EVE New Citizens Q&A

I've been a big fan of space opera sci-fi like Star Trek, Stargate and Babylon 5 for a long time. I never gave EVE an honest try because the thought of a "true sandbox" left me with no idea of what I would actually do in the game, but last night I learned that "exploration" is a career choice. I've been playing videogames for my entire life and I love nothing more than exploring and getting lost in a huge game world, so earlier today I made my first real character.

Having played through the tutorial missions I'm aware that "exploration" in EVE isn't about discovering strange, new worlds or exploring unknown parts of space (as if any could still exist in a game this long-lived) but finding rare materials and items through a minigame. I've decided that the first sort of exploration that I want to specialize in is Radar points since the idea of finding skillbooks and blueprints for advanced tech sounds like fun. Now I have a few questions about how to get started and what to expect as an EVE explorer:

1. To loot any Radar points I need a codebreaker (I have a non-civilian model that I bought on the market). In order to use the codebreaker I need the skills Electronics Upgrades Level III and Hacking Level I. I can afford the Electronics Upgrades book but the Hacking book costs around twice as much as what I have in my wallet. Even if I could afford both books I wouldn't be able to put them to use until tomorrow since the total training time is over nine hours. Is there a simpler form of exploration that I can focus on to start out, making the money and learning the skills for Radar points in the meantime? Is there a place where new players go to buy starter skills that might have a cheaper Hacking book (the cheapest in my region is ~900,000 ISK)? Should I just do the tutorials for another career and use those rewards to get started on exploration?

2. What can I expect in the long run if I focus on exploration? Can I use the blueprints and materials I find to build my own Tech II ships? Do corporations have any incentive to support someone like me? Is there ever any "real" exploration involved, or am I basically setting myself up for a lifetime of farming?

3. As an explorer what can I do to supplement my gameplay experience/income? Is there a form of passive income that I can use to buy defenses and probes? Any general tips on skills or components to invest in that I may not even know exist?

4. Unrelated question: When I click on the couch in the Captain's Quarters the options for "Sit" and "Stand" are greyed out. How do I use the couch?

Thanks in advance for the help. If any of my questions are too vague just let me know and I'll try to be more specific.

You should do all the tutorial missions, you'll pick up a lot of skillbooks, Isk and ships that will help you get started. I don't remember which tutorial it was, might even have been one of the Sisters Of Eve Epic arc missions, but I definately picked up the Hacking skillbook as a reward on this character.

We're apparently following the same path :)
I'm also pretty new to Eve and I hope this will give you some hints and help you achieve your goal.

1) funding your training:

When you've completed the tutorial missions, you should end up with quite a little bunch of ships at your disposal, a couple blueprints with runs left and loads of little items looted from wrecks.
From there you start by collecting some ressource to exhaust the remaining runs of your blueprints, then sell the products, I had 150 small crystals left and Caldari have about 15k rockets, plus a couple more ships to manufacture and sell. Find a trade hub to sell them though, so you have better chances, like Jita or Amarr, though you might find a closer one in Fed space.

You can probably sell some of the frigates you got in multiple copies during the tutorials, reprocess some of the junk gathered to sell the minerals or plain sell the ones worth it.

After the tutorials, there will be quite a bunch of lvl1 missions available in the nearby systems that you can easily complete with a destroyer, fit yours with a good DPS and focus on armor tanking (Gallente are quite similar to Amarr in this matter, right?). Use the agent finder in your quarters to locate them, or hop from station to station in .9 or .8 systems nearby. Invest in a salvager and salvage the wrecks before you complete the missions, you can yield a good million out of a couple missions, on top of the agent rewards, by selling the junk you collect from the wrecks.

When you don't have much time to keep an eye on EVE, you can bring your Iteron in an asteroid belt, fitted with a mining laser, and let it fill up for a couple hours and then sell the ore (do not jet-can, pretty please, save yourself the trouble, you don't have the ISK to let can-flippers bait you in PvP).
While it can be an early kickstart income, don't get your hopes up, mining only pays when you invest weeks of training in expensive ships and equipment like mining barges or exhumers. Besides, it's horribly boring...

I'm sorry if it sounds dull, but I can hardly think of any better way to earn some ISK when you begin and aim for a specialized occupation. To be honest, after a few days, your skills will probably not be high enough to properly scan down most sites anyway, the astrometrics skills take a long time to train, but you really shouldn't slack on it, bring them to rank 4 at least!
While you train astrometrics, don't forget to train some basic skills in engineering, electronics, mechanics and gunnery, because the sites you will scan down, will pretty likely be infested with NPCs, or be the property of other players, so you'll need to be in shape to fight.

When you train very long skill ranks (astrometrics rangefinding (x8!) to rank 4), you have days ahead of you to do other stuff, like some courrier contracts, mining, missions, etc.

I know it may sound like an eternity, but you will need that time to train up before you can really get your hands dirty and for now, it's quite likely that you will have to focus on the little NPC factions sites that show up in the on-board scanner to collect a few ISK while you train the skills.

