Datacore farming
First Steps - Start the Training The following skills are REQUIRED to start using R&D agents: - Science V - Mechanic V (or) Engineering V (or) Electronics V
Once you have those skills trained up, you can now start training up to use an agent. The agent's level determines what level the skill needs to be trained to. Below are my recommended areas to focus on, since they'll make you the most ISK: - Mechanical Engineering (Probably the most common to find agents for) - Molecular Engineering - Nanite Engineering - Quantum Physics
The following skills are REQUIRED to use more than one R&D agent: - Laboratory Operation V - Research V - Research Project Management I (each level gives you the ability to use another agent)
Now For The Fun So you don't know the first thing about research agents? Well, have no fear. It's as simple as picking a faction you have some standings for, and starting to grind out the missions. Once you work your way up to level 3 missions, you'll be well on your way to making some decent ISK per month. Easy way to find out who likes you already, which will save you some time: 1 - Open your character sheet 2 - Click on Standings 3 - Click on the "Liked By" tab. 4 - Scroll down to the "Corporations" section 5 - Right-click the top Corporation 6 - Click "Show Info" in the menu 7 - Click on the "Agents" tab in the new window 8 - Scroll down to the "R&D" agent list 9 - In the "Available" list, scroll down to the highest level agent and do a show info on him. 10 - Look under the "Agent Info" tab for one of the above mentioned research fields. 11 - If none of the above skill areas are listed (Mechanical Engineering for example), move to the next best agent and repeat.
Keep in mind, not all corporations will have R&D agents. If your top corporation doesn't have them, move to the next corporation and repeat the above steps until you find one that does.
So Now What? Now that you've found a faction that likes you, and has R&D agents - it's time to start pounding out the missions. Hopefully you have done missions before and understand how they work. I'm not gonna explain that to you in this guide. The idea here is to just complete as many missions as humanly possible to get your standing with the particular corp up to where you can use level 3 agents. Don't stop there though... your standing with the corp opens up higher level agents, which ultimately effects how many datacores you get per day, which I'll explain later.
Just do whatever missions you feel comfortable with. You'll make some ISK along the way, but remember to focus. Don't take forever doing a mission. Once it's complete, go talk to your agent and finish it off so you can start on another. Here's a list of what areas give what types of missions:
Administration: 50% Kill, 50% Courier Advisory: 34% Kill, 66% Courier Archives: 5% Kill, 90% Courier, 5% Trade Astrosurveying: 40% Kill, 30% Courier, 25% Mining, 5% Trade Command: 97% Kill, 3% Courier Distribution: 5% Kill, 95% Courier Intelligence: 85% Kill, 15% Courier Internal Security: 95% Kill, 5% Courier Legal: 50% Kill, 50% Courier Manufacturing: 5% Kill, 95% Courier Marketing: 5% Kill, 95% Courier Mining: 5% Kill, 85% Courier, 10% Mining (II) Production: 5% Kill, 95% Courier Public Relations: 34% Kill, 66% Courier R&D: 0% Kill, 50% Courier(Short), 50% Trade Security: 90% Kill, 5% Courier, 5% Trade Storage: 5% Kill, 95% Courier(Llong) Surveillance: 95% Kill, 5% Courier
The Math
So now that the basics are over, here's some math for you so you can understand how to get more Research Points per day. The raw calculation for how many research points you'll get in a day is as such:
((Agent Skill + Your Skill)^2 * (1 + Effective Quality / 100)) * Area Bonus
Agent Skill: Determined by the Level of the agent. Level 3 agents will have Level III of the appropriate research skill. Your Skill: Determined by your training in the research skill. Effective Quality: is your effective quality (after Negotiation, Connection, etc.) with the Agent. Area Bonus: Depends on the research field. Most fields have no modifier (e.g. 1), weapon-area research is doubled (2), and ship research is tripled (3). Don't worry about this one too much.
Skills Effecting Research Points per Day: Negotiation: The Negotiation skill directly improves the effective quality of your agent, and is the most efficient skill for raising the number of RPs you earn each day. Negotiation IV, for example, raises Effective Quality by nearly 20 points.
