EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hello EVE Online community. I'm Rahlekk, and after maybe two years of a hiatus (I never really got into EVE Online back then, so I guess I could just say I'm totally new) I'm back and kicking in the universe.

Anyways, back when I used to play, I remember I had a thing for Hacking and Planetology, but I need some help.

As a newbie EVE Online pilot what are good skills to train while still going for Hacking/Planetology? I know that I should be training for better ships which is just a necessary thing to make money and be able to actually do stuff.

Please help me out, I want to get my skills started good and early, as to not screw up in the beginning.

Thank you!

I would definitely start working on some general missioning, as a preparation for the hacking mini-profession. In a nutshell, the sites that have containers that can be hacked, are basically a mission that has to be scanned down first. This means two things:

1) You'll need scanning skills: Astrometrics, Astrometric pinpointing, astrometric rangefinding. These help you use a probe launcher to locate the anomolies that will contain hackable containers with loot inside. The sites that you are looking for as a hacker are Radar sites. There is a ship dedicated to safe probing, the covert ops frigate. If you train for a covert ops cloak and a covert ops frigate, you can scan very nicely with a bonsu, and do so while safely hidden. once a site is located, you can bookmark it and switch to a combat ship to actually run the site.

2) Before you do this though, you need to be able to handle some moderately difficult PvE enviroments. I would at least be able to master level 3 or 4 missions before you start looking for exploration sites with your probes. All the scanning in the world won't matter if you don't have a solid ship with a tank and plenty of firepower, and enough experience to fight a whole room full of NPC's without getting nuked. For example, if you fly minmatar, you could start running level 1 missions in a rifter, than train for medium tech 2 guns and move up to a rupture, start running level 2 missions, and when you train all of the other modules on your ship to the tech 2 level slide up into a Hurricane, and when you've mastered level 3 missions in a hurricane, slide into a battleship and learn to run level 4's. Same goes for Caldari (merlin / kestrel ---> caracal----> drake---->raven) or the other races. Without this base level of combat experience, hacking itself won't be of much use.

Last but not least - once you're able to defend yourself, and have a proper PvE ship you know how to fly well, you can fit the codebreaker on and go to work. However - once you're in a scan site, and start unlocking the first can with your codebreaker, warping out will de-spawn the site. Therefore - kill all the rats you can first, than start codebreaking. You may need to pause and kill rats that spawn between each can, but you'll have to stay in the site. If you haven't started codebreaking in a site, you can warp out if the rats overwhelm you, and warp back in and continue. But once you activate the codebreaker, you're stuck finishing or losing it all.

Let me know if you need a recommendation on missioning ships, proper fittings / gear, or what corp to mission for based on the area you live in...

I hope this helps you get started with exploration! It takes a bit to get into, but is both fun and rewarding. Enjoy!