Skill Discussions

So when I first started eve I trained up a bunch of skills that I now, and never will, have any use for whatsoever. I'm thinking about using a skill extractor to make some isk or move those SP's around, but what happens when those skills don't add up to 500,000 exactly? What happens to the extra points?

Specifically, I trained up Torpedos to level 5 which is ~1m skill points, so can I use 2 extractors for this one skill? Or will the overflow just be lost?

Nova's right on.

To elaborate a little, when you activate a Skill Extractor, a window opens up with a box at the top to fill with skill points to be extracted, and a drop down menu of all of your skills. From the skill list, hover over a skill to extract, and drag and drop it into the box at the top of the window. The extract box at the top will receive the skill points until it accumulates the 500,000 points needed for extraction. If the skill being extracted is Rank 3, Level 5 or higher, only one drag/drop will be needed to extract 500,000 points. No extra points will be lost, the R3, L5 skill will be left with 768,000 - 500,000 = 268,000 points and now be a Level 4 skill, or, as in Nova's example, one extraction of the Torpedoes skill would leave you with 524,000 points and Torpedoes Level 4, either example partially trained to Level 5.

The skill being extracted will be stripped of it's skill points one level at a time. Continuing with Torpedoes as an example, in the second extraction, the first drag/drop will move 343,000 points to the extraction box, leaving you with 181,000 points in Torpedoes, the amount needed to retain Level 4. A second drag/drop will move another 149,000 points into the extraction box, leaving you with 32,000 points in Torpedoes, the amount needed to retain Level 3. In this case, a third drag/drop would be needed to move 8,000 more points up to the extraction box for the 500,000 total points needed for extraction. This would leave you with Torpedoes Level 2 and 24,000 skill points, partially trained to Level 3.

If you frack up during extraction, you can cancel the attempt and do over, as long as you do so before clicking "Extract" on a fully loaded box.

Keep in mind, also, if you want to reinject the skill points, there are "diminishing injection returns"... i.e. you won't get all 500,000 points back when you reuse the Skill Injector. Show info on Skill Injectors to see how many points you'll get back, based on your toon's starting SP total.