In EVE you don‘t level up like in most games. You purchase skills which then train in real time until finished. The skills train even while you are offline. Skills give you a myriad of different abilities. Some allow you to fly specific types of ships or use a particular weapon while others focus more on general things. Each skill has five levels which all give the same percentage bonus to whatever field of your gameplay they affect. Each level however takes increasingly longer to train so that players are always faced with the choice of specializing in one field, or spend the skill training time equally on many different fields.

How do I make money in EVE?

There is an infinite number of ways to ways to make ISK (Eve‘s currency, Interstellar Kredits) in Eve Isk. Some of them evolve around performing various tasks provided to you by the game. For example you can always make money by mining asteroids for materials to sell. You can also run all kinds of missions for NPC (Non Player Controlled, run by the EVE system) agents. You can hunt NPC pirates in some parts of space and you can explore unknown parts of space for hidden treasure.

Then you have the option of using your creativity, your social skills and your business skills to make money from your interactions with all the other people playing EVE online. Around 95% of every item or ship in EVE is made by the players from scratch and sold through EVE‘s central market system. You can start your own corporation to build items that are in demand and sell them to other people. You can also buy things when the price is low and sell them when the price is high or exploit other people‘s lack of time or patience by moving things around for them. In essence you are free to invent any service valuable to other players and market it for your own profit. Wherever you see an opportunity there is probably ISK to be made.

EVE sounds complex – how will I learn all I need to know?

Most importantly you should keep in mind that you don‘t have to learn everything at once and that some things you won‘t ever need to learn. EVE is a very intricate, deep world with a lot of content and most only experience part of what‘s out there.

For the essentials of what you need to know we offer in-game tutorials, an online Wiki and bustling forums where players can discuss all things Eve Isk related or get answers to questions. We also run an in-game help channel and a special "rookie help channel" for our new players. The Rookie help channel is manned at all times by volunteers who are there to answer any question you might have.

Despite all our efforts to help players learn, most still gain the majority of their knowledge from other players which is the natural way of things in an MMORPG. To learn from others, a good idea would be to join a player run corporation relatively soon after you start to play. Player run corporations are usually welcoming towards new players and the number of corporations actively seeking new recruits usually outnumbers the number of players looking for a place in a corporation. Once you are in a corporation the more experienced players will typically help you get started. Note however that this is general advice and that we cannot guarantee any standard of behaviour towards you.