Inventory and Resources

This section discusses how to manage inventory, in-game resources, currencies, the exchange, phoenix boxes, and the Zen-store (C-store).

4.1 Inventory Management

By now you’ve probably started to fill up the limited number of inventory slots the game starts you with. What can you get rid of, and what should you keep? If you’re a veteran, feel free to chart your own course, but for new players:

Definitely Keep

• Any and all R&D materials and upgrades. You’ll need them later and they live in their own tab. Most of these stack to 9,999 so you likely won't run out of space either

• Sufficient weapons, personal shields, and armor to outfit 4 bridge officers to accompany you on away missions.

• Any weapons or gear you will need / want for your current ship or your next one.

• Commodities (example: Medical Supplies), which will be needed for duty officer missions.

• Any transponders or comm codes. These are used for summoning mobile trade hubs either on the ground or in sector space and should not be discarded. Other transponders are awarded as part of specific boosts. 

• Hypos. Slot ‘em and use ‘em, they’ll keep you alive once ground combat gets harder.

• Any Tier 6 ship (see section 7.1 for an explanation of tiers) you acquire that cannot be reclaimed. If you bought it directly for Zen or earned it from an event, it can be reclaimed. If you bought it from the Exchange or won it from a gamblebox, it cannot be reclaimed.

• Any event currency or event-specific items. You can always use them again next year.

• Any “choice of” rewards from lockboxes you picked up along the way as well as any duty officer packs.

• Contraband. This can be converted to 2000 Dilithium Ore via a mission at your faction’s security officer.

• Components and Regenerators for removing injuries from your player and starship.

• Items that are unique mission rewards that you do not care to ever play through again. Looking at you, Morphogenic Set.

Definitely Discard

• Lockboxes

• Weapons and gear that you have out-leveled and will not be using in the endgame, or which are unwanted. Unless you have sentimental attachment to that Mk I Dual Beam Bank that carried you through your first fight with the Borg, it’s time to ditch it. See below for instructions on how to do so.

Probably Discard

• Consumables like Shield Charges, Batteries, Power Cells, and food. Food items have some niche uses in select duty officer missions, but the odds of you having that exact one you need when you need it are low. You can also give them to your boffs. This also goes for Tribbles. Be aware that Tribbles left in inventory or on a boff/character with food will eat the food and multiply. This is not desirable unless you are into breeding Tribbles, which, yes, is a thing.

If you have too many items in your inventory, the game will start filling an overflow bag. It will not let you join missions until you reduce your inventory to empty the overflow bag. STO will gladly sell you more inventory slots as well, using Zen (of course).

How to Discard

If you’re doing a little cleanout, you can right-click an item and choose to discard it, which will get you 40% of the item’s energy credit value back. You can also do this by opening your inventory, selecting the Replicator, going to the recycle tab, and clicking items to recycle them for energy credits. We'll discuss the Replicator in further detail below. 

In the early game, when every energy credit is valuable, it is far more efficient to go to a gear vendor and sell items to them for 50% energy credit return instead. Alternately, you can salvage your loot instead but you will not get energy credits for it. See Section 4.2 and 6.5 for an explanation of salvage and upgrading.

Discard menu in the Replicator

Protecting Items

If you want to make sure an item isn’t accidentally discarded, traded, or salvaged, right click on it and select “Change Protected Status to On.” This will prevent any accidental disappearances of the item.

Right-clicked an item with pop-up menu

Other Storage Options

• The game gives you a personal bank, where you can store another set of items. These are not freely accessible unless you are near a bank terminal or summon a trader comm code. You can only equip items from your bank onto your ship or character at a social zone.

• You can buy slots for an account bank, which allows you to trade items between your characters. Each character can only see their personal bank, but all of them can access the account bank.

• You can store items that go on ships, like consoles or weapons, on your inactive ships. The game gives you a number of ship slots, and each of those can hold a full complement of weapons and gear if you’re full of things you want to keep. In the early game, this will not be much, and your ship slots are better reserved for T6 ships that have more slots, but it is an option. These items are only accessible in social zones. 

