EVE Online Beginner Guide: What to Do in Your First 30 Days

So you just made an EVE Online character and you're staring at a screen full of windows, wondering what on earth you're supposed to do. That's normal. EVE dumps you into a giant sandbox with very little hand-holding, and the first month is mostly about not getting overwhelmed. The good news is the early game is pretty forgiving once you know what to focus on.

Forget min-maxing for now. The goal in your first 30 days is simple: finish the tutorials, get some core skills training, learn to fly and fit a ship, and find a group of people to fly with. Knock out those four things and you'll be way ahead of most new players.

Choosing Your Starting Race and Career Agents

Pick whatever, honestly

There are four races: Amarr, Caldari, Gallente, and Minmatar. Each one leans toward certain weapons and tank types, and they each start you in a slightly different starter ship. The rough breakdown:

• Amarr - laser weapons, armor tanking. Lasers never need ammo, which is handy early on, but they chew through your capacitor.
• Caldari - missiles and railguns, shield tanking. Missiles always hit regardless of range, so they're forgiving for brand-new pilots.
• Gallente - hybrid blasters and drones, armor tanking. Drones are great because they fight for you while you do other things.
• Minmatar - autocannons and artillery, can shield or armor tank, fast and bendy ships.

Now the thing nobody tells you up front: your starting race barely matters. You can train any race's skills on any character, fly any ship, and live in any region of space. The only things your race locks in are your starting skills and your starting location. Two weeks in you won't even remember which one you picked.

So choose whichever looks cool. If you want the path of least resistance, Caldari and Minmatar are friendly picks. Caldari missiles hit consistently and Minmatar ships are quick and forgiving. But you can't really go wrong. Gallente drones are a strong call too if you like the idea of a ship that does some of the work for you.

Career Agents: do all of them

After the intro tutorial with Aura, you get dropped at a station near a set of Career Agents. Find them through the Agency window: open it, go to Agents, then Career agents. Each race has five career paths, and CCP recently renamed them so they line up with the four big professions:

• Enforcer (used to be Military) - basic PvE combat missions
• Soldier of Fortune (used to be Advanced Military) - tougher combat with a PvP flavor
• Explorer - scanning, hacking, uncovering hidden sites
• Industrialist (Producer) (used to be Industry) - mining and manufacturing
• Industrialist (Entrepreneur) (used to be Business) - trading and hauling

Each path is a chain of about ten missions. Do all five chains, even the ones that don't match what you think you want to do. Why? They're free, they teach you how the game actually works, and they hand you a pile of free ships, skill books, modules, and ISK along the way. You come out the other side with a dozen ships in your hangar and a real feel for combat, exploration, mining, and trade.

And here's a neat trick: you're not stuck with your own race's career agents. You can fly to any other race's space and run theirs too. Plenty of new players do all 20 chains across the four races. It's basically free stuff and free faction standing.

The AIR Career Program

On top of the career agents there's the AIR Career Program. It's a guided set of tasks that walks you through your first real activities and pays out skill points, ISK, basic gear, and boosters as you clear each chunk. Across your account's three character slots you can pull in somewhere around two million skill points in total (the exact number shifts as CCP tweaks it). For a new character that's a real head start, since it can knock weeks off your early training.

Work through it at your own pace. It overlaps a lot with the career agents, so you'll often be ticking off AIR tasks while you're knocking out career missions anyway.

Understanding the Skill Queue and Attribute Remapping

Skills train in real time

This is the part of EVE that throws people. Your character doesn't gain XP from doing stuff. Skills train in real time, whether you're logged in or not. Queue up a skill, walk away for the day, come back and it's done, or at least closer to done. The trade-off is that you can't grind your way to being good faster. Training just takes however long it takes.

Because of that, your skill queue matters a lot early on. Keep it full. Always have something training, and stack a long queue so you don't waste hours if you forget to log in. You can pile months of skills into the queue these days, so there's no excuse for sitting idle.

Alpha clones versus Omega

EVE has a free-to-play tier called Alpha and a paid tier called Omega. As an Alpha you train skills at half the speed of an Omega, and you're capped at roughly 20 million skill points. On top of that you can only naturally train the first 5 million; past that you'd need Daily Alpha Injectors to keep inching up.

What does that mean in practice? You can play the whole game for free as an Alpha, and 5 to 20 million skill points is plenty to be useful in a fleet. But you'll train slower, and a handful of advanced ships and modules sit behind Omega. Most players go Omega eventually, but there's zero rush. Stay Alpha until you're sure you want to stick around.

