Good day, Joe and STOers! I’m 1 month done with my “Grand Experiment” to earn a Mudd’s Choice Pack by the end of the year. Here’s my check-in for Weeks 4 and 5 as well as how things stand versus were I started.
Week 4 Updates (1/21 – 1/27)
* Extra Dilithium Days on the Galactic Red Alert event amounted to ~94,000 Dilithium.
* 7 characters completed a Tour of Duty while having a Dilithium Bonus Pool available, so that’s 30,000 Dil each (except for 1 that didn’t have a full Dilithium Bonus Pool) for ~207,000 Dilithium for the week. 4 characters only get to refine for a couple days, so 107,000 or so of that Dilithium spills into next week.
* Added a 14th character as one of my regular 13 has 5 days’ worth of refining already set up.
This won’t be a permanent addition, but it will do everything the other characters are doing during those 5 days.
* Due to Admiralty Campaigns hitting Level 10 and the Red Alert Event, plus some Admiralty rewards that gave 2,000 Dilithium each, I have a few characters generating 8,000 Dilithium per day, at least in the short term.
My contraband haul for the week was a whopping 576! 5 characters can go 3 weeks on this amount. But really…added to a set of 80 I still have in the bank and what my turn-in characters already had on hand, that is enough for those original 6 Federation Contraband turn-in characters to go 6 whole weeks turning in Contraband.
This means my Klingon characters will be taking a couple weeks’ well deserved rest from Marauding. They’ll pick back up, likely once the Anniversary Event is into its bonus Dilithium-earning days.
WARNING: Watch Your Dilithium Pool amount, especially when you have Admiralty Campaigns coming up on Level 10 and when you have Bonus Dilithium days in Events.
Notice here, I had about 17,000 Dilithium left in the bonus pool compared to 2 Admiralties ready to hit Level 10. If both go Level 10, I get 20,000 + 10,000 for the first one but only 20,000 + 7,085 for the next one.
Since that first Admiralty will give almost 4 days’ worth of refining on its own, I decided not to push the Federation Admiralty Campaign to Level 10 until I get another Ferengi Tour of Duty to 10 of 10. Then, with a refreshed pool, I’ll get a few more Federation missions going again.
TOTAL FOR WEEK 4: 584,000 Dilithium, equivalent to 1,169 Zen!
Week 4 was busy!…but so was Week 5. In fact, one could say it was slightly busier. 🙂
Week 5 Updates (1/28 – 2/3)
* 8 Characters got an Admiralty Campaign to Level 10, so that’s 240,000 Dilithium.
* Not all got it early enough for the entire amount to count for Week 5, so some will go into Week 6.
* Admiralty Bonus started on Thursday. This Event gives 2,500 Dilithium for each completed “Tour of Duty [x of 10]” mission completed during the Event. While I intended to keep track of how many Tour of Duty missions I completed total, I forgot to do that the first day. But for some quick mental math:
* I’d say at least 8 characters got all 4 Tour of Duty missions to go in the first day. That’s between 2,500 – 3,750 Dilithium each. So let’s low-ball it at a flat 2,500 for 32 Tour of Duty missions, that’s roughly 80,000 Dilithium…minimum.
* Daily, I’m doing 1-2 Tour of Duty missions per character. I have 13 characters helping with this, so let’s estimate that at the lowest number of 1 Tour of Duty mission each per day. That’s 13 Tour of Duty missions x 2,500 Dilithium each (without the Dilithium Bonus Pool) = 32,500 Dilithium per day just from the Bonus Admiralty Event.
* 3 characters have a week’s worth of Dilithium to refine. 1 week = 56,000 Dilithium. Week 6’s minimum Dilithium haul will be 168,000 Dilithium, or about 3 times what I’d need for the week.
* 5 characters were able to refine 8,000 Dilithium per day for the entire week. That’s 56,000 Dilithium per character for a total of 280,000 Dilithium.
TOTAL FOR WEEK: 668,000 Dilithium, which at a 500:1 conversion rate is 1,336 Zen!
Considering I didn’t post a sale last week (as I was at 3 offers already, so I needed the space for moving Dilithium around), this will combine with last week’s 584,000 Dilithium, there’s now a single offer up to sell 1,252,500 Dilithium for a total of 2,505 Zen for Weeks 4 and 5 combined.
Before and After: What Did I Need, What Do I Still Need, And How Fast Could This Go?
Let’s reset to the start of January. When I started this, I had intended 10 characters and had 0 Zen from pure grinding. To be done by October 28th, I needed 14,583 Dilithium per day, or an average of ~1,459 Dilithium per character. I figured Contraband on 5 characters would do that easily, but the other 5 would be difficult.
Since then, I’ve added 3 more characters to the roster (2 of which are turning in Contraband mostly daily), we’ve had extra days on the Winter Event and a Borg Red Alert, this week started an Admiralty Bonus Event, and quite a few characters have finished off various levels of Admiralty campaign leveling. This mostly while the Dilithium Bonus Pool from the Ferengi Tour of Duty was (and on most, still is) active.
So where are we now?
Combined from either sales going through or still on the Dilithium Exchange, I’ve acquired 2,243,500 Dilithium that has sold/will sell for a 5-week total of 4,487 Zen. That’s 51.28% of my overall Zen need if I were to count on my Lifetime Subscription’s 500 Zen per month stipend through the end of the year.
Having over half my need has greatly reduced how much Dilithium I need per day, assuming again this runs until the original October 28th deadline. The per-day need is no longer in the tens of thousands but in the single-digit thousands range at 8,015 Dilithium per day overall across all 13 characters. This comes out to about 617 Dilithium per character per day. Assuming my 7 Federation characters keep turning in Contraband and there’s no other Dilithium income, they can get 14,000-21,000 Dilithium per day, nearly double or even triple the 8,015 I’d need.
Just on that minimum amount of “work”, and assuming I can keep my Federation characters rolling in Contraband non-stop, I can be done in as few as 22 weeks, or the week of July 7th.
But that’s not all I’ll be doing, and it’s not all I have available. Remember above, at least 3 characters have 56,000 Dilithium each waiting to refine for Week 6. That’s 336 Zen available which brings me down to about 20 weeks, or June 9th.
Considering I had been looking at October 28th, these 5 weeks have already saved nearly 5 months of effort.
TOMORROW: The Crowd-Source Opportunity
Tomorrow, I promise I’ll share here the details of my crowdsourcing for content to cover the 13th Anniversary Bundle. If you’ve followed me on Twitter, you likely know those details. Otherwise, you’ll see on Sunday what I’d like to accomplish.
Until then, continue enjoying STO!
Joe and STO 