Research and Development


 * You may be looking for a list of craftable items with recipes.

Research and Development (R&D) is the crafting system of Star Trek Online. It uses R&D Materials to create R&D Components, both of which are in turn needed to craft various items, including "tech upgrade kits" that can be used to improve already existing items. The R&D system unlocks for all players once they reach level 15 with an automatically assigned mission.

Schools
There are currently eight R&D schools plus two special schools without levels. Each normal school has 20 levels and offers a range of items to fabricate. An increasing R&D level improves the chance that the crafting of a high quality item of that school is successful. In addition, each school has a 20 hour Fleet Research Daily R&D task that provides the player with 5,000 crafting school XP.

Ingredients
If you have the R&D Materials on hand, you can fabricate a wide range of Components and equipment for you and your ship.

Materials
Materials are the basic ingredients for all R&D tasks. They are rewarded by scanning nodes, Duty Officer assignments, most PvE queue missions, as well as Research and Development Packs.

Components
Components are non-equipable items that are fabricated from materials. The solely serve as further ingredients for certain R&D tasks.

Duty officers
In addition to materials and components, crafting an item will also require a duty officer. Quality of slotted duty officer will increase the total crafting skill that improves the chance of getting better quality item or it provides bonus components.
 * duty officer adds +0 Crafting Skill
 * duty officer adds +5 Crafting Skill
 * duty officer adds +15 Crafting Skill
 * duty officer adds +30 Crafting Skill
 * duty officer adds an unspecified amount of Crafting Skill ("Current Skill" added is shown as 0 - same as for quality duty officers, however success chance probabilities match those when using  officers, implying +30)

Crafting skill can be further improved by Skill Catalysts and leveling up skill level of the relevant school. Higher crafting skill results in higher probability of a critical success outcome that will give better rewards.

Regular or non-special items need duty officers with the appropriate specialization before crafting can commence. A Duty officer's R&D school specialization (if available) is not important when crafting these regular items. The tables below show which specialization is needed for which type of item.
 * Non-special items:

To craft a level 15 special item, a duty officer will need to have an R&D school specialization which corresponds to the school department it can be found in, except for Aegis items which require "Aegis R&D specialist". Specializations listed in the table above do not matter for special items, only their R&D school is important.
 * Special items

Some sources of duty officers with R&D school specializations: Fleet system - Krenim duty officers from Fleet Research Lab (random R&D School), and 23rd Century Duty Officers from Fleet Station K-13 (specific R&D school). Lock Box packs -, ,. Duty officer assignment - "Request r&d assistance".


 * ''See more:


 * Duty officers by R&D school
 * List of duty officers by R&D school specialty

Task Slots
To start a task, the captain must have an empty task slot. Each captain has from 1 to 6 task slots that they obtain for completing the following goals, in any order:
 * 1 is unlocked with the R&D System by reaching captain level 15
 * 1 is unlocked by raising any school to Level 2
 * 1 is unlocked by raising any school to Level 4
 * 1 is unlocked by raising at least three schools to Level 5
 * 1 is unlocked by raising any school to Level 15
 * 1 is unlocked by purchasing a slot from Fleet Research Lab that has Tier III Research unlocked

Skill
The crafting system is skill based; you gain permanent skill points by leveling a school. As your skill level increases you gain access to more items and have a higher chance to achieve a critical success outcome that gives better rewards. Additional temporary skill points boost is available from one-use Catalysts and higher quality Duty Officers.

Skill Catalysts
There are certain items that allow you to increase your skill when crafting an item. This will increase the probability of a critical success outcome that will give better rewards.



Crafting Items
Items can be crafted by opening the Duty Officer interface and selecting the "R&D" tab. Selecting a school reveals a list of craftable components and items. Selecting an item allows players to configure the mark of the item and the variation (e.g. Energy type for weapons). Components required depend on the parameters of the item selected, with higher mark items requiring more components. Duty Officers of varying specialisations are also required to initiate a craft.

Each item has a difficulty rating, which varies based on the parameters selected. This is compared with the player's skill rating to return the odds of returning, , , and for special items  items. Components have a chance of returning a critical, which triples the number of items created. Crafting skill can be boosted by using higher quality Duty Officers, or using consumable "Catalysts".

Items require time to craft, ranging from seconds to up to 20 hours. The crafting school XP generated by each task varies depending on the duration. Tasks can be completed early for a cost in Dilithium.

Critical Outcome
When running Research and Development tasks, it is possible to achieve a Critical outcome for most of them. Here are the tasks with a possible Critical outcome, and the comparison of reward given in case of the non-Critical and Critical outcomes:

Components and Consumables
While Critical outcome reward will be the same for all components (i.e. awarding 3 components instead of 1), its probability will be different. It will depend on the difficulty of the component crafting task.

For all consumables both Critical outcome reward (awarding 2 batches of consumables instead of 1), and its probability is the same across all crafted consumables. The probability is also the same as for component crafting tasks with the difficulty of 50.

There are 5 different difficulties when crafting components or consumables:

Critical Chances
The table below shows in-game probabilities in percent of obtaining a Critical outcome for all the possible R&D tasks and "current skill" combinations:

STO Crafting Critical Chances Table

Accolades

 * Research and Development General Accolades

External link

 * Official STO forum - Everything you need to know about R&D Crafting and Upgrading