• You can store up to 40 items in the mail/Exchange, but this is not advised as it’s easy to forget they are in mail and Exchange items will eventually time out if not sold, ending up in your mail.

Personal Replicator

Each captain has access to a personal replicator, which converts energy credits into goods that the universe uses. This is needed for Duty Officer missions or quests. This can be found at the bottom of your inventory tab:

Replicator access button

This will open a new window, where commodities and other items can be purchased for Energy credits.

Double clicking on any item, or selecting it and pressing replicate, will open a window asking how many to buy.

You can buy up to 250 of qualified items at a time, and the slider will update to indicate the costs. You cannot buy multiple hologram duty officers this way. 

This also includes food items, as well as combat consumables like Hypos (health kits), Power Cells (ground energy weapon buffs), or Shield Charges (repairs damaged shields) 

Retrieving discard items 

So long as you haven't changed instances (beaming up, warping out, or transferring instances directly), discarded items can be retrieved from the replicator. Following the steps as above, going to the Replicator at the bottom of the inventory and navigating to the “Retrieve tab." 

Example Retrieve menu

4.2 Resources 

While Star Trek Online is not as insane as some other games in terms of hundreds of different types of resources, there are a few key ones that you should be aware of:

Dilithium, specifically refined Dilithium, is earned via playtime. Dilithium is used for upgrades, fleet projects and unlocks, R&D, and specialized endgame stores at fleets, a unique Dilithium Store, and reputations. You can refine 8,000 dilithium per day per character and you should always try to refine dilithium if the option is available. Dilithium can also be exchanged for Zen. 

Resources can be viewed in the Assets tab of the inventory screen. Zen is only shown in the Z-store window. 

Zen is the premium currency of Star Trek Online. Zen is most commonly acquired by spending real money and is commonly used to buy ships, bundles, cosmetics, and utility items like inventory slots, bank slots, etc. You can also use it to buy lockbox keys, which are used to open lockboxes, which is not a good idea for your first purchases, and arguably not ever. You can trade Zen for refined dilithium. 100 Zen is approximately 1 USD.

Almost anything in the Zen Store will go on sale at some point and it is strongly recommended to buy things on sale. DO NOT EVER BUY ANYTHING IN MUDD’S MARKET UNLESS IT IS ON SALE!

To exchange dilithium and Zen, open your inventory (I) and select assets. Move down to the purple section for dilithium and select “Exchange.” This will open up a menu where you’ll see tabs to either buy or sell Zen, plus your history. If you are buying Zen, enter values in two of the three fields:

• Zen to Buy

• Dilithium Per Zen

• Total Dilithium to sell

On PC, entering anything but the maximum dilithium to zen rate (500) will result in your transaction never being filled. Once you have filled in those fields, submit your offer to buy and wait. On PC, there is far more demand for Zen than dilithium, so you will likely see a 2+ month wait for transactions. Conversely, if selling Zen, the exchange is instant. You’ll see any outstanding offers in the queue on the right; you can have up to 5 active at any time and you can cancel any active offers. Once a transaction has been completed, your resources, either dilithium or Zen, will be in the Exchange balance.

Left: Dilithium Exchange Screen with withdrawal option; Right: Entering an offer to buy Zen for Dilithium

You can use this system to transfer refined dilithium from one character to another by setting up a dilithium to zen offer that is under 500-to-1. Then, change to the destination character, access the dilithium exchange window, and cancel the transaction. You can then withdraw the refined dilithium from your exchange balance. Remember, this is only for refined dilithium. There is no transferral of dilithium ore.

Dilithium Ore is widely varied in how much you get, with some sources rewarding 5 at a time while others offer thousands. Most uses of Refined Dilithium use anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand, with some exorbitant uses taking hundreds of thousands.

Energy Credits are the player-to-player currency used at first for vendor transactions and in the endgame is largely used at the Exchange. You can acquire energy credits through a variety of gameplay interactions, such as missions or selling items to vendors. Duty officers offer some and after level 50, endeavors and admiralty will offer larger sums. However, truly vast sums will be required to buy the most sought-after items on the Exchange. 