What attributes actually do

Every skill has a primary attribute and a secondary attribute. Training goes faster the more points you have in those two attributes. A few rough groupings:

• Perception and Willpower - gunnery, missiles, most spaceship command skills (the combat and ship stuff)
• Intelligence and Memory - engineering, electronics, industry, science
• Memory and Perception - drones
• Charisma - social, trade, and leadership skills

So if you're grinding through a lot of gunnery, pumping up Perception and Willpower makes those skills train quicker. The catch is that boosting one attribute means pulling points away from another. You're working with a limited pool.

Implants help too. You can plug in implants that add points to specific attributes, and they stack on top of whatever you set with a remap. Cerebral accelerators (often handed out during events or as new-player rewards) give a temporary boost to everything. Free attribute points are basically free training speed, so don't ignore them.

Neural remapping, and why you should wait

A neural remap lets you shuffle your attribute points around. The big constraint: you get one timed remap per year, on a one-year cooldown after you use it, plus a couple of bonus remaps to start. That means you can't just move points whenever you feel like it.

Here's the trap a lot of new players fall into. They remap right away into some "perfect" combat spread, then spend the next month training support skills that use different attributes, and they've burned a remap for nothing.

The standard advice, and it's good advice: hold off on remapping for at least a few months. Keep your attributes balanced while you train a little of everything. Once you've got a real plan (say, six months of gunnery and spaceship command), you remap hard into Perception and Willpower and milk that training speed. Tools like EVEmon or Pyfa can model your skill plan and tell you exactly when to remap. Use them. Guessing can waste you a year.

Your First Frigate Fits and Basic Modules

A "fit" is just the loadout of modules you bolt onto a ship: high slots, mid slots, low slots, rigs, and drones. Fitting is where EVE gets deep, but for your first month you really only need two ships. Grab a Venture for making money and a frigate for dabbling in combat.

The Venture: your first income ship

The Venture is a free mining frigate you get early on, and it's the ship most new pilots use to earn their first ISK. It's an ORE hull with two mining turret slots, a 5,000 m³ ore hold (so you don't have to dump cargo every two minutes), and a built-in +2 warp core strength that makes it harder to pin down. You can fly it on day one with your starting skills.

A basic Venture fit looks something like this:

• High slots: 2x Miner I (or Miner II once you have the skills)
• Mid slots: 1MN Afterburner I, Survey Scanner I (swap in a Medium Shield Extender I if you're skittish)
• Low slots: Mining Laser Upgrade I (or a Damage Control I if you want to survive a gank)
• Drones: 2x Warrior I or Hobgoblin I (the 10 m³ bay fits two light drones)

Fly it out to an asteroid belt or an ore anomaly in highsec, lock a rock, and turn on the lasers. The ore piles into the special mining hold, and when it's full you dock up and sell or refine. It's not exciting, but it's steady money, and it teaches you how to fly, lock targets, and manage a ship without much risk.

That +2 warp core strength is worth understanding. A single warp scrambler only applies 2 points of disruption, so it won't hold a Venture by itself. That little detail has saved a lot of new miners. It won't save you from two people pointing you at once, though, so don't get cocky out in lowsec.

A tackle frigate: your intro to PvP

"Tackle" means pinning a target down so it can't warp away. It's the job new players can do almost immediately in fleet fights, because the skills are cheap and the ships are disposable. Any racial frigate works. The Atron, Executioner, Condor, and Slasher are popular cheap tacklers.

Two modules do the pinning, and they behave differently:

• Warp Disruptor (the "long point"): 20 km range with the basic module, 24 km with the Tech 2 version. It stops the target from warping but does not turn off their propulsion.
• Warp Scrambler (the "short point" or "scram"): 7.5 km range basic, 9 km Tech 2. Shorter reach, but it also kills the target's microwarpdrive. A scram is the thing that really locks someone down.

Add a Stasis Webifier (10 km range) to slow them, a prop mod to get close, and a small shield or armor repairer to stay alive, and you've got a tackler. Your job in a fight is to get within scram range, hold the target, and survive long enough for the rest of your fleet to arrive and do the damage. You will explode a lot. That's the job.

Core modules everyone trains

No matter what you fly, there's a short list of skills and modules every pilot wants early:

• Propulsion: 1MN Afterburner (cheap, no capacitor penalty) or 1MN Microwarpdrive (huge speed burst, but it bloats your ship's signature radius and eats cap)
• Tank: Small Shield Extenders or Small Armor Repairers, depending on the ship
• Damage Control I: nearly free, adds a chunk of resistance to your hull, basically always worth fitting
• Core skills: CPU Management, Power Grid Management, and Weapon Upgrades. These let you actually fit things onto your ship, so train them early.

Docking, Undocking, and Reading the Overview

The Overview is your real UI

The Overview is the list of stuff in space over on the right side of your screen, and it's honestly the most important window in the game. It's how you see what's around you, who's friendly, who's hostile, what you can shoot, and what you can dock at. The default overview is kind of a mess, so most pilots set up custom tabs.

