Datacore farming
Contents
What is datacore farming?
One of the most interesting ways to earn InterStellar Kredits (ISK), the currency in EVE, is to develop relationships with research and development (R&D) agents in non-player corporations. Once you have access to R&D agents, you can then ask them to conduct research for you on your behalf. They will produce Research Points (RPs), which you can then use to purchase datacores.
Datacores are a key part of the invention process in EVE, which produces advanced technology ("Tech II" or "T2") items. Datacores are a consumable item used in invention to create T2 Blueprint copies (also known as "BPCs"). Every invention process requires a certain amount of datacores, so datacores are always in demand. For more information on invention, see this link: http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Invention
Datacores are therefore very valuable, and can be sold on the market for ISK, in addition to being used for T2 item production. This is a very good thing, as it means that "datacore farming", once established, can produce a passive income for EVE players. Without any further action required, an R&D agent will happily generate RPs, which you can periodically convert to income.
How much income? With multiple high level R&D agents working, you can earn an income of over 150 million ISK per month. Not a bad amount to collect, for no additional effort!
How do I start to farm datacores?
There are three steps involved in becoming an effective datacore farmer:
- Train the required skills
- Develop relationships with R&D agents
- Begin the flow
Training skills for datacore farming
The following skills are required to start using one R&D agent:
- Science V
- Mechanic V (or) Engineering V (or) Electronics V
- At least one applied science skill to level I or higher
Different R&D agents specialize in different types of research. They won't even speak to you unless you have the above skills trained and completed, and then they will only conduct research in their areas of expertise, and only if you have trained in relevant science skills that match their expertise. Below are some recommended areas to focus on -- these applied sciences tend to generate datacores that command higher prices in the market:
- Mechanical Engineering (The most common to find agents for)
- Molecular Engineering
- Nanite Engineering
- Quantum Physics
Note that the above skills give you access to one (and only one) R&D agent. To maximize your income, you will want multiple R&D agents working with you. 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 up to a maximum of six at level V.
Developing R&D agent relationships
Not all non-player character (NPC) corporations offer R&D agents, so some pre-planning about which corporations you will select for your datacore farming plan is absolutely required for success.
http://www.eve-agents.com - This site lets you search for agents. You can search by corp, by R&D skill, or just list the corps with R&D agents. You can also sort the list by number of datacores earned per day.
To see if you have any relationships with corporations that have R&D agents already, use this procedure:
- Open your character sheet
- Click on Standings
- Click on the "Liked By" tab.
- Scroll down to the "Corporations" section
- Right-click the top Corporation
- Click "Show Info" in the menu
- Click on the "Agents" tab in the new window
- Scroll down to the "R&D" agent list
- In the "Available" list, scroll down to the highest level agent and do a show info on him.
- Look under the "Agent Info" tab for one of the above mentioned research fields.
- If none of the above skill areas are listed (Mechanical Engineering for example), move to the next best agent and repeat.
In order to maximize the production of RPs, and therefore to produce more datacores, you will want to work with the highest level R&D agents - level 4. There are no level 5 R&D agents (though some agent-finder sites may show them, this is in error). The corporations with level 4 R&D agents, sorted by their associated factions, are:
- Gallente Federation: CreoDron, Roden Shipyards, Duvolle Laboratories (a mix of research corps is needed to access all level four agents, unfortunately)
- Caldari State: Kaalakiota Corporation, Ishukone Corporation, Lai Dai Corporation (best)
- Minmatar Republic: Core Complexion Inc. (best), Boundless Creation
- Amarr Empire: Carthum Conglomerate, Viziam
There are also some non-Empire faction corporations with a few R&D agents:
- Thukker Tribe: Thukker Mix
- Khanid Kingdom: Khanid Innovation
- Ammatar Mandate: Nefantar Miner Association
Only level 4 agents produce datacores in useful quantities. Because the good Gallente R&D agents are scattered between three corporations, they are not an optimal choice, unless you have already started grinding missions there, or are otherwise committed to their faction.
Each R&D agent requires a certain level of standing with their corporation and their faction, before they are willing to talk to you. That is, even if you have faction standings high enough to use a normal level 4 agent, it won't do you any good with the R&D agents. Earning high faction standings is generally faster than getting high corporate standings, so you will 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. Therefore, you must usually execute missions for that corporation to earn higher standings.
Start the research flow
Once you have the standing level needed to speak with an R&D agent, go the the station where the desired R&D agent is located, and begin a conversation with him or her. One of the options they will provide to you is to start research - select this option. They will offer you their areas of applied science to research. Select the one(s) in which you have trained your skills. The agent will then start to produce research points (RPs) for you.
The calculation for how many research points you'll get in a day is: ((Agent Skill + Your Skill)^2 * (1 + Effective Quality / 100)) * Area Bonus where:
- 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 - as the price of datacores is scaled to the area bonus.