By default, new player accounts are limited to 15 million energy credits. Unlocking this to the full 2 billion is done via a 500 Zen unlock. For reference, desirable gear is often tens or hundreds of millions of EC, while endgame ships are billions. In-game vendors and items work in thousands of EC.

Lobi Crystals are the pity currency that is a guaranteed drop from lockboxes and promotional packs. Lobi Crystals have their own unique store and are untradeable. Lobi gear is bound-to-character and thus can’t be traded, while Lobi traits and ships can be bought and sold on the Exchange. Lobi traits and ships are ALWAYS cheaper on the Exchange than using an equivalent number of keys to open lockboxes to acquire Lobi. Ships take a few hundred Lobi, while lockboxes drop around 5 lobi.

Marks (not to be confused with the mark of an item) are specialized currency for completing specific tasks related to a certain enemy in the reputation system, or a fleet-related activity for fleet marks. They cannot be traded. Queues reward around 50-100 marks, and most reputation marks take up to 750 marks, with Fleet projects sometimes requiring thousands.

Gold-Pressed Latinum has very few uses outside of a select few cosmetics and a handful of duty officer missions and minigames. It is trivial to acquire and almost entirely useless. Don’t tell Quark.

Salvage is a resource acquired by converting loot to salvage using the Upgrade/Salvage button at the bottom left of your inventory. You do not get any energy credits from a salvaged item, but you will get some crafting materials. The rarer and higher mark the item, the more salvage it is worth. Salvage is used as part of the upgrade system called re-engineering. See section 6.5 for more details on upgrading gear.

Salvage Screen

If you’d like more details on the scale of STO’s economy and means of acquisition of various resources, please see our Economics guide. 

4.3 Lockboxes

STO offers a number of lockboxes and promotional boxes. Lockboxes of various types will be picked up during gameplay, tempting you to buy keys with Zen to open them. The game may even give away keys at some point, and since these aren’t tradeable, you can use them to open lockboxes freely. However, while it’s great if you want to support the game monetarily, please be aware that run-of-the-mill lockboxes have low odds at granting you the Tier 6 ship which is the grand prize in them, and that only for a single character. Conservatively, it’s around 1-in-300, and each key costs $1.25 USD. Even rarer ships can be found in Promotional R&D or Infinity Promotional duty officer packs, which first cost you 250 Zen to purchase, and then also have very low odds of unlocking a Promotional ship on a single character, over 1-in-100. These are not officially published numbers, but rather crowdsourced from players opening them en masse. 

We strongly encourage opening not using Master Keys on lockboxes or opening Promotional Boxes unless they are freely given and bound to character. 

It’s your decision on how you want to spend your money, but our recommendation when you’re first starting out and wanting to invest in the game is to visit the C-store for Tier 6 ships to get some guaranteed goodies rather than hoping for Lady Luck to smile.

4.4 The Exchange

STO offers a player-to-player exchange, where players can post items for sale and buy items from other players. Trading is anonymous; you don’t know who you’re buying from, and you don’t know who’s selling. You can also directly trade with players, but this is much more prone to scamming because in the exchange, you can see prices that others have posted for the same items.

Selling

To list an item, navigate to an Exchange terminal, interact with it, and either click on the button or drag and drop the item from your inventory to the Exchange window. Enter a price and hit “Post” and the item will be posted. You’ll be notified via Mail (see the next section) if your item sells, at which point the energy credits will be delivered to your account. You can list up to 40 items at a time.

Posting an item in the Exchange

If you are posting more than 1 of an item, ensure you have the total price listed, not the unit price. The game will tell you what the unit price is next to the post item. 

ALERT: Be very careful you have the right price set, especially for something that is highly valuable. 

Many a potential windfall has been lost by missing a digit. It is also incumbent upon yourself to do your market research and post a reasonable price if you want the item to sell. It doesn’t matter how special your first dual beam Mk I is to you, it is unlikely anyone else will pay 5,000,000 energy credits for the privilege of having that specific item. Yet selling a hard-to-find duty officer for the same 5,000,000 could be costing you a potential windfall if it's worth double or triple that. 