Connections: Not terribly efficient (but very useful in grinding standing to be able to use agents), Connections can minimally raise the effective quality of your research agent.
Area Specific Skill (Mechanical Engineering, etc): Each level of your skill in this area increases the "Your Skill" part of the equation listed above. I would recommend getting this skill to level 4 (level 5 is just a bitch).
Now for the ISKies So, you've selected your corp/faction, gotten your standings up, and you want to start gaining Research Points. Fly out to your R&D agent and have a chat with him. Tell him you want to begin researching with him. Doing this will bring up a window where you have to select what field you wish for him to study on. Since you've read this guide, you already know which one to pick by now (I hope) - so pick it. From that moment on, you'll start gaining RP every single day your character is alive. Once a month, or however long it is between the times you have some ISK and you are flat broke, go talk to him again and tell him you wish to purchase datacores from him.
He'll tell you how many you can afford. Buy as many or as few as you wish, check the market and if there's some decent buy orders out for them... sell them and start spending your ISK on cool stuff. If not, fly them out to a different region and check the market. You can usually get 200-300k isk more per core by placing a sell order, but don't get too greedy.
Keep in mind as well, you can pretty much double your RP by completing a mission for your research agent. You will only get offered one mission a day, but it is equal to 1 day's worth or RP - effectively doubling your ISK potential. As mentioned above, your research agent will offer you the following mission types:
R&D: 0% Kill, 50% Courier(Short), 50% Trade
I hope this guide helps some of you become more self sufficient. It's a bit of time invested, and some ISK for the skills but the payoff is worth it. I'll guess, starting from scratch, it would take about 1-2 months to train all the required skills. You can do missions in the meantime with regular agents to get your faction/standing up and unlock the higher agents. Please let me know if anything else needs explained better, or any comments you might have on the validity of this guide. THANKS!
R&D agents are a special kind of NPC agent that will perform research for players that meet their requirements. This research is represented by the steady accumulation of research points, which you can intermittently cash in for various kinds of Datacores. Datacores are special items that are used for inventing tech two modules, and enjoy a brisk trade at market hubs, like Jita.
The neat thing about these agents is that, once spoken to, they will continue to produce research points on their own, without any interaction from the player. That means that they are what we call a "passive income source." Passive income sources are ideal because they mean that you can spend less time grinding for ISK, and more time doing whatever it is you enjoy. Each character may only have a certain number of research agents working for him, at a time, though, so there is a hard limit to the amount of datacores that you can have pouring in, at any given time.
Because of the way missions work, if you're going for level four missions in general, you may as well also get R&D agents going at the same time. That way you get datacores to sell, while running your level four agents, in perpetuity.
My previous two guides about running missions will be very useful for players that are unfamiliar with the mission grind or are looking for ways to speed it up.
An Example
I think the best way to explain this process is to give an example of how it works, and then go over each step, afterwards:
Let's say that I decide to do R&D agents for the Amarr faction, since I live in Amarr space and having high standings with them will generally come in handy. I search on an agent-finder web site to see what level four R&D agents are available for Amarr, and notice that they all belong to the Carthum Conglomerate corporation. Obviously, these is the best Amarr research corporation.
In order to get access to level four Carthum agents, I would run the Amarr newbie missions, turn in tags at the faction data centers, and run level two and three missions until I had great Amarr faction standing. Then I would run level four Carthum agents until my Carthum standing was high enough to access the R&D agents.
After visiting each of the highest-level Carthum agents and getting them to research datacores for me, I would check in every few months in order to pick up the datacores so produced. Then I would either sell the datacores in Jita or use them for invention, depending on what projects I had going at that point in time.
Accessing An R&D Agent
Unlike most agents, R&D agents require a corporate standing rather than a good corporate standing or good faction standing. That is, even if you have faction standings high enough to use a normal level four agent, it won't do you any good with the R&D agents. Getting high Amarr standings is faster than getting high Carthum standings, though, so you want to run the tutorial agents, turn in tags, and do all the other stuff mentioned in my previous two articles. Once you've gone as far as you care to, with faction standings, you should check to see what level Carthum agents you can access. Ideally, it should be level 3, though perhaps 2 is more likely if you are stingy with turning in tags.
