My Comprehensive efficient account building guide Updated for 2018

Starting out

After completing starter missions, go to auction and bid on goliath and vengeance ships, and any extras you can get, prioritising the 10 slot cpu (third blue one down blue one) repair bot 4 (get 3 if it’s too much) auto repair bot, auto rocket and rocket turbo cpu.

If possible find a clan which will help with credits, they can give 5+5n each week where n is the number of weeks in the clan up to a cap of 250 million. This means your initial 5 mil can be used to buy credit shields lasers and flax drones. Buy 6 flax and about 25 spectral lancer 2s, then buy some credit generators and shields with remaining credits.

Go to hangar, open up your liberator, click the delete configurations button next to the [1] [2].
Go to your piranha, or a goliath if you have one by now, and equip your lasers extras shields and generators. It’s generally a good idea to have one ‘run config’ with full speed and shields on drones and another ‘battle config’ with full lasers on drones to do more damage to aliens and players.

Now you have your ship configured select some missions you would like to do. You will be familiar with the mission control from your tutorial. Complete missions to gain experience to reach ‘uppers’ where npcs with better rewards can be found. Find a group to do missions with if you can, hopefully some other clan members!

Credit Spending

The bulk of your credits should be saved for bids on iris drones in auction with a small proportion on plt-2026 and lcb-10 ammo. Speed generators should also be bid on but these are generally much less expensive. Less active times of day are where items will be cheaper. It is generally not a good idea to bid on LF3 since spectral lancer-IIs do almost the same damage and lf3s can be found in booty chests anyway. The decreased damage spectral lancers give in pvp is irrelevant as you are very weak anyway at this point.

Edit 14/8/18: When you have essential credit items be sure to bid on boosters when you can.

Skylab

You should begin to upgrade your skylab too, this is essential. The solar module must be sufficiently high enough to provide power, and nothing can go above the basic module. Upgrade whenever you can, every time you log off send about 50 seprom and the rest promerium to your ship use some prom to upgrade generators and seprom on shields. When you have more seprom you can use it on rockets. Eventually you will be using it on pilot points and on lasers.

Subscriptions, P.E.T and Gates

Here is where things become more complicated.

Whether you spend money or not plays a massive part in how long it takes to build your account to a state where you can pvp and hunt with success. This doesn’t mean building for free is impossible by any means! By far the biggest things are premium (free ship and pet repairs 2x rocket fire speed, 2x faster ship repair, 500 more cargo space, 5% off uridium purchases), rebate (25% off all ‘uri’ purchases), and box doubler (double bonus box, spaceball cargo (search spaceball on wiki for more info), and event box loot) These are all very cheap indeed and increase efficiency massively.


Your first large uridium purchase should be a P.E.T, which can be used to collect bonus boxes, shoot enemies, locate enemies, repair your ship, collect resources, and sell cargo!

Edit 14/8/18: the P.E.T can be crafted in assembly now, which is a much cheaper way of getting it. you can either choose to buy the extras which combine to make the P.E.T, or wait until you complete your first zeta and within the 50 keys that you obtain, you should aquire the extras needed for a P.E.T.

Earning Uridium

Save through completing missions and killing NPCs (Unless you plan on buying uridium). When you have your pet. Equip a laser and always ensure it is out when you receive experience from an npc kill or completed mission. When your pet reaches level four, if you can afford a bonus box doubler for 1.49 for a week, you can buy auto looter level 2. If you have 10 G3N-7900 speed gens, equip a vengeance with the speed gens, and go to 4-1/2/3 to collect bonus boxes. This is the best way to earn uridium galaxy gate spins and ammo until you can kill kristallons solo fast or solo cubikons. If you can’t spend the money, instead get auto resource collector and begin collecting palladium in 5-3 and selling it at the 5-2 base.

Edit 14/8/18: Bonus box collecting has been 'nerfed' so that rewards reduce over time. The rewards are still good however if you plan on playing for long preiods of time, you may wish to kill NPCs or collect palladium instead when rewards drop. I have also concluded that palladium is inefficient for nearly every level. In my opinion even earning 7-10k Uridium and hour is more efficient, and will gain xp and allow you to earn EP and Honour. This amount is achievable in x-3 maps on a relatively weak account, and easily in x-7 maps when you are hitting over approximately 10k on whichever laser ammunition you choose. In x-6 maps you can make 20-50k Uridium per hour killing cubikon when you begin to get a reasonable amount of lf4 lasers.

Gates

Free GG spins should be used in zeta gates and uridium saved for the moth drone formation to complete zeta gates more efficiently. If you have premium, get kamikaze level 3 when your pet is level 8, this will MASSIVELY increase the speed you kill npcs in gates especially. Do not complete zeta gates until it is a double galaxy gate reward weekend. They span over friday, saturday and sunday and will double equipment received, experience and honour gained and booty keys and log disks credited to your account. Full GG rewards can be found on the darkorbit wiki. There is also weekends which GG spins are reduced by 20-30%. This is when you should ensure you have rebate if possible. Uridium should be used on repeating zeta gates as many times as you can. If you have rebate and premium and insufficient uridium to build a zeta (about 80k when spins are 50 or less, then use uri in alpha beta and gamma because you can make a lot of ammo and a small uridium profit).

