Eve-Online is, in my opinion a much more complex MMO then many others, so it does tend to have a fairly higher learning curve. This guide will give new players the gist of what to do in the first few days and weeks of starting a character in Eve.

Please notice the words “starting off” in the title, this guide will not hold your hand all the way into late game, its just meant to teach you how to get your character off the ground in areas such as — Making your character, Making Isk, Setting up your first ships, and other basic concepts.

Also keep in mind that I’m sure that there are people that will disagree with some of the ideas and suggestions in this guide. As Eve tends to be more complex in many areas then in most MMOs there are many times in which the answer falls in sort of a “grey area” in which people will never totally agree on the answer, also there are many times the answer to a question will be “It Depends”. One example of this is to a question I here very often from new players. “What is the best (insert ship type)?” The answer. . “It depends”

Depends on what? The situation, and your skills mainly. Say you wanted to know if you should choose a Thorax or a Vexor for your next Cruiser and you ask “Which one is better?” In this case it depends on your skills. There are different weapons skills you can have such as Missles, Gunnery, and Drones. If you have high drone skills the Vexor would be the ship for you, while if you have high gunnery skills the Thorax would serve you better. But thats enough about that for now, onto the real guide.

Part 1 — Making a Character, well.

There is a difference between making a character and making one WELL. This isn’t WoW where you just throw together a character and most of the choices are made after its created. In Eve some of the most important choices you make are made right here, at the beginning.

This may mean restarting your character in order to get a better start. Trust me, its better to do this sooner rather then later, making your character well in the beginning will pay off in the long run. Now we will break making a new character into steps.

1. Decide what the character is going to do. Are you going to be combat oriented, making your fortunes with guns blazing? Or do you want to aim your turrets at some juicy asteroids, mining masses of valuable ore and either selling the ore or perhaps manufacturing goods to sell at a profit? Then again you could go the way of the trader and look for those lucrative “Buy low sell high” chances in the markets of Eve.

All of these choices are viable ways to make a living in Eve, some pay off in late game more then early game but none the less all can make you money. So it is important to know what way you are going BEFORE making your character.

2. Choosing your Race. In Eve there are 4 races. The Amarr Empire, The Minmatar Republic, The Gallente Federation, and The Caldari State. I will not go into their histories as that is not the point of this guide.

If you have chosen the path of the Industrialist and wish to mine, there is little difference in what race you choose as the biggest mining ships, called “Mining Barges” and “Exhumers,” are a non racial ship so you get the same bonuses no matter what race you are.

Now if you have decided to be a combat pilot the choice in Race makes a MUCH bigger difference as each have very unique fighting styles. I will briefly outline each race one at a time.

-The Amarr use energy weapons that don’t use ammo as other races do. The Amarr fit their weapons with crystals that change the characteristics of their weapon and these crystals slowly degrade till eventually they break. This can be nice as you do not need tons of ammo sitting in your cargo taking up space. A disadvantage to the Amarr however is that all their weapons do EM/Thermal damage and while that may be good for taking out an enemies shields (shields are inherently weak to EM) it’s not so good for taking out their armor (Armor is inherently strong against EM). (DO NOT take this to mean the Amarr are not a good choice, the Amarr excel at large Battleship slugging matches and other areas, every race has a way it can be used in just about any area of game play.)

-The Gallente don’t rely just on their guns for power as they have mastered the use of drones that can fight for them. This gives them the same advantage as the Amarr in the way that your drones do not require ammo. But the Gallente are not limited to only drones, they can field powerful Hybrid weapons that fire charges that primarily do Thermal/Kinetic damage. This tends to be a better overall combo of damage types then the Amarr. (My personal opinion is that The Gallente are the best all around race for being able to dabble in just about any area of Eve. But thats my opinion.)

-The Minmatar use projectile weapons that don’t require energy from your ships capacitor to fire allowing them to use their energy to keep their ship alive longer. Also this brings us to one of the biggest advantages of the Minmatar. Their ammo selection is huge. With the Amarr you only fire EM/Thermal, Gallente fire Thermal/Kinetic. But the Minmatar have different ammo types to do just about any kind of damage you need. Example of usefulness would be if you are engaging an enemy that you know has low resistance to Explosive damage you just unload your ammo and throw in your explosive ammo and go to town on his exposed resistance.

