After you install the EVE Online client and sign up and create your character, you are ready to play. This guide tells you some of the things you can do when you are first starting out in EVE Online.

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

In EVE Online, you can learn skills to improve your ability to do things in the game. 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.

Join a Player Corporation

Players in EVE can make their own corporations, usually with the goal of generating as much income as possible. Many of these corporations are friendly to new players and will help teach you the basics. They can also give you plenty of things to do.

EVE Online has an in-game recruitment tool that allows you to find player corporations that are a good fit for you.

Decide on your Focus

Since there are so many skills to train, it helps to find out which activities in EVE that you find most enjoyable, and focus your skill training on improving your abilities in that area.

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 deal damage efficiently and is fitted with powerful weapons. Industry is a non-combat discipline that includes mining, research, manufacturing, and trade.

Combat

If you are interested in combat, you have many options.

For basic combat opportunities, visit a station and see if any of the NPC corporations have combat missions available. 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. These missions may include non-combat activities like hauling cargo from one place to another. Different types of agents provide different types of jobs.

For more advanced combat experience, you can become a pirate, joining with the many NPC pirate factions of New Eden.

You can also engage in PVP combat. Join a player corporation and fight the players of corporations at war with yours. Or you can simply attack other players for no reason and hope that you don't get in trouble with the law. Some solar systems have a greater CONCORD presence than others, while some have no law enforcement at all, leaving you free to blast anyone and everyone to smithereens, assuming they don't get you first.

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

You can look for deadspace complexes, which are dangerous areas full of enemies that guard valuable loot, much like a dungeon.

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.

In short, 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. Ships such as mining barges are designed specifically to fit powerful strip miner lasers 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.

Manufacturing is another option. 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.