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.
This spreadsheet contains the list of goals with their CP values and may be useful for comparing strategies or inventing your own.
Completing exploration
When AIR Career Program was first introduced, it was easily possible to complete Exploration Career in 1h 30m or less[1]. It is likely that with perfect execution it could be less than an hour bringing the results to 150k SP/hour. However later patches fixed some bugs this method was relying on, the most important one being that the containers in Career Agents missions could be hacked repeatedly and did count into goal progress.
As of the moment of writing (April 2024) this route can be completed in several hours. The straightforward goals are:
- Complete the Career Agents missions for the corresponding goal (75 CP)
- Visit 15 combat sites (while travelling for other goals find a system with at least 2 combat anomalies; warp between them 15 times) (75 CP)
- Visit 15 gas sites (find one gas site, warp between this site and a bookmark 15 times) (75 CP)
- Visit 5 regions in high, 5 regions in low and 5 regions in null: the easiest way is to connect to Thera bookmarks (visit ingame channel EvE-Scout), go to Thera and go to each exit from it. (120 CP)
- Scan 15 wormholes and 50 signatures overall. One can mass scan the signatures in the Career Agent system, there are typically 9 of them available and a wide scan will usually get 5-7 of them. Relog and repeat until you get ~25-30 scanned signatures, the rest will be completed through scanning at least 15 wormholes, at least 1 gas site and several relic/data sites for the hacking goal. (175 CP)
The semiproblematic goals are:
- Navigation – requires 100 jumps to complete for 70 CP which does not align well with Thera strategy; partial completion for 50 jumps (30 CP) is much easier.
- Project Discovery (maximum 130 CP) – this one is extremely easy and fast but currently (as of April 2024, this might change with Project Discovery update) there is a daily cooldown preventing from submitting more than 10 samples[Verify] which yields only 45 CP out of 130.
The problematic goals are:
- Hacking – requires hacking 25 containers for 130 CP.
- Advanced Hacking (3 goals: hack 20 containers in WH/low/null; each goal yields 50 CP)
It is easy to see that it is impossible to reach 750 CP without doing at least some hacking. One possible strategy could be to hack 25 containers in WH space, this will usually allow to find gas site in the process. One could then skip the entire Project Discovery, for example. Unfortunately, there is no way here to skip part of Project Discovery and part of Navigation.
It is important to note that hacking, the most problematic part of the process, is not multiboxable, as only one character will receive the reward for a given container, so two characters need twice as much relic/data sites found. On the other hand, this method does not require any finances (one could send ~1m ISK from their main for outfitting an exploration frigate) and any other requirements.
