Energy credits are the main form of currency in STO used to buy gear and supplies from vendors as well as being used in the reputation systems and DOFF missions. There are many ways to farm EC's in the game. Here are a few of the most common ones:
Crafting: Once you have a crafting school up to level 15 you can start crafting various pieces of equipment and upgrades that you can turn around and sell on the exchange.
Playing the Exchange: This is done using the various drops you get on missions. When you hover your cursor over an item there is a value listed on the lower right. When you sell an item to certain vendors you will receive exactly half that price. Now, if you go to the exchange and drag and drop the item into the search bar and click search it will bring up a list of items of that type and what they are selling for. Look at the prices carefully. Sometimes people will list a popular item to sell much lower than the next highest item. Buy these and put them back on the exchange for around the next highest amount and you will make extra EC when it sells. Other times, people will list items for far less than they would get by vendoring it. You can buy these, and either try to sell them on the exchange for more or just make the extra EC by selling them to a vendor. This is a rather tedious way of earning EC but it is an easy and guaranteed way of making EC's.
Foundry Missions: There are a couple of foundry missions that have been set up to help you farm EC's. The two that I know of at this time are Fed Farm 102, and Loot-O-Matic (if you know of others please share them with the fleets). These are basically stationary missions where you kill a set number of ships (usually 50-60) in a number of waves. You then collect the drops from the ships you kill. Once you are done with the foundry mission you have the option of vendoring the items or playing the exchange as described above. These are basically daily missions as the drops from foundry missions is limited and the limit has been changed since these missions were produced. So generally as you hit the higher waves of either of these missions the drops will stop because you have hit the limit of drops for the day. At that point you can either leave the mission or, if you haven't hit your kill accolade for the type of ships you are killing, you can stay in and finish it.
These are just a few of the most popular ways of farming EC's. Please share your favorite way of earning EC's here so we can expand the list and help out all of our fleet members.
Subject: What's an EC? 