-The Caldari use a myriad of different missiles, rockets, and torpedos to rain death down on their enemies. Like the Minmatar the Caldari have a decent selection of missile types to do different types of damage allowing you to find and exploit resistance holes in your enemies defenses. I may point out that the Caldari are considered to be very good at PVE combat.

2. Your Bloodline comes next, think of a bloodline as a subrace. The main things a Bloodline does is it alters your starting attributes and determines some of your starting skills which can have a large impact on how you start. Some are high in Perception/Willpower, some Intelligence/Memory and so on. Some of them will be geared toward weapons or perhaps Mechanic, while others might be more aimed toward less combat oriented skills. This is a very important choice as it will have huge effects on how fast you can learn certain skills as well as if you start off with combat skills or industrial skills.
Each skill in Eve has a Primary and Secondary attribute governing how fast you learn it. The higher those two attributes the faster you learn the skill. A lot of people go with one of these two groupings of attributes.

Perception/Willpower: Using this combo will allow you to learn Spaceship Command, Gunnery, and Missiles more quickly. So in other words you would be able to get into the next ship of your dreams a little faster and you would be able to train the weapons skills for it quickly too. But as you will have lower other attributes you would not be able to learn your support skills as quickly. I may point out that just cause this sounds like its going to make you uber faster doesn’t make it so. You’re support skills are JUST AS IMPORTANT as your weapons and ship skills. In fact they would be more important then the ship skills in some ways.

Intelligence/Memory: This combo would allow you to learn Electronics, Engineering, Science,Mechanic, Industry, and Learning faster. So while it will take you longer to get into that nice new Battleship, you will have plenty of support skills to back it up once you do get it. Your capacitor will last longer (Engineering), your armor will hold better (Mechanic) and Science leads you down many roads, one of which is implants which are another thing that can use to yet again increase your attributes. One very important thing to note is that your learning skills are in this grouping. Learning skills increase your attributes even further (+1 per skill level) and getting them up early on is one thing that most people in Eve will not disagree on.

It is also worthy of mention to say that NOT ALL skill groups follow these two combos. Such as Drones which uses Memory/Perception. Trade uses Charisma/Willpower and Social which uses Charisma/Intelligence.

For the record books, be wary of using a high Charisma character. The uses for Charisma are more limited then the others and normally center around Trade and running Missions for NPC agents. If you are making a Mission runner or a Merchant, looking for those Buy low sell high chances mentioned earlier then this may be the route for you, but in all honesty I don’t think that would be your best choice for a first character.

It should be mentioned that there are those that believe a balanced setup is the best for new players, making it so most skills train at roughly the same pace. The choice in this area is up to you, but you should have a reason for an unbalanced setup, such as specializing for trade or mission running.

To give you an example. A balanced attribute setup would be something like all your attributes being somewhere around 6 or 7. While an unbalanced setup would be like you would have 2 at like 12 and one (probably charisma) at around 3 and the others a little higher then that.

This all may sound confusing but when you really get into the game it’s fairly simple. If you are still confused about this then just read the rest of the guide and then make your character, you can try to contact a more experienced player to help you. But anyway, on with the guide.

After you choose your Bloodline you are given free attributes to allocate where you wish. Where you put these will depend on what you decided above. If you are biasing your character toward an attribute combo then use them in cooperation with your combo, if you decided on balance then use them to balance the character further.

Now, basically you are left with 3 things. Ancestry, School, and Specialization. These again decide starting skills that will determine whether you start with combat skills or industrial skills.

Part 2 — I Have A Character!! . . . .What now?

Well there are a few things you must do at this point. The first of which would be to start a skill.

Probably right off the bat you would want to start to train for a Frigate class ship so you can get out of the Newb Ship you start with. Once you have a few levels of Frigate you can decide where to go. I personally went for Destroyer after that, as it has more guns and is a little more durable then the Frigates and 99% of the time you could have the skill learned within hours or by the end of the day. Or you can go for a combo of learning skills and support skills.

What I did was I went back and forth. I would get a level or 2 of my basic learning skills as the first few only take minutes to learn and then get my Frigate skills up to where I could get Destroyer. Afterwards alternating between support skills such as Mechanic and Hull Upgrades and then back to a few more levels of Learning. Once you have all your Learning skills to level 4 you can get the advanced Learning skills which yet again increase your attributes by +1 per level.
Now once you have your learning skills up a little and your support skills up to where you can outfit your ship decently well I would then proceed to train up for Cruiser. (Some go all the way to Cruiser before seriously training support skills) Once you get Cruiser you will want to get at least level 4 of it fairly soon as it will be your main ship type for a little while.

