Lessons From New Eden

As a very wet behind the ears capsuleer myself, one of my intentions with this blog is to compile some of the lessons I have learned about EVE Online for others to benefit. This post will be a longer post, but I also intend to have more frequent quick tips that may only be a few sentences.

The biggest idea to understand is that everything in EVE has a catch.


Every time I have set my mind to something I have run into two main hurdles: ISK (money) and prerequisite skills.

I was joking with a friend that every time you click the mouse in EVE it costs ISK. Don't worry, that isn't true and most tasks don't cost much, but if you lack a source of income you will get nickle and dimed into the poor house.

The other catch is prerequisites skills. Everything you want to do or use in EVE has a requisite skill attached. For example simply running a corporation, or increasing the number of members your corporation can accommodate, or inncreasing the percentage of corporation members allowed from a certain race. Plan ahead when you set a goal, make sure you have all your skills in order. A useful out of game tool to help you plan ahead is called EVEMon, I recommend getting to know this application very early on.

Another important tip, the little blue information icon next to just about everything in game is your friend, click on it now, click on it often. To easily compare items with the info icon, shift click to make the info screen open in a separate window. This can also be accomplished by changing a setting in the options menu so that all info screens use new windows.

EVE is a giant sandbox, it is easy to get overwhelmed or loose focus. Early on I would suggest completing all of the career agent missions. These missions act as a tutorial for all of the main aspects of the game. By completing all of these missions you will have gotten a small taste of every part of EVE. This will help you decide where you want to leave your mark in the universe.

Corporations are everything in EVE. In fact, you literally cannot play EVE without belonging to a corporation. You start the game belonging to one of many NPC corporations and if you ever leave a player run corporation without joining another you will default back to that NPC corporation. Fortunately there exist some very noobie friendly player run corporations, chiefly EVE University and Red vs Blue. As far as I am concerned every new player should start in EVE University and if you get the PVP itch, move on to Red vs Blue.

These few lessons are a good foundation for having a positive experience in EVE.