of your bridge officers. Each only gets one outfit and some bridge officers cannot be customized. Choose the “bridge officers” tab and then you’ll have the option to modify their outfits.

Most bridge officers can also be customized in appearance. 

By default, your first outfit is devoted to the uniform slot. You must always have one outfit of type uniform which is used for missions and most content. There are other types of outfits as well, including formal wear, club wear, beachwear, and off duty, selectable from the dropdown to the right on the uniform tab. 

Generally speaking, armor and uniforms can be worn everywhere, while more informal/club/beachwear/formal outfits can only be worn in certain areas, such as the resort world of Risa. Additional outfit options can be unlocked by completing reputations and purchasing their items, completing missions, spending Lobi, using summer/winter event currencies (see 6.3.1) and making Zen purchases. 

Bridge officers can only be given uniforms for their outfits, not off duty/formal/clubwear. Furthermore, NPCs on  your ship will always wear the default faction uniform. 

Variety of options available for different outfit choices. 

While the term “tailor” connotes only clothing changes, other physical characteristics of your character can be customized at the tailor, including height, eye color, etc. These do not have any gameplay impact, so no matter how many knives you festoon your KDF character with, you still have to play a mission/buy a bundle to unlock an actual usable knife melee weapon. 

8.9 Starship Customization

Starship customization options vary depending on the ship. Common or popular ships that have many different variations (usually hero ships from the movies and TV shows, Constitution Classes, Galaxy Classes, Miranda Classes, Intrepids, and so on) which can be mixed and matched. Some one-off ships, usually limited to gamble boxes or events, have little customization outside of hull material and patterns.

But what does this mean? Well first to be able to customize our ship we need to interact with a vendor that allows us to do this.

Ship Tailor Interact

When we open our ship customization screen (from “Customize Starship”), we’re prompted with this screen:

We’re shown at a glance our ship, the interior, windows, and hull material, with two colour boxes that connect to the patterns applied to the paint on the hull. We also see various templates available; these are other variations of ships. The starship in the middle can be moved by clicking with the left mouse button and dragging to get different angles, and with the scroll wheel can be zoomed in on.

Each of the many templates can be clicked on to show the appearance of, for example the many Miranda Class variants:

However some you might not have unlocked; The game will not allow you to apply a customization of a ship using components or features you haven’t unlocked. 

We can also use the randomize to roll the various model options and variations:

For those looking for more direct control, you can open the “Advanced” tab, this will open the options for the ‘bones’ of the ship.

This is where we get to see all the options. Each bone of the ship has an option, in this case there are 4 bones, Saucer, Struts, Pylons, and Nacelles. Additionally we can change the patterns here.

By clicking on a drop down we can see what we have available or not. Many options are freely available. These are ship models that have no icon beside them. On the Miranda these are the Centaur, Miranda (& beta), and Shikahr. However there are more options available from the store.

Customization options

Models that have been unlocked show up with a green checkmark, while options that require purchase will show a zen amount next to them. By hovering over the locked model you can see where it’s purchased from. 

We recommend you do not buy ships from the vendor solely on appearances. 

Once we are satisfied with our ship customization, be it from the templates, a randomized button, or directly using the advanced editor, push Apply and accept the changes.

Completed ship edit

Now you can venture out into the universe with our brand new look 

Equipment Visuals

One more item to talk about would be ship Visual Slots. Some items have visuals that show up when the item is equipped. These are either Deflectors, Engines, or Shields (some consoles have this effect as well but it's very rare and the process is the same). By right clicking in the gear item we can disable and re-enable the visuals.

Left: With Shield equipped; Right: Default appearance

Visual slots

There are also ship visual slots. If we want to use a piece of gear for visuals but not have them equipped, we can place them here under our ship’s status window. Please note that a visual item cannot be disabled and still be in the slot. To remove the visual the item must be removed from the slot.

Left: Shield un-equipped; Right: Shield equipped in vanity slot. Items equipped this way do not apply their stats bonus. 

Only items with visual effects can be placed into these slots, items without visuals will not show up as an option to even equip.

8.10 Difficulty Settings

Players following this guide and not investing heavily into the game should feel the game’s difficulty feels organic and comfortable for the most part; not bereft of challenge but a reasonable adventure set in the Star Trek universe. 