Multiple items posted as a stack

Buying

When it comes to buying things from the Exchange, navigate to the “buy” tab and type in your item, then select “Search.” The game will accept partial names, but it won’t account for misspellings.

“Contra” will find “Contraband,” as will the full string. 

Oops, this won't work

If you are searching for items sold in bulk, set your filter to “Sort By Ascending Price per Unit,” to find discounts from bulk sellers. You can also use the Item Type filters to narrow down what you’re looking for, which is especially useful when there are similarly named items of various categories. 

Items sorted by Ascending Price Per Unit

One important note about the exchange: you can search only by item title, NOT its stats. For consoles with stats, like Exotic Particle Field Exciter Mk XV [EPG], you can search under “ALL” for that exact string or use the menu on the left to search for science consoles with “Mk XV [EPG],” in the name but you might have to do some more scrolling to find the right one. 

Left: Exotic Particle Field Exciter Mk XV [EPG] with full string; Right: Using a partial string finds other consoles as well

You also cannot search for stats on duty officers. For example, most Fabrication Engineers have a chance to beam in an extra Support Drone as their passive when slotted into an active ground slot. A select few have an extension of the Reverse Shield Polarity ability, but you can’t search Fabrication Engineers for “Reverse Shield Polarity” to find this. You have to scroll manually and find them. Nuanced hidden stats often account for large disparities between item prices, but not always. It's a free market.

As a final tip on using the exchange, items can be dragged from inventory into the search window. This will carry the same search settings as before so only items that exactly match the name will be shown, but this might help you if you are unsure of the worth of a particular weapon or item by removing the modifiers in the square [] brackets that appending the name. For example “Chroniton Mine Launcher Mk VI [CrtH]” should be converted to “Chroniton Mine Launcher Mk VI”

Illustration of how to drag and drop an item into the Exchange

Supply and Demand

The exchange is very much governed by the laws of supply and demand. If you’re looking for a rare or difficult-to-obtain item, you can expect it to cost millions of energy credits. Let’s say you look up a guide on the Internet and it says you “need” to acquire the personal trait Breen Shield Tunneling from either a lockbox or the exchange. You check the exchange and are sticker-shocked to see its price at over 40 million energy credits. Why? Supply and demand. 

First off, this trait comes from a lockbox, which means that somebody has to use a bunch of keys on a box to acquire a copy. Secondly, people who play the Exchange heavily also follow those same guides on the Internet. If a popular streamer says that Breen Shield Tunneling is best-in-slot, S++, OMGWTFBBQPWN tier, or other superlatives, then those people know that demand will be high and can raise the price to recoup the investment they had to sink into keys to procure it. 

4.5 Mail

STO has an in-game email system. It can be used to send messages, as well as unbound items, up to 5 at a time. The Exchange will also notify you when an item is either purchased or sold via in-game mail but otherwise it is mostly for player-to-player communication. If you are in a fleet, fleet leaders of the appropriate rank can message all members. When you have new mail, the mail icon to the right of the mini-map will flash green at you.

Flashing mail icon

When composing mail, ensure you have the player’s @ handle in the address line. You do not need to have a specific character’s name. 

ALERT: If a message in your inbox has an attached item as indicated by the box icon, DO NOT DELETE IT OR ELSE THE ITEM WILL BE DELETED TOO! 

Even if you’re not an incredibly social player, mail has one other use: sending unbound items or especially doffs from one character to another. Doffs can’t be placed in the account bank, but can be mailed. Conversely, you can use the account bank to move account-bound items between your characters, but NOT the mail system.

Lastly, the mail system has a limit on messages you can have, as well as a number of items you can store in there, shared with your items actively in the exchange (40). Clean it out every once in a while!