That is as far as I’m going to go into skills here cause by this point I will hope you have linked up with a corp that can help advise you on where you ultimately want to go. You could pilot big Battleships for large front line battles, or you could choose to fly an interceptor and run circles around the bigger slower ships. There are many choices to make and this is only meant to be a basic guide so for further skill advice talk to an experienced player.

After setting a skill I would suggest doing the tutorial missions. They do a decent job of getting you settled with the controls of the game, make you a few isk, and get you a nice shiny frigate to get you out of that newb ship.
So, you want to make some more Isk (Interstellar Kredits) huh? In the beginning there are three main ways of doing this.

Missioning: Each NPC corp in Eve has agents that you can run missions for. You overall probably make more money doing this right off then you would Ratting. As when you go to an agent and get a mission you get paid for doing the mission, you get a bonus reward for doing in in a timely manner, you get the bounties for the ships you destroy, and you get the loot from the ships that you can sell. But also, doing missions will open up “storyline missions” in which an agent will contact you and give you something to do and in return you get a few bucks but as a bonus you often times get implants, which were touched on earlier as another means to increase attributes.

Ratting: In each system there is a certain number of asteroid belts. In the asteroid belts you can find NPC pirate spawns which each have a set amount of Isk you get for killing them (the bounty) and you can loot the ship and take whatever is left. The main thing this has over missioning is you are not stuck on a time table and you can stop whenever you want. Also if you find a nice system that doesn’t have a lot of ratters and it has some good spawns it is possible to make more money then missions. Also in lower sec areas you have a chance of finding faction spawns which often times carry very expensive loot that you can sell for mucho isk.

Mining: Again, each system has a number of asteroid belts. These asteroids contain different ores that contain differing amounts of minerals used for manufacturing.

Ok so choose what you wanna do.

Ah, so you wanna rat? Excellent choice! Here is how you start.

Pull up your map and go into the map options and find filters and then filter the systems by Security Status. Find a system that is .7 or lower as rats will not spawn in 1.0 or .9 systems. The lower the security rating the higher the rats bounties will be worth and also the better the loot.

When looking for a system to rat in, DO NOT go into systems with a security rating of .4 or below (when you try to gate at a system .4 or below you will see a pop up warning you that you are about to enter a dangerous system). In fact I would not wander into low sec space till you have at least some decent support skills and some experience playing under your belt (unless of course you are lucky enough to join a corp/alliance experienced in low sec that can hold your hand).

For those not confident in their ability to avoid getting blown up, may I suggest using a frigate for a while. If you lose your frigate you’re only out a little isk, lose a cruiser and that’s 5mil+ down the tubes. For older players 5mil is pocket change but to a newb, that’s a good chunk of change.
Probably the number one moto in Eve is “Don’t risk a ship you can’t afford to lose.”

In systems that have a security status of .5 -1.0 you are protected from player pirates by a corporation called CONCORD. They act as the police of high sec systems and will attack with extreme prejudice anyone dumb enough to attack you in these systems.

Note: This does not mean that you can’t be killed by a player in high sec space. It’s the same as if a bunch of friends came to your rescue, they might not get there in time. What it does is it makes it so most people will not want to attack you here as they will soon after find themselves being ejected into the cold unforgiving space, less one ship.

But anyway onto the meat. Once you find a system to rat in, preferably one with as many asteroid belts as possible you just start warping from belt to belt and open fire on the filthy pirate scum! Loot and repeat.

Oh I’m sorry. You didn’t want to rat? Well then here is how you find a missioning agent!

Missioning is a little more complicated then ratting but is fairly simple once you get into it.

Lets say you want to do missions for the Federal Intelligence Office (Thats a Gallente corp). You would open your “People and Places” window from the menu on the left and select “corporation” from the drop down box. Then type “Federal Intelligence Office” in and search. Once you find it right click it and open its info and you will see a bunch of tabs, you are looking for the one that says “agents” this will show you a list of all the FIOs agents listed inside other tabs that describe the type of agents such as Intelligence, Security, Command and so on. These tabs are important as they will determine what kind of missions you will be doing. Here is a list of what the different types give you for missions.

