User:Mednik Breau/Biomass farming
Biomass farming is a process of farming skill points through creating new characters on the same account as a previous one, earning redeemable points on them, redeeming the points on the main character and deleting (biomassing) the new character to free the slot so that the process may be repeated.
Biomass farming may be used to earn skill points for your main character or for skill farming – the process of earning skill points for selling Skill Injectors.
Mechanics
At the current moment (April 2024) the main method available for such skill points (SP) farming is the AIR Career Program. It allows to earn from 50k to 750k SP through completing various goals; the rewards appear in the Redeem Queue and can be redeemed by another character on the same account. Note that this behaviour was declared by CCP as unintended but not an exploit. Therefore, this approach is not forbidden, but might be fixed in any future expansion.
The strategy may vary from completing the easiest of the goals to earn 50k or 150k SP as fast as possible (see further) to completing every goal to earn the entire sum of 750k SP. After the desired amount is reached, one may initiate the character deletion which will put it into a deletion queue for 10 hours. Theoretically, one may perform this with 2 character slots on the account (queue times are separate for different slots) twice in a day.
AIR Career Program consists of 4 careers, each has goals totaling to 1000 career points (CP). Each career provides a 100k SP reward for completing 750 CP in this career. Also there exist rewards for completing 750, 1500, 2250 and 3000 CP in total. The corresponding rewards are 50k, 75k, 100k and 125k SP respectively.
Profitability
It is important to note that this approach involves an investment of time for SP gained. Same time could be used to earn ISK, which allows to buy Skill Injectors to gain SP. One needs to convert the SP/hour to ISK/hour or vice versa to compare those approaches in profitability. Additional concern is whether the strategy is multiboxable, as this allows to scale the rewards.
Known strategies
- One may simply try to complete all the goals. This will provide 750k SP for your main character but will likely take more than one day. Guide to AIR Career Programme suggests 12 hours of playtime, assuming this one obtains 62.5k SP/hour.
- One may try to complete one career to 750 CP as fast as possible. This approach gives 100k SP for completing a career and 50k SP for having 750 total CP. The optimal strategy is unknown, in a later section we suggest a strategy that needs about 3-6 hours and yields 150k SP bringing it to 25-50k SP/hour.
- One may rush to complete any available goals to obtain 750 total CP as fast as possible to gain 50k SP. While the reward is smaller, there are easy goals in each career which allows to complete this milestone much faster. Currently there are at least 2 known methods that obtain 50k SP in 1.5-2 hours bringing it to 25-33k SP/hour. One of them is multiboxable and another can likely be brought down closer to 1 hour.
