Science & Industry

Main source? No. It's a good amount of isk for doing very little though. Amount per month will vary depending on skills and agent access.

Suggest using a calculator (like in my sig) to find out what you can expect.

with high skills and standings, using a good agent, you can pull in 2-2.5 datacores per day per research agent. Thus with a max of 6 research agents (for one character), you can get about 12-15 datacores per day.

The value of a datacore varies but 200k is a reasonable estimate for most. So you can get on the order of 2.5 - 3 mil per day per character.

So 75-90 million a month. If all 3 characters on an account are actively farming datacores at a good clip you can pull in about 250 mil a month.

While it is true that once setup this is essentially completely passive income (and a moderate chunk at that) this can be a good deal.

Keep in mind, however, that getting 3 characters skilled to sufficient science levels, and then grinding up sufficient standings to use the good agents is a major time investment. The time spent gaining rep could instead be spent just grinding cash. So this is only going to pay off after at least several months have passed.

A more realistic goal by the way is to get the relavent science skills to 4 and get a total of 5 reasearch agents. This will cut down your income per month to a little under 200 mil if you use all 3 character slots.

Well, if you stick 3 fully trained datacore harvesters on a single account you could make up to about 400 mil ISK/month from just navel-gazing for most of the month followed by a quick set of round-trips to collect the datacores and sell them.
Not exactly enough to pay for a PLEX, but then again, almost enough.

Greetings o/

I started 2-3 weeks ago. I had some free points to use in my skills because I had all learning skills lvled when I played in 2008.

I´m running now five lvl 4 agents, Electronic Engireering at IV and Negotiations at IV.

This is 9 datacores per day (1.81 x 5).

62.5m ISK / month aprox.


I´m now learning Electronic Engineering at V, because I think that the bonus worth it. I don´t know if I will try to get one more agent because the time required for the last agent is around 30 days. And Negotiation at V I´m not sure... I think that you gain just around 2.5 more RPs per day. I was thinkin to do this with 2 more characters (alts) but there is a lot of work there. Skills + the faction standings, a lot of time and boring tbh.

So, five lvl 4 agents with the science research skill at IV and negotiation at IV, are around 79-80m ISK per month. Like other players said here, is a good move if you want gain an small amount of free ISK.

And you always can do this + PI in high :) good luck!

Yes, the "ghost datacore farming" exploit of the past was fixed a few years ago. So if the account is not active, you no longer earn RP each day.

It's not much income but if you're mapped for science skills you might as well do it. The only difficult part is grinding corp standing enough to use R&D agents. You can also double your RP for each agent per day by running a mission for them. So if courier missions are your thing you can make significantly more ISK than just sitting around waiting (but still not much).

I'm pretty sure CCP mentioned they want to re-do the research system but I'm not sure if that means I should stock up or cash them in. Datacores have really gone down in value since I started this character so I haven't cashed them in once yet.

I get 93mil a month from my main account and about 70mil from my alt. Both have 5 agents and my main has all science skills at 4.