Administration: 50% Combat, 50% Courier
Advisory: 34% Combat, 66% Courier
Archives: 5% Combat, 90% Courier, 5% Trade
Astrosurveying: 40% Combat, 30% Courier, 25% Mining, 5% Trade
Command: 97% Combat, 3% Courier
Distribution: 5% Combat, 95% Courier
Intelligence: 85% Combat, 15% Courier
Internal Security: 95% Combat, 5% Courier
Legal: 50% Combat, 50% Courier
Manufacturing: 5% Combat, 95% Courier
Marketing: 5% Combat, 95% Courier
Mining: 5% Combat, 85% Courier, 10% Mining (II)
Production: 5% Combat, 95% Courier
Public Relations: 34% Combat, 66% Courier
R&D: 0% Combat, 50% Courier(S), 50% Trade
Security: 90% Combat, 5% Courier, 5%Trade
Storage: 5% Combat, 95% Courier(L)
Surveillance: 95% Combat, 5% Courier

So lets say you now want to do combat missions, you would open the tab of the agent type you want, namely Security, Internal Security, Surveillance, Command or any of the other ones with a very high percentage of Combat missions. Once you click that it will pop open with a list of agent names and some other information, here is an example of what you will see.

Carane Poi, Level 1, Quality -19
Location Renyn IX – Moon 4 – Federal Intelligence Office Logistics Support.

The top line shows you the agents name, the level of the mission and the quality. You are at first looking for, most likely, a level 1 agent but you want the highest quality you can get as this will equal more rewards for you. In the example above the quality is pretty low, -19. You would want to see if there was a different agent with say maybe a -5 or if you can even a positive number, at first this may or may not be possible. You might have to take what you can get and do missions for him a few times. As you do missions for that corp your standings with them will increase and more Agents will open up to you pretty fast.
One last thing about missions that really set them apart from ratting is that when doing missions you get awarded Loyalty Points (LP) along with your isk reward. The LP can be spent along with isk in the LP Store of that corp. You can get implants, skills, and even very powerful faction ships that would normally cost you much much much more. The higher the level the better the LP.

Also worth noting is that there are skills you can learn that will increase your standings, the amount of isk you get, as well as how much LP you get.

Mining? Why would you want to do that? Ok ok I’ll tell you how to get started.

Mining is very very simple for the most part. You buy yourself some mining lasers and strap them on your ship, head out into the asteroid belts and start eating up space rocks! This job is made more fun and more profitable in groups but you can solo it if you like. Once you have a good chunk of ore you bring it in and refine it and then sell the ore for the best price you can get.

Part 3. Awesome!!. . . . So how do I setup my ship?

Well this depends on things including your race and what skills you have. Since you are just beginning and don’t have a lot of support skills your choices in the beginning will be limited. Here is a short list of support skills you REALLY want to get up to level II or III asap in order to be able to get a complete basic setup on your ship.

Mechanic
- Repair Systems
Hull Upgrades
Engineering
Energy Management

Navigation
- Afterburner

Propulsion Jamming (requires Electronics III and Navigation II)
Well then, now that you are an expert on tanking, if you happen to be a shield tanker you will need these additional skills for a basic setup. (keep in mind that these skills are still useful even if you are not a shield tank and you will want them up anyway)

Shield Operation
Shield Management
Shield Upgrades

All those support skills (and then some) you will want to get up even further, I especially urge armor tankers to get Hull Upgrades IV asap (level IV takes about 4 days) as that is when you can use real armor Hardeners and not just Nano Membranes. The same goes for shield tankers, get Shield Upgrages to level for to be able to fit better shield modules.

Alrighty then, now that that is out of the way lets learn how to setup a ship. There are many ways to setup a ship, some focus more on damage while other focus more on taking damage. So I’m not going to show you a specific setup. I’m going to give you the basic understanding of what you are going to want in one.

First the armor tank. Armor tanks want an Armor Repairer, and a couple modules to increase resistance. If you only have Hull Upgrades II or III this will mean using Energized Membranes. They give less of a resistance bonus then Armor Hardeners but on the plus side they don’t have to be turned on and therfore do not take capacitor.

Now, if you happen to have Hull Upgrades IV then you will want Hardeners. But since they only increase resistance to 1 type of damage rather then all you will have to use the hardeners that are specific to the enemy you are fighting, you can find the list of what damage types are done by what factions in just about every other persons bio but for the heck of it I’ll include it at the end of this section.