Another decent income that may help you, is the Sisters of Eve epic arc, with missions yielding around 200k ISK each in rewards, double or triple that with the salvage and loot, but be prepared for a fight, because the difficulty ramps up quite fast.

Your best bet, to have an evenly skilled character, is to keep a close eye on certificates, train up the core competency trunk and the other ones that will benefit you, defense, gunnery, etc. The only required skills for exploration might be Astrometrics, pinpointing, rangefinding, etc. but this only won't help you survive in the wild on your own.

2) the uses of your training:

As you get skilled in exploration, you will encounter gravimetric, magnetometric, radar or ladar sites, these have different kinds of ressources you can earn ISK from, be it through mining, reselling of materials or technology, improvement of your character or rare items production... it all comes down to ISK in the end though, so you'll need to either nudge up the trading skills, the production skills or both.

Rare ressources or technology can sell well, but you have to bring them safely to trade hubs to make the best profit. Also, there's other explorers, you might end up competting with them at some point and in this situation... you will need to be able to bite back.

Exploration can earn you quite some ISK, that you can use to fund your equipment, but keep your eyes on other sources as it's not an even source of income, some days you won't find anything, others you'll get the good rewards. So you could need a more diverse set of occupations to guarantee a regular income.

On the long run, you might need to find some friends to help you, because some sites will be to heavily guarded for soloing.

It's hard to tell what you will get from it, there's honestly a lot of options open for explorers and just too many possibilities.

I don't know what *you* can expect from this in the long run, though... it's your Eve.

The major aim of my exploration training, is WormHoles, that's why I focus my training on exploration, combat and stealth. I do a lot of ratting and missions for the moment, being too cheaply skilled for exploration, but it helps raising my standing in stations wich serves me well to gain extra bucks.

3) the couch

Just get close enough from it ;)

*takes a deep breath*

By all means, don't feel overwhelmed with all the pre-requisites and warnings, there's not much you can do to skill up, you just have to wait and find occupations to have fun meanwhile.
Don't invest all your bucks in big ships that you can hardly fit, losing them would mean too much. You can do a lot with a good frigate/destroyer and they're pretty cheap.

I hope this wall of text shed some light...

Totally agree, picking your player corporation isn't something you should rush.

Take your time to find the one that suits you best, don't just jump into the first corporation that attracts your attention.
Getting into the right corporation might take a bit of research. Things you should look for are:
- How large is the corporation you join.
- How active are they (both around the clock but mainly during your ingame time)
- What does this corporation do (are they a mining corp, mission running corp, PvP corp, etc.)
- Some small history check on the corp (how old is it, what alliances has it been in)
- Maybe bit of out-of-game search (Evewho will tell you who is (was) in that corp, dotlan gives some statistics, google for the corp).
- Hang around their public channel if they have one, in there you will encounter more of their (former)members.

Get EVEMon -- http://evemon.battleclinic.com/

It's a useful little tracking tool that uses your API Key (get it from https://support.eveonline.com/api) to keep track of your training progress, and help you plan out your training queue.

I currently have a 2 year plan in EVEMon (yes, really.) ... and at a glance can see that I'm just shy of 5 days from being able to start on the next skill.

Aimed towards corporations you are better IF you wish to join a corp that is unless being a solo traveler with no ties is our thing of course you should always look for a corp with the ''new-player-friendly'' sort of thing but not all are like it, some use that as a trick so if you wanted a corp to join it'd be best if they are in high-sec or possibly close to low sec depending on what you wish to do in-game, Wormholes anomalies and all that are great for explorers, missions can give you a bit of an isk bonus with connections and salvaging and ect, but the only problem you would have is getting there.

So personal advise out of experiance its not a epic thing or manditory its your life your rules so to speak :) :

1) find a corp in high sec or where-ever with 10+ members which is active make sure its not a superly massive corp so things dont become encumbersome with ops and stuff.

2) Branch yourself out towards the technology you wish to use.

3) Figure out what you are interested in actually doing like you mentioned exploring, so stealth stuff would come in handy with traveling :P

4) pretty much everything everyone else said about the tutorials good skill books given, and occasionally ships i think? i dont know i skipped the tutorials and never looked back XD

5) Make sure your choices make you happy :) You dont want to play eve which choices you regret or begin to play eve because you feel that you absolutely have to play like i used to, it makes the game seem dull, boring, and tedious, which is why i love my corp (which yes i made) i dont HAVE to be online 24/7 i can help my friends out whenever i please so to speak (within reason) and we generally have a laugh over anything that we feel like :)

Im not saying join my corp as it would be rather impolite to tell you to join my corp and you will enjoy eve 4ever and stuff, Eve online ''the universe is yours'' sort of comes into play here.

Make your own decisions towards things, and most of all enjoy your time on eve but if you need a hand with anything and are in caldari high sec at any time just ask your gallentean friend Callista for assistance :D i'd be more than happy to help you out :)

Have fun flying in eve now wont you? ^^ Maybe see you in a system somepoint? :D

Fly safe, Enjoy flying, and keep safe :)