However, once you’ve learned the game’s systems and maybe made some purchases, you might find the game a little too easy. Resisting the Borg isn’t close to futile. You’re tearin’ through the Terrans, etc. It could be that you want to accelerate your Reputation grind. STO offers you the option to increase the game’s difficulty setting. To do so, press Escape to open the in-game menu, go to Options and the Basic tab. This setting will only apply to episodes or missions in the journal, or patrols where you are the team leader. Task Force Operation difficulty is selected from the TFO menu and patrol difficulty on patrols you join rather than lead is set based on the leader’s difficulty setting. 

By default, everyone starts at Normal. You can increase this to Advanced or even Elite if you’re truly daring. For episodes and patrols, the only reason to change the difficulty setting is for the sheer challenge; there is only a small increase in rewards and the missions will likely take longer. 

However, when it comes to Task Force Operations, the rewards increase appreciably, where advanced starts offering significantly more marks, dilithium ore, and 1 advanced reputation currency (example: Ancient Power Cells), and Elite offers even more marks and dilithium ore, and 2 reputation currency items. Random Elite Task Force Operations also offer a component that you can use to craft advanced consoles, some of which are very powerful and are used frequently on STOBETTER builds. We talk more about these in section 5.4.5. 

Now, acquiring these consoles is hard enough given that you’d be playing Elite TFOs to get them, and random ones at that, but you’ll also have to re-engineer them to get the desirable stat, which is a significant investment in refined dilithium and salvage to get the right mods. Suffice to say this is not truly accessible to a new player working on their own, but it is something to look ahead into once your ground space and builds are a little more developed in the endgame. Check out our space builds and ground builds pages for more suggestions, especially in the economy tier for space builds as you consider some first purchases. 

What are the implications of raising the difficulty level? The first is that enemies are much harder to fight. There will be higher-rank enemies and enemies will have many, many more hitpoints. Let’s take the most popular Task Force Operation, Infected: The Conduit. 

On Normal, the first group of Borg you fight is a single Assimilator and some spheres. On Advanced, there are two more assimilators. On Elite, the central Assimilator is replaced by a Borg cube with 16 million hit points, and the final boss has around 40 million. 

The second consideration is that death, either on ground or space, has a strong chance to inflict injuries on your ship or character. Injuries are persistent debuffs that reduce your ship’s or captain’s effectiveness in battle. Mild ones will clear themselves between 5 and 15 minutes. Major or critical injuries have severe impacts on performance and can take several hours to heal. Otherwise, you can visit a ship repair officer/medical officer to heal them for free at a social zone, or use either components for ships or regenerators for characters to heal them. There are different levels of each item (Minor/Major/Critical) corresponding to the severity of the injury. You must match the correct item to the type of injury.

Left: Ship Repair Officer; Right: Doctor at Earth Space Dock

Components for ship repair (left) and regenerators for character injury (right) 

Left: Damaged ship; Right: Injured captain

The third consideration is that objectives start mattering a lot more in high-difficulty Task Force Operations, which usually involves passing a knowledge check on how to perform them, or potentially a DPS-check if the objective involves defeating enemies within a certain time. Or both! How fun! On Elite, you should treat every objective as mandatory or the TFO will fail. For example, the ground Task Force Operation Brotherhood of the Sword has you defending Qo’Nos, homeworld of the Klingons, from an invasion force. On Normal and Advanced, the objectives are primarily around shutting down enemy devices and fighting enemies, with optional objectives around rescuing various NPCs throughout the map. On Elite, however, those “optionals” aren’t optional anymore. If you learned the TFO on Normal/Advanced and didn’t pay attention to the optionals, you might be the one that causes the TFO to fail because advancing the map without completing the secondary objectives does just that. Failing the TFO means you forfeit the rewards and put that Task Force Operation on a 30 minute cooldown. Playing Elite will not just challenge your gear (up to a point, there are many highly-invested players who have completely invalidated any sense of difficulty from a damage/survivability perspective) but your knowledge of the maps. 

If you need a quick reference, we have a slideshow with 1 slide per TFO you can use for reference to understand the objectives, linked here again. Also, our YouTube channel has playlists for TFO videos covering different playstyles, and we’re always adding more.

Conclusion

Well, you made it to the end . . . of the beginning. We hope our handbook was helpful to you and more importantly, that you're having fun with the game. Whether you used this guide occasionally or went your own way, there's incredible freedom and creativity available in Star Trek Online and we sincerely hope you've enjoyed your experience. If you ever need help, come back and see what resources we have to help you play STO Better, or contact us via the form below or our email stobetter (at) gmail (dot) com.