[Rakal]

Great topic for a thread, perhaps long overdue!

As someone who refines the 8k each day on my 3 toons but has not consciously sat to 'farm' dilithium for some time, it might help some people to outline how I maximize my dilithium take. It differs for my fed and klingons so I'll outline them briefly by faction below:

Fed:
Hoarding:
1. Dyson Battlezone - Before the battlezone I never made 8k a day, now because of it I never fail to make 8k. Its by a long way the most profitable way to farm dilithium in the game. Even if you hate ground at least try it out once.
Can be done once a day to get the bonus of the daily missions given by the commander in the command centre, but for best effect team up and complete multiple times to build a stockpile of dilithium.

2. Bonus Weekends / Marks and Implants: If you have no immediate need for the marks and implants you earn in the battlezone and other pves, then hoard them for the bonus dilithium weekend (one is coming this Thursday) and get an extra 50% when you trade them in.
Remember you get 5 voth implants and 135 marks if you successfully complete one run in the battlezone - ordinarily this converts to 3,016 dilithium, but with the bonus this is 4,525 per run!
If you have the time over the dilithium weekend to run the battlezone then go for it, as it tends to be busy and very profitable with a 50% bonus on regular dilithium rewards too.

Maintenance:
Once I have a stockpile I do a few different things to stop it deteriorating too fast.
1) PVE: 960 diltihium from Infected is very handy and its a good fun pve. Dont forget the daily bonus marks also which can be traded for dilithium. Azure Nebula/Rhi'hho Station/Crystalline and Undine Infiltration are handy for getting the other factions daily mark bonus.

2) Dailies: Separate to those that Ver mentions above, there are a few dailies available via the mission screen from Admiral Yanishev that offer additional rewards for completion within a PVE - The Big Dig, Gorn Minefield, Klingon Scout Force and Breaking the Planet. They can add an additional 960 dil and 50 fleet marks to the exisiting rewards so are well worth picking up. However queues for all but the Gorn PVE are tough to get sufficient numbers to start.

3) Hourlies: This is where you get the best return on your marks. Provided you have completed a reputation to T5, you can trade 15 marks for 340 dilithium per hour.

4) Mining: I really don't enjoy mining but if you find yourself at the fleet mine its worth a go as you can mine about 2400 dilithium there per day. Also as Ver mentions you can refine an additional 500 and there are a couple of handy doff missions for diltihium and ec rewards.

5) Nimbus III: A lot of people forget about this place after the storyline missions here but its very close to new Romulus, has bank access and 3 missions from Yamlon Nuk give a very easy 1500 dil in about 10-12 minutes. This is especially useful pre-level 50 as a lot of other missions are not yet available.


Klingon:
I have yet to take my Klingon to the Dyson Battlezone, but he still hits 8k per day by a combination of 2,3 and 5 above as well as:
1) Contraband: Its many times easier to gain contraband on the Klingon side... Cybrox has a great set of tips here:
The Cybrox Guide to Contraband on KDF

2) Trading in Prisoners: From the contraband missions you also acquire a good many prisoners which are tradable for dilithium also, though the rate of success is a lot better in those doff missions found in space as opposed to from the security officer on Qo'nos.

NB - Season 9.5 also introduced dilithium rewards to the ground missions on New Romulus, Defera and Nukara Prime - a great way to combine getting the daily mark bonus with some dilithium.

Hope the above is helpful and if anyone has any questions on this then post here or pst me in game @beardypicardo