4.6 Phoenix Box

The Phoenix Box is a prize pack that is purchasable for refined dilithium in the Dilithium Store, accessible next to the Refine Dilithium button in the Assets tab of your inventory screen and given away one per day during certain recurring events. You will only ever want to buy these at the bulk rate of 40,000 refined dilithium for 10 boxes (12% more efficient than buying singletons). Phoenix Boxes don’t cost anything to open, and when opened, offer 1 of 4 tokens of varying rarity: Rare, Very Rare, Ultra Rare, and Epic. To open one, double click the box, which will open the Phoenix Prize Redemption window (shown below) 

Left: Example Phoenix Prize tokens. Left to right: Rare, Very Rare, Ultra Rare; Right: Phoenix Pack purchase option in the Dilithium STore. 

ALERT: The odds of finding an Epic Prize Token are vanishingly small, and you could open hundreds of Phoenix Boxes without seeing one. The crowdsourced estimated odds are somewhere at 1/500 to 1/1000. This guide will thus not cover them. 

Phoenix Boxes contain many valuable items, though, not just at Epic Tokens, so acquire and use them as you need. When you’re early in the game, refined Dilithium is scarce, and in the mid-game at level 50, a lot of things will cost dilithium as you start buying endgame gear. However, it’s worth it to invest in at least 1-2 batches of Phoenix Box buys to acquire the following based on token rarity.

Rare Prize options:

Rare:

• The prizes here are mostly cosmetic, though the Martian Mining Laser isn’t bad as a ground weapon should you need one. Grab what you want from the emotes, tribbles, and non-combat pets. Phoenix Universal Tech Upgrades are what you’ll use 99% of these on.

Very Rare Prize options:

Very Rare:

• The Red Matter Capacitor device is a reusable device that boosts all power levels periodically

• The Emergency Conn Hologram is essential, as it reduces 85% of the cooldown of Evasive Maneuvers when Emergency Power to Engines is used. 

• If you’re building Antiproton, the Crystalline Absorption Matrix is a decent offensive and defensive console.

• The Admiralty Cards are all useful (see Section 5.12), especially when you are first starting out.

• Neal Falconer is a decent duty officer, providing 10% damage against Borg on both space and ground, and can be slotted in a ground slot. In the endgame, if you engage with the Task Force Operation system at all (See 8.2), you’ll probably end up fighting the Borg a lot.

• The Sompek Lightning kit module is a decent direct damage ability.

• The APU doff doubles your expose chance, which is very solid early game.

• Varel for engineering captains provides a chance to beam in an extra Quantum Mortar

• Mariah Kilara Marr is highly valuable for exotic builds leveraging Tyken’s Rift.

• Tactical Exocomps (Fed) / Goshi the Augmented (KDF) are decent for as long as you’re still using Photon Grenade. It’s not the best endgame module. 

• The other duty officers are all fairly useful for assignments as Very Rare doffs and of course cosmetics depend on your taste. You can expect to get plenty of these tokens eventually so there’s no rush.

Ultra Rare Prize Options

Ultra Rare:

• Reiterative Structural Capacitor is the standout here, and this universal console should probably be your first Ultra Rare purchase. It is a short-duration activatable ability to causes you to heal your team to heal for a percentage of incoming damage, and is a very strong burst heal.

• Bajor Defense Warp Core is a solid choice for Phaser/Disruptor/Plasma builds just entering the lategame, when paired with one of its other set-pieces from the mission “Scylla and Charybdis.” It tends to get replaced though, so only use if you need a Warp Core and aren’t close to getting fleet, reputation, or event versions. 

• Terran Guerilla Combat Armor is a solid choice until you can unlock reputation options

• The Pahvan Crystal Prism kit module summons small glowing crystals that shoot psionic pulses of energy. They also network to other nearby crystals to increase the strength of their attack. If you are familiar with Prism Towers/Spectrum Towers from the Command & Conquer series, it’s the same mechanic.

• The Prolonged Beam or Cannon are solid choices for Phaser builds using those weapon types.

• Temporal Vortex Probe is a decent exotic console for exotic builds that are just starting out. 

• Prior’s World Elite Defense Satellite is likewise an okay starting console if you’re swimming in these, but be aware you’ll outgrow it quickly.