Galaxy gate multipliers should be used on 2x if possible, so using 100s, then 10s, then 5s, then 1s for the last few parts is generally what i recommend as multipliers rather than gate parts become more common. Galaxy gates is where all your equipment should come from essentially.

Booty Keys

The 50 booty keys from each zeta should be saved and used on ‘zeus day’ to collect zeus and apis drone blueprints to decrease their cost. You will get a lot of assembly hardware, ammo, lf3 bo2 speed generators and lf4s if you’re lucky! With the hardware you receive, if you are not yet full iris, you can craft the remaining ones. Open assembly on your game screen in one of the tabs on the bar at the top left. Make sure you use repair credits to repair iris in the hangar before they are destroyed. It hurts to lose upgraded iris, trust me! Using the drone repair cpu is helpful here.

Skill Tree

Log disks can be used to out point in different skills to increase laser damage shield power hit points and other things.

Below is a copy of my pilot points. It is up to you what you deem most important however I believe mine is a fairly good path to follow.

https://gyazo.com/b181f7ca5cdccd5022549d991b90ca8c
https://gyazo.com/6fe3081b267d63e66217af02b348eebe

Drone Formation Purchase order

Whilst on the path to full havocs, buy drone formations, and pet slots, when you have excess uridium. After moth, get drill formation, then ring formation then diamond formation. This should be sufficient for a while.

Edit 14/8/18: There has been a balance patch to from formations but this order still stands as the most effective for fast progression

Hades gates can be completed when spins are 50 uri and below for no cost at all, and have potential for profit with smaller groups, so, if you are welcome in hades groups (likely when you have apis and a few havocs and maybe fat lasers- from the bounty hunter II pilot point- you should complete these. There is a 15% chance of lf4 reward, obviously on double rewards day this becomes 2 lf4, so this is where you should get the bulk of your lf4, obviously some will be found in booty chests.

Edit 14/8/18 GG spins unfortunately bottom out at 55 uri every Saturday and Sunday now. This means no more free Hades, but it is a weekly event. Special GG rewards are every Saturday and Double GG rewards are ever Sunday with a 15 U. discount.

By the time you have around 30 lf4 you should start doing kappa gates for hercules drone designs for added shield and hit points. These are good for PvP only, hence they come later on when you can hold your own.

Upgrades

After hercs you should have most drone formations, and should be very familiar with the game by now. The last stage is upgrades. Drones are most important because the bonus can be stacked with havoc/herc bonus, and drone level bonus, your higher level equipment, and better equipment should always be allocated to drones first. Level drones up all at the same time, overall the cost is the same but cheaper at lower levels, so throughout the upgrading process you get stronger at a faster rate. When your drones are around level 10 the upgrades begin to get more expensive so you should move on to shields. You will only need 20 upgraded shields generally so get these to around 10 before doing the same with LF4. Never upgrade lf3s, because they will be replaced! Finish off upgrades to level 16 and you are ‘UFE’.

Edit 14/8/18: Don't upgrade lf4, work towards enhanced lf4 by completing daily and weekly missions and use uridium for gates and ammo if you want to PvP. There was an event which gave a 100% chance of enhanced lf4 called the Laser Storm. We do not know if this will ever happen again, but you may wish to save Uridium just in case.

If you play regularly, it may take a month or two until you are strong enough for pvp. Until you are ufe maybe 3-4 months because upgrades take a large amount of uridium.

If you have money you are willing to spend on the game, wait for a mega happy hour or helix offer where uridium purchased is multiplied 3-4x and spend this on the same things i mentioned before. zetas>hades>kappas and formations before upgrades.

Hope this helps.

Darkorbit wiki: darkorbit.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page


The highlighted cells indicate the most cost effective percentage to upgrade based on statistical probability.
Source: http://www.bigpoint.com/darkorbit/board/threads/upgrading-cost-charts.12614/

Edit 14/8/18: As a footnote I should add that I play GB1, which has since merged with GB2 and GE5, and soon to merge with GE6. If any of you wish to ask my questions in game, or would like PvP advice, then you are welcome to ask.

Good Luck,

Sam

 

Informative and helpful. I will try and follow this and report back again. Thanks for posting " Oyston OUT "

 

Thanks mate, i appreciate it may not be as aethetically pleasing as many other posts, but id like to think it goes into some more detail and takes you from a new player to completely UFE and the steps to take to do so as efficiently as you can. I'm more than happy to answer any questions you, or anyone else may have

 

I will be coming back to keep reading. I have book marked it. It looks good enough and it's the info that's the important part. It has loads of that so. Thanks again

 

i would like to add that you should do lambda gate instead of zeta if you don't care about havoc designs.This is because you can do 2,4 lambda gates at the place of 1 zeta(111 zeta pieces/45 lambda pieces=2.4-2.5.that way you can earn 39k uridium and spend them wherever you want.