You get up to five tabs, and each one can run a different preset that filters what shows up. A common setup is one tab for travel (just stargates and stations), one for combat (ships, drones, structures), one for mining (asteroids and ore anomalies), and one for looting (wrecks and cargo containers). You load a preset by right-clicking a tab while you're in space. There's a whole community of shared overview presets out there, so grab one and tweak it rather than building from scratch.

A couple of habits will save your ship. Learn to read the colors. Friendly brackets are white or blue, neutral is grayish, and flashy red means someone who can shoot you (or who you can shoot). If a hostile pops into your overview and you're not ready to fight, that's your cue to leave.

Instadock and insta-undock bookmarks

Here's a skill that separates new players from veterans: bookmarking the undock.

When you undock from a busy station, you come out moving at top speed in a straight line, and for a couple of seconds you can't be targeted or stopped. Clever players abuse that window. The trick is to make a bookmark a few hundred kilometers straight out from the undock point, 200 km or more for safety. Save it the next time you're out there, and now you've got an "insta-undock." The moment you undock, warp to that bookmark. Because you're already moving in that direction, you instawarp away before anyone can lock you.

The mirror image is an "instadock." Make a bookmark right on top of the station, within its docking radius (basically at 0 km). Warp to that bookmark and you'll land close enough to dock instantly, so nobody can catch you on the way in. To make bookmarks, use the People and Places window or just hit the bookmark hotkey.

Set these up at any station you visit a lot, especially trade hubs like Jita. Trade hubs are crawling with people who make a living off new players who dock and undock carelessly.

Docking and undocking without drama

A few plain rules. Docking is instant once you're within range, so right-click the station and dock the moment you can. Undocking is the dangerous part, because you're committed for a second or two. If you undock into trouble, don't panic and don't mash re-dock. Your best move is usually to warp straight to your insta-undock bookmark or to a safe spot. Never sit still outside a station you don't control.

Joining a Corporation Without Getting Scammed

Why bother joining a corp

You can play EVE solo, but most people who stick around join a player corporation. A corp is just a player-run group, your guild or clan. Good corps hand out free ships, run classes, take you on fleets, and answer the hundred dumb questions you'll have in your first week. Trying to learn the game alone in an NPC corp is a slow, lonely road. In a decent corp you'll pick up more in a weekend than you would in a month by yourself.

The catch: EVE allows scamming. It's not against the rules, and CCP won't give your stuff back. So you have to use some judgment when you pick a group.

Scams to watch for

A few classics to recognize:

• The recruitment fee. Someone offers to let you in for a "small" fee or a "security deposit." Real corps don't charge to join. The moment money comes up, walk away.
• The full access grab. Legit corps will ask you to authenticate with EVE's login so they can see your skills and alts. That's normal and fine. What's not fine is a corp demanding access to your wallet, your assets, or your mail. You control what you hand over, so keep the scopes tight.
• The "buy this ship" bait. A corp tells you to buy a specific blinged-out ship to fly with them, then ganks you for it the moment you undock. A genuine newbie corp gives you cheap free ships, because newbie gear costs almost nothing. A full frigate fit usually runs under 20 million ISK.
• Corp theft through roles. Once you're in, be careful what access you accept. If a corp hands you hangar roles on day one and you stash your stuff in the corp hangar, a director can clean it out, and CCP will not reimburse you. Keep your valuable gear in your personal hangar until you really trust the group.

There's also the old "awoxing" trick, where someone joins a corp purely to kill its members. The good news here is that corps now have a friendly-fire setting, and with it switched off, which is the default, shooting a corpmate in highsec brings CONCORD down on you. So classic highsec awoxing is mostly a thing of the past. Out in lowsec, nullsec, and wormhole space, though, CONCORD doesn't protect you, so the same caution applies.

Green flags and where to look

Signs of a corp worth joining:

• They recruit openly and never ask for money or weird account access.
• They advertise themselves as newbie-friendly and hand out free skillbooks or frigates.
• They have public channels you can hang out in before you commit.
• They're happy to answer questions and explain their doctrines.

A few well-known newbie-friendly groups to look at: EVE University (literally built to teach new players), Brave Collective, Pandemic Horde, Karmafleet, and Brand New Bro. They're big, they're used to total beginners, and they'll hand you ships and content on day one. You can also browse the in-game corporation recruitment tool or the r/Eve subreddit.

One last thing. The corp you join shows up on your character history forever. That's fine, and almost nobody cares after the first week, but it's a reason to avoid jumping into the first shady group that whispers you. Take a day, hang out in their public channel, ask questions, and make sure they actually do the things they advertise. A good corp in your first month is the single biggest thing that keeps new players from quitting, and EVE University hands out free frigates and skillbooks to anyone who shows up, which is a pretty safe place to start.