• Shard of Possibilities is a ground device that summons some extra copies of your character, but with generic weapons and no kit abilities. It’s okay.

You can trade down to pick up 2x lower-rarity tokens from a higher rarity, but there is no trading up. Phoenix Box items are bound to character, and the most frequent purchase will probably be the Phoenix Tech Upgrade, which is the most dilithium-efficient Tech Upgrade in the game, at least in terms of wide availability. You will need hundreds of these to fully max out a build and while just getting to Mark XV is plenty for any content in the game on Normal and Advanced with a good build, if you want the shiny gilded build, it’s going to take a lot of these. The Phoenix Tech Upgrade comes from the Rare prize pack so it’s easy to get a big pile. You can expect around 15 per set of 10 boxes you open, assuming you convert the excess Very Rare tokens to Rare.

It is NOT a good idea to convert Ultra Rare tokens down to Very Rare and then Rare to get Phoenix Upgrades. On special Phoenix Events, you can trade 5 Ultra Rare tokens into an Experimental Ship Upgrade. You can apply Experimental Ship Upgrade tokens to your endgame ships to give them an extra console slot, extra starship slot, and extra device slot. The game lets you do this twice; the first T6-X upgrade costs you one token, and the second level costs you 2 more Ship Upgrade tokens to get T6-X2. While this upgrade is applied to all ships of that class account-wide, it is per unique ship class, even if the ship is only a minor difference.

4.7 The C-Store

The C-store, sometimes called the Z-store or the Zen Store, is where you can spend Zen, the premium currency either purchased with real money or exchanged from other players. There are many different tabs and hundreds of purchasing options here. To access the store, click the Z-store button near the minimap:

C-store Icon

The tabs on the left will give you different options. Featured items tend to be new or what the game is promoting at the time. 

On Sale, if shown, is a crucial tab and our advice, especially when first starting out, is to never buy anything from the C-store that is not in this tab. STO runs periodic sales that include the following:

• % Everything in the Zen Store (usually 25%)

• % Ship Sale (usually 20%)

• % Key sale (usually 15%)

• % Services sale (usually 20%)

• % Starter Packs (usually 20%)

• % Ship Bundles (usually 35)

• % Legendary Bundles (usually 35%)

• % Duty Officer Packs (usually 20%)

• % Duty Officer and Personnel (usually 30%)

• % R&D Packs (usually 20%)

• % Costume packs (usually 20%)

• Lifetime Subscription Discount (usually 33-50%)

STO sales are not previewed or announced until they are basically live, so watch the STO subreddit or the playstartrekonline website for announcements. STO also periodically has bonus Zen purchases where you’ll receive additional Zen for purchasing with real money, and Lobi Store discounts where Lobi purchases are 20% off. Never buy anything with Lobi unless it is on sale or you’re really, really overflowing with the stuff. 

Mudd’s Market is the place to buy items from past events that might not have been around for or played through. It can also contain account-unlock purchases of various older ships from the Lockbox/Promotional boxes in larger Mudd’s Bundles which give you several options to choose from, including those premium ships. Normally, it is marked-up to obscene prices as something of a joke and if you heed our advice on anything C-store-related, it is to NEVER BUY ANYTHING FROM MUDD’S MARKET THAT IS NOT ON SALE!  Mudd’s Market will intermittently have 75% off sales for individual items (example: Temporal Disorder Console) or ships (example: Hysperian Intel Battlecruiser) and 50% sales for larger and more expensive Mudd’s Bundles which have choices of multiple premium ships. 

Starter Packs consist of several items grouped together to help accelerate your account, which we cover more in section 6.1. 

Expansion Packs are larger bundles themed around a specific expansion to the game, which is mostly a legacy concept. These items contain several ships and other items available individually in the C-store as well as some extra goodies to incentivize the purchase, potentially an exclusive duty officer, titles, etc.

Ship Bundles allow you to purchase multiple ships in a single purchase. Any Legendary Ship is a bundle exclusive and never available individually. Sometimes, these bundles contain exclusive items as well, but usually contain other incentives to justify the price like Ultimate Tech Upgrades (see 5.5) and Experimental Ship Upgrade Tokens (see 5.6). Buying an individual ship from a bundle generally does NOT pro-rate the rest of the bundle down. 

