EVE New Citizens Q&A

Where do all these skill books come from? when they are injected, they are gone forever. Are all skill books available through missions? Or does CCP just create them and sell them in trade hubs? I've never really gotten a clear answer.

Skillbooks are sold by NPC sell orders so they are created by CCP but usually not in trade hubs. If you see the sell order has a 365 day duration it is an NPC order, anything else it is a player that has bought a bunch and is selling them for profit.

Some missions can drop skillbooks, and some are only available through exploration (the two advanced drug ones if memory serves is exploration loot only) and then a few skillbooks come from LP stores (such as drone and weapon spec)

By the time you are in a position to inject those skills you will be in a position to buy them.

You are too new to be worrying about capital ships, I've been playing s since 2013.05.15 and I don't have any trained .

not as far as I know. But as said when you get to that stage the 500 mill for the skillbook isnt a big deal anymore.

No, just from the market.

But compared to a capital ship, which is 1.5-2.5 billion for the ship, excluding all modules (carrier/dread), the skill books aren't exactly expensive, and you only ever need one of each book for a character.

Well... you see dear... when a mommy capsuleer and a daddy capsuleer love each other very much they take leftover organic matter from their latest cloning and put it into a vat filled with implants. They then toss a couple of virgin neckbeards into the vat, dump in liberal amounts of quafe, and proceed to have tantric sex with it that may or may not involve swapping bodies a couple of times.
After that has been completed, electrodes are stuck into the now ballooning mass of flesh in the vat and streams of data are downloaded into it via uplink from the parents.
Growth hormones are applied and within 9 months, a new capsuleer is fully formed and ready to go!

Any leftover flesh still in the vat is usually filled with still useful data... so that it all packaged up and sold as skillbooks!



On-topic:

- you can buy skillooks from NPC stations (from NPCs) or at market hubs from players (who have bought and shipped the skillbooks from NPCs).

- some LP stores have "specialty" skillbooks for sale... but generally speaking they won't help you beyond some very specific things. It is usually more efficient to build up an income and buy the skillbooks directly.

Just to add a bit of additional info to this, NPC sell orders won't always be at 365 days. Each time an item is purchased from them, the clock on their orders is reset to 365 days, but if a particular NPC order hasn't been bought in 30 days, the clock will have ticked down to 335 days.

Player orders cannot go above 90 days, so if you see an order that is above the 90-day mark, it's an NPC order. Most NPC orders tend to be in the 300-day-range, but you can see some in the more remote parts of the game that are in the 200's and, in a few instances, even the 100's (these are extremely rare, though; I think the only 100-200 NPC order I ever saw was something out in Solitude lowsec).

sometimes hubs have skills for cheap as I looted some from killing other players with skillbooks in their cargo

also as said some specialization skills can be bought with LP, and these will usually sell for less than NPC sell price, the drone spec skills are all around 2.5-3mil isk because they sell for 3k lp each. where the NPC sell price is 9mil for each one.

^ This is important to note.

Some (most) skillbooks are sold on the market at school stations by the NPC corps.

Some are sold through the LP stores (weapon specializations, some of the agent connections skills).

Some are drops from exploration sites (a variety of science skills as above, some of the booster-related skills).

Some skillbooks are only found through one of these methods, and some are available through several. It depends on the book - some of the exploration ones are only found that way and are very rare and expensive as a result.