• EVE Online Guide Home
• General Help
  • New Player Guide
  • EVE Online Soloing Guide
  • Free EVE Online Trial
  • Skill Training Guide
  • The Backstory of EVE Online
• Improving Standing
  • EVE Online Faction Standing
  • EVE Online Standings Guide
  • Corporation Standing Guide
  • Dog Tag and Data Center Guide
• Combat
  • Combat Guide
• Ships Guide
  • Ship Piloting and Navigation Guide
  • Ship Guide
  • Skills for Improving Ship Performance
  • Ship Speed and Acceleration
  • Ship Insurance
  • Capacitor Guide
  • Rigs Guide
• Your character
  • Character Attributes
  • Implants Guide
  • Clone Guide
• Laws and CONCORD
  • CONCORD guide
  • Security Status guide
• Mission Running
  • Agents and Standing
  • Agent Types Guide
  • Accounting Agents
  • Missions Guide
  • Courier Missions
• Mining and Industry
  • Mining Guide
  • Guide to Selling on the Market
  • Salvaging Guide

EVE Online New Player Guide

This guide will instruct the new player on what to do when first playing the game.

I joined EVE Online. Now what?

You've joined EVE online, and now you're not sure what to do next. You have a character who has a small, rookie ship with simple weapons and mining lasers. Your character has already learned some skills from an institute of higher learning in New Eden. What now?

Train Skills

First, you should improve your ability to learn skills. In EVE Online, learning skills is extremely important for improving your game and opening up new possibilities. As you learn skills, you earn skill points. Skills take time to train, but fortunately, until you reach 1.6 million skill points, you will train skills twice as quickly.

In addition, there are skills available that increase the speed at which you learn. These skills are in the Learning category and can be purchased from the Marketplace. Train these skills up as soon as you can, and if possible, train them before training up skills in any other category. You will be saving yourself a great deal of time later on.

Decide on your Focus

As you train your learning skills, you should decide on which activities in EVE you find most enjoyable, and then learn skills and buy equipment that help you get better at doing those activities.

Two of the main activities in which you can participate in EVE Online are combat and industry. In general, combat involves piloting a ship that is designed to be a good fighter, fitted with powerful weapons. Industry is a non-combat discipline that includes mining, research, manufacturing, and trade.

Combat

If combat is your thing, you have many options open to you. One activity that you can pursue is running missions for NPC corporations. There are always corporation agents who will hire you to do their dirty work, which includes killing pirates, or ships of enemy factions or corporations, or sometimes non-combat activities like hauling cargo from one place to the other. Some types of agents give mostly combat missions, while some give mostly trade missions.

You can also become a pirate, joining with the many NPC pirate factions of New Eden.

There is also plenty of PVP combat to be had. Join a player corporation and fight the players of corporations who are warring with yours, or just be a jerk and fight people for no reason.

You can also join the military, and fight battles as a soldier.

To support your combat path, you will want to train up skills that enable you to pilot bigger, more powerful ships fitted with bigger, more powerful weapons.

There are skills that improve your ability to move your ship around, skills that enable you to pilot more powerful ships, skills that enable you to use your weapons more efficiently, skills that allow you to fit more modules to your ship, and so on.

There are many skills that you can train that will make you a better fighter, so look through your skill training list (and set your skill list to show all skills) to see what you can train. The certification planner can also help you train the best skills for being a fighter.

Industry and other non-combat activities

If fighting isn't really your thing, there are plenty of options for non-combat activities in EVE Online.

Mining is one of those options. There are ships like mining barges that are designed specifically to fit powerful strip miners and carry a large cargo of minerals. You would do well to train up your skills and earn ISK to buy a cruiser of your faction that is designed to be good for mining. Here is a more in-depth guide to mining in EVE Online.

You can also do manufacturing. In the marketplace, you can find blueprints that you can bring to a station with the required ore (which will be listed in the blueprint information window) and set up a manufacturing job in the station's factory (if it has one). You can become a better manufacturer if you train up the right skills.

You can also work toward becoming proficient at buying and selling in the Marketplace for profit.