Ship Selection tab in the C-store

On the ships tab, the top tab has additional filters you can apply to narrow your selection down. You can also use the “Purchased Filter” dropdown to select or remove any ships you have already purchased. Ships you have purchased in the C-store are available to all characters on your account (aside from any faction locks, which can be removed either through a Zen purchase or leveling a KDF recruit to 65 via that Recruitment Event, covered in 8.5). 

If you have a T6 C-store Ship Token, perhaps earned from an event, you’ll see that the ship is marked discounted. You don’t have to use the token on it, but it’ll show up priced that way. 

Ship prices with coupon available

The Duty Officers tab allows you to either buy more slots for your duty officer roster or duty officer packs, which are akin to trading card packs in that they will have a random assortment of duty officers, with potential for some rare ones. 

The items tab is mostly related to gambling items: keys, promotional packs, and lockboxes, but it also contains upgrade tokens you can use to alter or upgrade your captain and ship: 

• Elite captain tokens allow your captain to gain an additional personal trait slot for both space and ground as well as a kit module slot and ground device slot. 

• Captain alteration tokens allow a single captain to change their species or gender. They may not change their faction or career. 

• Elite bridge officer tokens increase the rarity of eligible bridge officer traits to superior, add a kit frame and ground device slot, and allow your bridge officer to have an eligible personal ground trait. The bridge officer also learns all standard bridge officer abilities, i.e. those that are not purchased from an event store or lockbox/exchange. This includes specializations. This is not something we use much at all since bridge officers aren’t used in endgame Task Force Operations but we’ll point to this guide as a decent and recent example of how to set up bridge officers for ground, with considerations for these tokens.

• Fleet Ship Modules are used to buy ships from the Fleet Starbase (see 5.3 for a discussion on Fleets). Normally, these ships cost 5 Fleet Ship Modules for a Tier 6 ship. If you already own the C-store variant of the ship, the price is discounted to one. These ships are exclusive to a single character. Given that you earn a Fleet Ship Module for progressing each Reputation to Tier VI (so 13 with all maxed), we recommend you not invest into these until all of those free ones are exhausted. See 6.6 for Reputations.

Slots and Services contains lots of useful but optional items depending on your level of investment in the game, from more ship slots to more character slots to more bank slots. This is also where you find the single most useful unlock in the entire game, the 500 Zen purchase to unlock the energy credit cap from 15 million to 2 billion for the entire account. 

The uniforms and personnel tabs are fairly self-explanatory, unlocking uniforms and either playable species, bridge officers, or exotic space/ground pets respectively. 

Lastly is the promotions tab, where you’ll find all the giveaways available to your character. Pay special attention to this tab during the yearly anniversary event in February on PC (delayed somewhat on console) to claim free items!

Giveaways tab

Recommendations

You can find recommendations on what ships/ground gear to buy on our Basics pages, or across our individual builds, where we will identify the purchases used to recreate the build upfront. 

If you’re after an individual ship, a solid recommendation for a first purchase is one of two options. First, considering buying the Arbiter/Kurak/Morrigu Battlecruiser, which are very proven T6 ships, are easy to fly, have an excellent trait, a decent console, and lends itself well to beam or cannon builds (discussed more in 7.2) with examples of cheaper setups on our site. Alternately, the Gagarin/Qugh Battlecruiser has an excellent bridge officer layout and has a very versatile starship trait useful to a broad range of builds. 

If you’re looking to make one ship bundle purchase, the Legendary Battlecruiser Bundle is THE most efficient buy for energy weapon setups, which is what most players are flying. The Legendary Avenger is what the Arbiter wants to be when it grows up, an improvement in every way, and the consoles and traits that come with the bundle can be used to make an Elite-capable build when combined with Fleet and Reputation gear. Many a build listed as Midrange on our site is basically “How much from the Legendary Battlecruiser bundle can I squeeze onto this thing?”