Season 9: Dev Blog #27

Hello everyone! It's AdjudicatorHawk here today, to give you an overview of our new crafting system – Research and Development. At its core, the R+D system allows players to take materials they’ve gathered throughout the world and synthesize them into powerful gear to use. Players who participate in the system will get better at making high-quality equipment as they craft more, and earn extra rewards like titles and additional Trait choices for advancing in a given School of the R+D System.

What are Schools, you ask? Research and Development is broken down into seven different Schools of research, each one focused on creating different types of useful items. Crafting anything in a school gives you XP for that school – for instance, creating a Beam Array or a Dual Beam Bank gives experience towards the level of the Beam school. The seven schools in the R+D System include Beams, Cannons, Projectiles, Shields, Science, Engineering, and Ground Weapons.

Your skill at making things depends on your level in the school which you are crafting from, and the difficulty of your task depends on the level of item you are trying to create. As long as you have the materials, you can try to create Mark XII items at School Level 1 – but your chance of creating a Very Rare will be nonexistent due to the task’s high difficulty and your low starting skill. As you progress by crafting items, your Skill Rating increases, causing the overall quality of the items you craft to increase on average. By the time you hit the maximum level of any school, you’ll regularly craft Rare and Very Rare items, and you’ll completely eliminate Common items from your potential outcomes.

Of course, as the Captain, you don’t have to do all of the research yourself! Duty Officers are used in the R+D System to assist you with any given task, while you give the orders of what to do and in what order. Each type of item requires a different officer to create – so while a Fabrication Engineer will help you synthesize raw materials into crafting components, you’ll need an Energy Weapons Specialist to create a Beam Array or a Research Lab Scientist to create a Science Console. Any Duty Officer of the appropriate specialization will allow you to create your item, but high quality Duty Officers provide a bonus to your Skill Rating – increasing your chance of critically succeeding.

That’s it for the high-level overview! To recap, you can use your Duty Officers to make almost any type of item in the game at Mark XII, potentially at Purple quality. You can unlock titles and trait choices by earning levels in each crafting school and you can drastically increase your chances of producing Blue and Purple gear by leveling up your crafting schools and by collecting rare Duty Officers. Stay tuned to my next blog where I will share more details about some unique items that can be crafted and unique attributes that can be found on all crafted gear. Until then, jump onto Tribble and help us out by providing feedback on the system after you’ve played around with it!



Jeff “AdjudicatorHawk” Hamilton

System Designer

Star Trek Online

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