Star Trek Online New Player Tips

- Federation has the most ships and biggest playerbase, but mostly the oldest missions (early missions have been remastered).  Klingons have the best access to energy credit and dilithium generating duty officer missions.  Romulans can ally with one or the other and have, for the most part, the easiest leveling experience.

- Your captain career does not limit in any way the type of ships you can fly, nor does it influence the skill system.  For example, a tactical captain can max out every science skill and fly a cruiser if they wanted to.  Your career mostly decides your access to kit abilities and gives you some captain abilities.  There's a lot more of a difference between careers on the ground than in space.

- Unless you're playing as a Romulan, the Alien species is recommended because it has the best selection of traits.  Most species can be recreated from the Alien options, and your choice of species doesn't matter too much aside from that.

- Chat settings are the button on the right of the chat bar.  You can join chat channels from the chat setting menu as well.  The chat server is shared with Cryptic's other games, Champions Online and Neverwinter, so you can chat across games if you want.

- You can right-click on your weapons in the toolbars (not on your character sheet) to set them to auto-fire.  If you do it right, there will be a green border around them.

- Skill points give diminishing returns the more you put into a single skill.  Generally, it's best to avoid putting more than 6 points into a skill unless you know for sure it's going to actually help.

- Free players have to pay Zen for respecs, so try and find a build that works for what role you want to play at endgame and build around that.

- Don't put too much effort into gearing up as you level.  Leveling is fast enough that you will quickly outpace any gear you buy.

- Sell any gear you don't use to equipment vendors.  Selling it to the replicator and other vendors will give you 80% of what you'd get selling to equipment vendors.  Double-check to make sure you're selling for half of the item's stated "buy" value, not 40%.

- Dilithium is mainly the endgame currency.  Don't worry about acquiring or spending any while you're leveling.

- The ship you get at level 40 is the last free ship you get, barring any free event ships you might acquire, so make sure you get one you know you want.

- Specialized energy consoles (+phaser, +plasma, etc.) gives a higher bonus than generic consoles (+beams, +cannons, etc.), therefore it's best to stick with a single energy type when you reach level 50.

- The difficulty and rewards of a mission will scale to your level, including random drops from enemies and end-of-mission rewards.  You can replay missions at level 50 to get free Mk XI or higher rewards.

- If you don't buy gear (bridge officer retraining is fine) and sell loot to vendors, you will have over 1 million Energy Credits by the time you hit level 50, plus anything you get from subsequent missions.  Use that to invest in consoles, as you'll get good weapons, shield, deflector and engines from replaying missions.