Find Carthum agents of the highest level that you can, of whatever type you prefer. I prefer agents that give me mostly combat missions. Run those Carthum agents, moving up the ladder to higher level agents, until you finally have access to level four Carthum agents.
Skills For R&D Agents
Each character may use a single R&D agent, plus an additional agent per level of the Research Project Management skill that they have trained. I recommend training it to level four. The pre-requisites for this skill are pretty intense (as is the ISK cost) if you don't already have them, but well worth it, as I explain later. In order to train Research Project Management, you need to train Laboratory Operation V, Research V, and Science III.
Additionally, the kinds of datacores that your agent can produce are limited by your skills, and also by their own particular areas of research. Some agents may be able to research Mechanical Engineering datacores, which are possibly the most lucrative at the time of this writing. The higher your Mechanical Engineering skill, the more datacores your agent will produce, each day.
Research Rates
The amount of research points produced by each agent varies according to your skills, and according to which datacore you are researching. Deceptively enough, even though some fields of research (like any of the Starship Engineering skills) will accumulate research points at a faster rate, the cost of purchasing datacores in that field is increased by that same amount. This is a relic of the old tech two lottery, an old game mechanic that hasn't been used in years.
You will need to look at datacore prices in Jita and do math, in order to figure out which kinds of datacores will make you the most ISK, per day.
The datacore varieties and their research point multipliers are as follows, sorted by requisite skills:
Electronics:
* Electromagnetic Physics * Electronic Engineering * Nanite Engineering
Engineering:
* Graviton Physics (x2 research rate) * High Energy Physics * Hydromagnetic Physics * Laser Physics * Nuclear Physics * Plasma Physics (x2 research rate) * Quantum Physics
Mechanics:
* Amarrian Starship Engineering (x3 research rate) * Astronautic Engineering * Caldari Starship Engineering (x3 research rate) * Gallentean Starship Engineering (x3 research rate) * Mechanical Engineering * Minmatar Starship Engineering (x3 research rate) * Molecular Engineering * Rocket Science
The Economics Of It
If you are balking at the skill requirements and the 40mil ISK price tag on Research Project Management, keep in mind that by ensuring a passive, constant income source, you are effectively lowering the price that you pay, to play EVE Online.
My best agent gives me about 2.5 Mechanical Engineering datacores, each day, while the worst level 4 R&D agent that I have still gives about one, each day. In total, I'm getting about 7.8 datacores a day. Assuming that they sell for about 380,000 ISK per unit, that's 2.98mil ISK, per day.
To put that in perspective, buying a 60-day timecard usually costs about 550mil apiece, or 9.16 mil a day. In effect, it's paying for a third of my subscription. If I were to do this with all three characters on my account, it would more or less pay for that account's subscription. That would mean anything that you made over that is pure profit, to be invested or spent on PvP. In tandem with other passive income sources like copying and selling blueprints, moon mining, or alchemy, you can easily pay for your EVE Online account without spending real money, which is damn cool in my books.
Note that you can check your journal to see what agents you are currently researching with, as well as what field you told them to study, how many research points they have accumulated to date, and how many they produce, each day.
A Final Note
The process described above can be repeated for any of the major high-sec factions. There are no level 5 R&D agents (thought some agent-finder sites may show them, this is in error). The corporations with level four R&D agents (and their associated factions) are:
* Amarr: Carthum Conglomerate. * Caldari: Ishukone Corporation, Lai Dai Corporation (best), Kaalakiota Corporation. * Gallente: CreoDron, Duvolle Laboratories, Roden Shipyards (a mix of research corps is needed to have all level four agents, unfortunately). * Minmatar: Boundless Creation, Core Complexion Inc. (best).
There is also a single non-Empire faction that has a solitary level 4 R&D agent, located in null-sec space, as well as various agents of lower levels:
* Thukker: Thukker Mix.
There are various other R&D agents scattered between some of the other factions, but only level 4 agents produce datacores in meaningful quantities. Because the good Gallente R&D agents are scattered between three corporations, I don't recommend grinding for them, unless you have already started grinding their missions or are otherwise committed to their faction.
