Research agent

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Research agents are agents representing various NPC corporations' R&D divisions. Rather than the usual missions, R&D agents can be asked to do "research" for you. Once an agent is working for you, you get Research Points (RP) from them to trade for Datacores (available from the agent with RP as currency) to sell or use in invention. To use a research agent you must have the appropriate skills and standings.

This research agent guide covers interacting with research agents as a source of datacores. The invention guide covers inventing T2 blueprints based on T1 blueprints (which uses datacores), while the production/manufacturing guide covers the ME/PE research and later construction you do with the blueprints to end up with a physical product that you can fly/sell/explode.

Required Skills

Skills you must have:

Skills that will benefit you to have:

In order to train all these skills you must spend time and money. Supposing you start the game now you will need about 3 months of training to get all the skills above to the right level. If you have played a while you will need less time training depending on your starting attributes, implants you use, etc. The financial outlay is significant, especially because you will need about 40 million ISK to buy the Research Project Management skill (which allows you to have more than one R&D agent simultaneously).

The next step is to choose one field of research, each field being represented by a special science skill:

There are many fields of research, so you have many opportunities. Remember that the level trained for each of these skills will give you the correct level of R&D agent(s) that will agree to work with you, so train these skills to the highest level possible.

Required Standings

Once you have met the skill requirements, you must find R&D agent(s) who will work with you. To use a research agent you need to have a personal standing with that agent's corporation specifically, in addition to the normal faction or corp standings - the extra standings required for the R&D corp is to prevent you grinding up faction standings with eg: Republic Fleet, then starting research with a Boundless Creation R&D agent. Remember, this must be your own personal standing with the R&D corp whose agent you want to interact with. The required standing level is documented in the agent info tab of the agent's details.

 

 

R&D Corporations

Each empire faction has its own research corporations, which are the following (links go to the EVE-Agents site):

The Amarr Race:

The Caldari Race:

The Gallente Race:

The Minmatar Race:

Research Points

When you find a suitable R&D agent(s) you can ask them to start working for you. Each R&D agent will generate Research Points (RP) depending on the field of research you choose and the level of your agent. It's very important to know that the RP are generated on a daily basis, so each day your total RP will increase by a set amount regardless of whether you interact with the agent or not.

As an aside, certain fields have a multiplier that will increase the RP for that field. For example the Starship Engineering research field has a multiplier of 3x for all RP generated. However, the cost of starship engineering datacores purchased from the agent is multiplied by the same field multiplier, which essentially makes the field multiplier cancel itself out when determining how many datacores you can purchase through a particular research agent over a given period of time. At one time it was possible to win T2 BPOs through a lottery system, with your accrued RP of any flavour being equivalent to tickets in the lottery. After a while CCP realised that flooding the market with BPOs was a bad idea and the lottery was removed, to be replaced with Invention as a means for getting T2 BPCs.

The RP that you will accumulate are based on only three factors: your field-specific skill level, base quality of the agent, and the agent level.

RP/day = Field multiplier * (1 + (AQ + 5*N)/100) * (SS + AL)^2

AQ = Agent Quality
N = character's Negotiation skill level
SS = character's specialist science field level (eg "Quantum Physics")
AL = Agent Level

The RP/day generated by your agent will change if you alter your specialist science skill by eg: training from 4 to 5 of the respective skill. You do not need to interact with your agent for this change to be applied - the new rate applies from the moment you gain the higher level skill.

The RP/day generated by your agent will not change if you alter your Negotiation skill. You will need to interact with your agent for this change to be applied - apparently all that is required is to start a conversation with your agent from the Journal -> Research page.

Research Agent Missions

You will be offered missions by each of your R&D agents once per day, starting sometime after you start research with them (what is sometime? one day? one downtime? after you've accrued X number of RP?). Sometimes you will get a notification from your agent that they need your help, often you will not hear from them at all - this is a fault in the R&D agent system in the game. Regardless of whether you get the notification or not, you will be able to request a mission from them once a day. The two missions currently offered are to either deliver a quantity of Tritanium to the agent, or to courier a small box from the agent to some other station. Both missions can be completed in most frigates - a level 4 agent will require about 8100 units of Tritanium, or ask you to deliver a box that is smaller than a shuttle's cargo hold.

Completing the missions will give you the same amount of RP that you gain per day with that agent as reward. R&D missions count towards the 16 mission count required for a storyline mission to be offered, but they do not modify your standings with the R&D Agent (since they do not track personal standings), nor do they modify your standings with the NPC corporation.

Not requesting the mission will not affect your RP gain - the agent might notify you that "research will halt", but that warning can be ignored - the "research" that they need help with will be halted (and you will not receive the bonus RP), but the other research they are doing will continue (your normal RP will continue to accrue).

Troubleshooting Research Points

Sometimes research points will not show up in your journal correctly - this is a display bug only. Interacting with the agent (opening a dialogue, buying cores, running a mission) will usually update the journal to the correct RP/day.

When running the R&D missions, you will sometimes find that the box or tritanium has disappeared from your inventory, but the mission is stuck in your journal and you don't see the bonus RP in your journal either. In this situation, simply log out and back in again - the mission will be cleared from the journal and the RP will be displayed as you expect.

Agent Selection

One way to locate a suitable agent is to look at the description in the info box for the research agents that you are interested in working with. This will have all the information regarding the different fields that agent can research. An alternative is to search on EVE-Agents for R&D agents who work in your chosen field. There is also a Research Agent profitability calculator available which will help you to select the best agents for ISK output.

Datacores

Once you gained a certain amount of RP with your agent you can trade them in against Datacores. Just start a conversation and click the appropriate option. The datacores available from R&D agents are as follows (links take you to EVE Central buy/sell order details):

 

See Also

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