 

lambdas are only worth it to build kronos later on. zetas are way more cost efficient, time efficient, and if you dont have 10 havocs, then you should 100% care about havocs

 

Should?nobody is forced to care about something.And going by math zeta gate gives you 100,406 uridium while lambda gives you 95,940.But wait!From zeta gate you only get 35k pure uridium.That's why as i said,if you don't care about drone designs or any ufe items and you are still satisfied with being a normal FE then lambda is a better choice.Sure,you might lose 4,467 uridium but you get to get 95,940 uridium in any way you want.

 

where the hell do you get 95k for lambda when its about 28k uri + 5 bootys + 3 logs even if u was 2 do 3 gates it would prob still cost u more to do lamdas, zeta outranks for simple reason speed, price to open x2 gate rewards adding another 37.500+ 15.000

then add the x4 = more speed at killing npcs = more uri faster

 

As shown in this post: http://darkorbit.wikia.com/wiki/Galaxy_gate you can get 39k uridium for every lamda gate.And 111(zeta gate) pieces/45(lambda gate) pieces=2,46
Which means if you mutiply 39(thousand uridium)x2,46= 95,940 uridium.All that means that you can get 95,940 uridium for 111 pieces.Sorry to bust your myth that zeta gate is so profitable.If you think you don't need any more booty keys or research points to spread then going for lambda would bring more uridium per hour.

 

Sorry but what the hell are you on about? lambda only gives about 20k rewards and costs about 35k on average to build with cheap spins. Zeta gate reward is about 48k uri with 100 keys and 50 log disks. this is a guide on building your account and the most cost/time efficient method in which to do so. if you want to stay weak forever, why are you reading this? keep doing your lambdas. you are better off buying your keys and log disks than doing lambdas -.-. When i say that zeta is the best for building up, its because of the 22.5k and 52.5k worth of keys and log disks on top of the 48k uri return, chance of havoc and the fact that it is the easiest gate to complete (especially with moth). forget lambdas.

 

'If you think you don't need any more booty keys or research points to spread' i dont think that, because you DO need those unless you are already pretty much ufe, in which case do hades or kronos or kappas for rank abg for ammo. lambda does not give 39k uri, that is a misleading post, it only gives about 20k uri.

 

What does "abg" mean?

 

alpha beta gamma mate, remember when you are building, always complete them as you open them, never spin when one is on full parts because its an inefficient use of uri

 

Depends when i spin abg i get a alpha done and i will get beta and gamma about half way using the x to get me more parts then i let alpha onto the map and by the time i get beta open i have another alpha and keep goin my uri never goes down .... on another note when spinning gates always use a ship u never use because u get nano and it goes to waste if u jump in gates or killing npcs when u use a ship u never use you stop getting nano once it is full and it gets removed for the spins so more chance of gate parts/ammo

 

you should open the gate as soon as you have it built. theres only a 13% chance to hit a multiplier, you are costing yourself more uridium than you need to, i made 150k or so uri profit on sunday off abgs alone when spins were 50 uri your uri will definitely go down on 70 U spins. yeah i always build in an egg. i think i mentioned earlier either in my original post or a comment about spinning in a low hp ship you dont use. if not i should have done. appreciate the response though bud

 

Nice guide Sam. Wish I'd read it before I started building mine up. If I'd of followed this to the T it would of only taken me 3 times as long to get half decent .

 

thanks appreciate it

 

You meant three time 'LESS' to get half decent?. (@ponderous).
Another important element that is vital is Pilotpoints...Where to put them also. I can count it as expensive and probably everyone in the game has reset them at some point or other. I personally know someone who has got a half decent account with ony 200 hrs play. The thing is the account holder had to spend £300 to build from scratch. Players who know how to play Dark Orbit can build an account from scratch and get it Near UFE cheaply, quickly and for less. However, newbs who don't know about the game will seriously face many obstacles and Dark Orbit have to realise that the game is too complicated for newbs. Maybe someone should publish a book for this game?

 

zyn that was my goal with this post and the successive coments. that anyone reading through should know exactly what to do. i linked two gyazos as an example of my pilot points. i reset but ended up putting them back on the same skills... went for box bio but figured out it wasnt really worth it because i could do better off npcs since im full lf4 anyway. by the time you have enough points for a box bio, you will be strong enough to just bash npcs, but its all personal preference to a degree.

 

"Eventually you will be using it on pilot points and on lasers." Regarding seprom, how do you use seprom on pilot points? If this is something obvious sorry I don;t get it. Great guide otherwise, good info!

J