- Not to be confused with Bridge Officer skill points, which are used to upgrade Bridge officer abilities.
Skill points are earned over the course of a character's career in Star Trek Online. Skill points are directly related to a player character's current rank and are required to be earned and spent if the player wishes their character to receive a promotion. Skill points are comparable to "experience" used in other MMORPGs however unlike experience points they are not automatically assigned. Instead the player must manually assign those points on skills. Players are allowed to reset their spent points and redistribute them as they see fit via a respec.
Each character has a balance of skill points, similar to the way any currency in the game works, such as Energy Credits. Skill points are acquired primarily by completing missions. They can also be accrued more slowly by killing players and NPCs of the different factions, in both PvE and PvP.
- Note: When a player reaches the skill point cap, any skill points rewarded are automatically converted into bridge officer skill points by the game.
Once a player has gathered enough skill points, they may be spent on increasing the rank of that player's skills. At Lieutenant level, an additional rank in any skill costs 100 skill points. For example, if a player earns 32 skill points for completing a mission and they have zero points to begin with, then they will need to earn another 68 points before they can purchase a new rank in any Lieutenant level skill. This base value of 100 increases with rank, and there are nine ranks per skill.
The skills window for both player skill points and bridge officer points are viewable and spendable in game by pressing the K key on the keyboard.