There are several additional skills that can improve the amount of RPs generated per day. These include:
- Negotiation: 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. Train this skill to level 4 or higher.
http://hussars-online.ru/eve/datacore.php - This site lets you input your skills, standings, and such and it'll show you in order which agents/skill combinations are the most profitable. You can use your real skills/standings or just input possible combinations.
Once your R&D agent is working for you, that agent will offer you a mission once per day. Each of these missions reward you with 1 day's worth or RP - effectively doubling your ISK potential. R&D agents offer relatively safe missions, half of which are short courier missions and the other half are trade-related. There is no penalty for ignoring or declining a mission from an R&D agent, despite the warnings they may give you - turning them down will not stop their research or the flow of RPs.
Making ISK from datacores
Periodically, go talk to your R&D agent again and tell him you wish to purchase datacores. The agent will tell you how many you can afford, based on the number of RPs you have accumulated. Regular datacores cost 50 RPs each - weapon-related datacores cost 100 RPs each, and starship engineering datacores cost 150 RP each. Buy as many as you wish - unused RPs remain in your accumulated pool.
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!
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
Not really a hack or a cheat, but something not everyone's aware of... Once you do some skilling and grind some standings you can farm datacores for completely passive income.
I know many of you are like me... You've got an account (at least one) that is just your miner. And once you've got the skill for a hulk and refining maxed out there's not really a lot to do with the training potential of that account. Training for pvp, missioning, or other "active" professions is generally a waste of time for that account; I mean, what's the point of stopping your mining just so you can mission?
This led me to datacores. Why? It provides a small amount of bonus income, and once the characters are set up and running all you have to do to earn that income is to go visit a few stations once every so often. Other than the trip to gather the datacores and fly them off to a market, the income's completely passive.
So, what are datacores?
How do you get datacores?
Datacores are acquired by talking to R&D division agents and starting research. If you meet the prerequisites, once you've done that you will then earn X amount of Research Points (RP) per day. The RP can then be traded in for datacores, which you can then use for invention or sell.
The important thing to remember is once you start the research the RP just accumulate without you doing anything. The only time you have to worry about them again is when you want to go buy the datacores with your RP and sell them (or use them for your own invention), which you can do whenever you like. Currently, RP's will even still continue to accumulate while the account is inactive. Some believe CCP will eventually change this but there's been no official word on the subject.
What skills do you need?
You need: Research V Science V Laboratory Operations V
Those are the base skills, plus the specific research skills (more on that below). But you also want Research Operation IV. Every level of research operation lets you have an extra R&D agent, so level 4 gives you five agents. Level V would be better, but that fifth level takes forever. Level IV is enough to get you started.
You may also want some Social skills, to make the standings grind easier, such as Social IV-V and Connections IV.
In addition to the above, you'll need one or more of the skills below. They're listed under their prerequisite skill, which you'll also need at five. Not every agent deals with every skill, so you'll have to find the specific combination of skills, agents, and corps that work best for you. Each of the following skills corresponds with a specific type of datacore:
Engineering Graviton Physics High Energy Physics Hydromagnetic Physics Laser Physics Nuclear Physics Plasma Physics Quantum Physics
Electronics Electromagnetic Physics Nanite Engineering Electronic Engineering Hypernet Science
Mechanic Amarrian Starship Engineering Caldari Starship Engineering Gallente Starship Engineering Minmatar Starship Engineering Astronautic Engineering Mechanical Engineering Molecular Engineering Rocket Science
How about corps and standings?
Each R&D agent has a specific standing requirement, just like mission agents. You've got to have sufficient standings to do research with them. You'll have to get between 6.0-7.0 standings with the corp in order to use the high level R&D agents.
This will generally mean mission grinding. Usually, I fleet the datacore farmer with a mission toon and grind them out that way. Once the datacore farmer has high enough standings with the mission agent they can get and turn in the missions themselves, thus avoiding the split.
Alternately, if your datacore character can't do combat missions themselves and you can't fleet them with another pve toon, you can have them do courier mission for the necessary standings.
How long it takes to get the standings really depends on you, how you do it, what's your setup, how fast you can complete a mission, ect. Remember that the social and connections skills can speed up the process.
R&D Missions
You have the option of doing R&D missions once per day, per agent. Your agent will evemail you saying the research has hit a snag and offer you a mission. First of all, despite whatever the agent says remember that your research has NOT stopped. You're still accumulating RP's and can still trade them in for datacores whenever.
But, if you like, you can also do the R&D mission. Doing a mission doubles your RP points for that day from that agent. Generally it's not worth it to chase around doing all the missions with each of the agent. After all, this is supposed to be passive.
However, if you can park your datacore farmer in the station with the highest producing agent, it is work checking in once per day. See, about half the time the mission is "bring me X trit." So, you can set up a buy order for trit in that station and check in daily. If the daily mission is for trit, accept and complete it. If it's not, just decline it.
Picking skills and corps
Like I said, not all agents (or even all R&D corps) use the same skills. So you'll have to look around a bit and decide what corp you want to do your standings grind with. Or, if you happen to already have standings with an R&D corp, decide see which skills their agents do research for, and pick a couple of them to train.
