In Star Trek Timelines, events take place on a weekly basis, usually in the time interval between Thursday and Monday. At present, four types of events are still being run – Faction, Galaxy, Hybrid, and Skirmish, with the last of the bunch taking place only once every couple of months. Faction events are, by far, the most frequent, as they tend to occur once every two weeks with reasonable predictability.

Regardless of the type, events are an essential part of any Captain’s career. Even if you don’t compete for the leaderboards, clearing the score thresholds will give you 3 to 4 copies of a Super Rare character, as well as hundreds of Chronitons, some Merits, Honor, and even gear. If you manage to place in the top 2000, you earn yet another full-starred Super Rare character, while any spot over 1500 will grant 1 to 5 copies of a Legendary crew.

Differently put, weekly events are the best way to acquire crew that you can then easily immortalize and use. As such, you’ll want to excel at this aspect of the game as soon as possible.

An Introduction to Faction Events

Faction events last for 4 days and require you to earn Victory Points by sending out successful shuttle missions. These missions start on a 1-minute duration and work their way to up 3 hours, although you can reduce the interval by using the correct shuttle boosts. The more missions you complete with a positive outcome, the higher the VP you earn per mission.

At 0 successful missions, for example, you earn 2 VP per run. The number increases progressively with some important thresholds at 10-11 missions (350 VP), 12-13 missions (500 VP), 32-35 missions (2750 VP), 36-39 missions (3500 VP) and 40+ missions (4000 VP). Naturally, your goal is to hit the highest threshold and earn as many VP per 3-hour run as possible. However, the difficulty of the missions also increases with the reward, which might ultimately work against you.

Sending out 4 shuttles for 4000 VP when you don’t have the necessary crew to ensure the success of at least 3 of them might results in 3 failures and 1 single success. In total, this will give you 6400 VP, whereas 4 successful shuttles in the 3500 VP bracket would have earned you 14,000 VP. At the end of the day, reaching the top threshold is desirable, but balancing the difficulty and the reward is far more important towards obtaining a high overall score in the event.

How to Prepare for a Faction Event

There are two important things to keep in mind when you’re prepping for an upcoming Faction event: shuttle boosts and featured crew. To place high in the leaderboards, you need both.

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Even if you were able to ensure the success of every single shuttle mission you send out during the event, this would still not generate enough score to pass all reward thresholds and earn a good rank. The missions simply take too long to complete, which is why you need blue and purple “Time Reduction” shuttle boosts. When you use these on a 3-hour mission, you can reduce its duration to 1 hour and 30 minutes or to 1 hour, respectively. This does come with a downside, of course. You can only use one boost at a time, so if you’re using a time reduction boost, you can no longer improve your crew’s skills and the success rate of the shuttle is likely to decrease. In other words, you also need excellent crew, but more about that in a moment.

The only way to obtain a reliable amount of shuttle boosts without spending real currency is to complete Cadet Challenges on Thursday. Elite missions will each earn you a pull for 10 Rare+ boosts, while Epic missions will give 3 pulls for Super Rare+ boosts. If you’re trying to stack up on blue time reduction shuttle boosts, then elite missions will give you more pulls overall. If, however, you want to obtain more purple boosts, then you should focus on Epic missions exclusively. As we’ve mentioned in our guide to farming Chrons, you can double your income from Cadet Challenges by properly timing your use of ads throughout the day.

Finally, where crew is concerned, you should begin your preparation by checking the Reddit forum for Star Trek Timelines on the Monday before the event. There, you will find details about the event’s featured crew. These characters and other variants of them will grant significant bonuses to your mission success rates, which means that you should spend the first half of the week upgrading any suitable 3-, 4-, or 5-star crew.

If you already have one of the featured crew maxed out before the event starts, this greatly improves your chances of placing high on the leaderboards. It’s also a good indication that you can go all-out on the upcoming event, provided, of course, that you’re interested in the rewards.

The Faction Event Kick-Starter Method

This method is used by all players who are serious about their STT events. It’s a way to quickly boost your shuttle mission rewards and will only take about 20 minutes to complete, as opposed to the organic mission development, which can take up to a day. Depending on how many factions are involved in the event, you can instantly boost your VP gain to 2750 or 3500 per mission.

The steps are the following:

1. Open as many faction shuttle missions as the game will allow. In most cases, 3 factions are involved in the event, which means you can open 3×8 = 24 missions.

2. Send out and complete 11 of these shuttle missions. If successful, this should bring you to the 350 VP threshold.

3. Open another 11 shuttle missions to replace the ones that you’ve just completed.

4. Send out these missions with blue Time Reduction shuttle boosts, but do NOT complete them (don’t collect the rewards)! Make sure that you send out the correct missions (350 VP, 1h 30 min duration). Do not confuse them with missions that you have opened in step 1.

*Important Note: During step 4, you will have to send out up to 11 missions without completing any of them. This means that, unlike in step 2, you will not be able to use your best crew in multiple missions. Furthermore, the difficulty of the missions will increase, so you should spread out your good crew carefully. Don’t throw all featured and maxed out characters in the first 2-3 shuttles or you will significantly decrease the chance of success for shuttles 8-11.

5. (Optional) Complete TWO of the missions. Open two missions and send them out with purple Time Reduction shuttle boosts.

6. Collect the rewards for all completed missions.

7. Send out and complete the missions that were left over from step 1. The game will tell you that these take 2 hours to complete, but they will, in fact, take only 1 minute. You do NOT need to use any time reduction shuttle boosts in this step.

8. Complete all the missions. Voila! You can now earn 2750+ VP per run.

You should start every Faction event with a good kick-starter strategy, then continue to send out missions as normal. Based on the score you get during the first day, you can estimate how many time reduction boosts you should use in order to achieve the desirable score. Provided that you’re using the right crew and have a hefty stash of shuttle boosts, you’ll be one your way to top 1500 in no time!

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