If you have left over slots you can either add more resistance by adding another membrane or hardener, or you could use a Damage Control Unit. Or, you can put on some mods that increase your damage.

In the mid slots you will probably have an Afterburner in the first one and possibly a webifier then you will want cap chargers in the rest.

High slots can be whatever you want depending on your fighting style. Just make sure to stick with the weapons you get a bonus for. i.e. if you are Amarr don’t be using Hybrid Weapons and so on.
Ok, you obviously want a shield booster. Now if you have the needed skills perhaps a shield extender, but surely you’ll want shield hardeners to increase your resistances. Basically a shield version of the armor tank there. Now in the low slots you will need things that increase your cap charge since you can’t use Cap Chargers. So this will require you to have the right skills to use things like “Local Power Plant Managers” and such in your low slots.

Hardeners to use

Angel: All
Amarr Navy: EM/Thermal
Gurista, Mordus, Gallente: Kinetic/Thermal
Blood: EM/Thermal
Sansha: EM/Thermal
Serpentis: Kinetic/Thermal
Mercenary: EM/Thermal/ (Kinetik missiles)
Caldary navy: Kinetic/Thermal
Khanid: EM/Thermal
Zazzmatazz : all types of dmg
Mordus: Kinetic/thermal
Rogue Pirate: EM/Explosive/Kinetic
Odamian: Kin/therm
Damage types to use

Angel: Explosive or Thermal
Amarr Navy: Explosive
Mordus: Explosive
Gurista: Explosive, Thermal/Kinetic all round
Blood: Thermal (em thrown into the mix too)
Sansha: EM and if that don’t whoop em, try thermal
Serpentis: Thermal
Mercenary: Explosives
Caldary Navy: Explosives (Kin/Therm)
Khanid: Explosive
Zazzmatazz: Explosive
Rogue Pirate: Explosive
Odamian: Explosive

Anyway, That is my guide. I hope this has helped you start your character out on the right track.

Fly Safe,
Master Entreri
That pretty much covers the basics unless you are a shield tank. . . Whats a shield tank you say?

In Eve there are 4 types of tanks.

Shield Tanks: Basically this means you concentrate your repair and resistance boosting efforts on your shields. So a shield tank would have things like Shield Boosters and Shield Hardeners in order to keep their shields up in combat.

Armor Tank: An armor tanker puts his repair effort to, you guessed it, the armor. The shields of the ship are simply a free damage buffer allowing him some time before having to turn on his tank. An armor tank would have things like Armor Repairers and Armor Hardeners in order to keep his armor repaired.

Structure Tank: This is a foolish way of tanking with few uses and I personally don’t know anyone that does it. It would involve using Damage Controls and Structure Repairers to keep your structure up, but as your structure is the last line of defense between you and a very short trip back to your home station it’s not a very good idea. That and, the structure repairers aren’t as efficient as Armor and Shield repairers.

Speed Tank: This has more to do with tactics then equipment. Speed tanking basically means you are trying to fly your ship in such a way that you are difficult to hit and is generally used by small fast ships such as interceptors. This guide is not a tactics guide but I do suggest you read a decent speed tanking guide as it can help you even in larger ships.

What determines what type of tank you are actually depends on the ship you are flying. But for the most part if you are Gallente or Amarr you will probably be an Armor Tank (though it’s important to note that some Gallente ships can shield tank well), if you are Caldari you will most likely be a shield tank. And Minmatar have a number of both types.

So thats the rule of thumb, heres the more technical explanation. Whether you are an Armor or Shield tank comes down to how many Low or Middle slots your ship has. Since everything having to do with repairing your armor or boosting it’s resistance goes in a low slot, if you have more lows then middles you are an Armor tank, and if you have a lot of mids, you are a shield tank.

Please, please dear god do not use hybrids of armor and shield tanking! So many times I see new players strap on a shield booster an armor repairer and just about anything else they can find because they don’t know any better. Use what tank your ship is good at, trust me, you will survive longer.

Now, I suppose I should tell you that there are 2 other types of tanking that go along with the ones I just showed you. They are Active and Passive.

Active tanking means that you have hardeners and repairers that you must turn on once battle has commenced. These modules consume capacitor energy every time they cycle.

Passive tanks on the other hand work by boosting your resistance and increasing your ships ability to automatically regenerate it’s shields in order to negate your enemies damage. The modules for passive tanking do not require capacitor to use but also tend to have lower stats.