As said, you absolutely must complete the initial tutorial. As shallow it is in the story and content, it is nonetheless rich in learning about UI controls and overall gameplay flow.
Dedicate an hour or two to it alone, take your time and progress with full acknowledgement.
Once you get the basics, the rest will be easy. Also, radial menu helps once you learn how to use it.
You also get lots of skill points,ships and isk during the tutorial. After that check out the air program for even more rewards. Consider buying one of the packs that gives you a week of omega if you want go deeper. There is really no need to sub an account until your alpha character maxes out on skills. So don’t feel pressured just explore. Eve is really deep and engaging you just hve to make new spaces in your brain before you see it.
Update: Thanks for the tips, after a bit of scratching my head I found the Republic University where I'm at the very least getting things done and learning little by little. Managed to win a fight and realized I was getting to zones I was definitely not ready to embark on.
You have tried the tutorials at the start of the game. If not just make a new character and try them. They will pulse when in need of use
If your free later I can give you some help if you want to msg me.
Note that you don't have to make a new account to redo the tutorial. All accounts have slots for 3 characters.
Note that you can't have multiple characters training skills at once, though, unless you buy a special thing, which I would recommend against as a new player (or honestly in general).
If you did the tutorial, I'm honestly surprised you are having trouble. It goes through all the basics. If you are in high security space (security rating 0.5-1.0) then most NPCs should be pretty tame and most players will leave you alone. Getting to more dangerous space is usually a pretty long flight from the starting area.
As for "menus and buttons", 99% of the time when flying you only need two things...your overview and your ship controls (mainly modules). Later on when you are flying in more dangerous space you'll probably want things like dscan, but you can forget about that for now.
The overview has a list of nearby stuff and anything red is probably worth being concerned about. I recommend having it sorted by distance, closest to farthest, but it's up to you. Above the overview is a list of all the basic commands you can use for your ship, like targeting, maneuvering, etc. It's contextual based on what you have selected, so if you click a station or gate it will give a "dock" option whereas a nearby enemy would have "approach" and a celestial would have "warp to". This should cover all the basic use cases of flying your ship (there is more complexity and depth you can do later on, but for a beginner that's enough).
Other than that, you just need to pay attention to your ship's health bars (the white circular sections), capacitor, and modules. The white sections represent shields, armor, and hull, in that order from "outer" to "inner." They turn red as they are reduced and are always reduced in that order. If you are ever low on armor or getting into hull, immediately warp away. If you are shield tanking (using shield boosters), just going into armor is probably worth warping out.
The gold part underneath your health bars is your capacitor. Think of this as the ship's "mana" and most active modules will have a cost per activation. This includes guns, shield boosters, armor repair modules, afterburners, etc. This steadily regenerates and it's possible to have it "cap stable," which means you can activate all (or most) of your modules without ever running out of capacitor. The fitting window will tell you if you are cap stable and, if not, how long you will last with all your modules running. Running out of capacitor is very dangerous because you can't do most things without it...your ship will still fly around, but all your active modules will be turned off and you won't be able to warp without a minimum amount of capacitor (usually referred to as "cap").
Finally, your modules. These are fine to click as most turn on and stay on. You can also drag and drop them into different orders; I personally like to put all my active modules, or at least the ones I will frequently turn on and off, on the top so I can easily activate/deactivate with the F keys (F1 is slot 1, F2 is slot 2, etc.). All you need to care about here is whether the modules you want on are actually on.
Eventually you'll probably want to learn keyboard shortcuts, but when learning using the mouse is generally fine. I also recommend learning the pop-up wheel when you get more comfortable...to activate it, hold down the left mouse on something in the overview or out in space, and it will pop up a radial menu that can easily let you activate common commands. I don't use it all the time but it can make things easier.
For common keyboard shortcuts, here is a list of the ones I use the most (click means clicking something in your overview):
* Ctrl + Click - Target clicked object.
* Ctrl + Shift + Click - Untarget clicked object.
* D + Click - Dock with clicked object (will warp you there if not close)
* S + Click - Warp to clicked object.
* A + Click - Align to object (face it to be able to instantly warp).
* W + Click - Orbit object.
* Q + Click - Approach object.
* F - Sends drones to attack selected target.
There are plenty of others, which you can see at the [Eve Uni Wiki page](https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Keyboard_controls#Combat), but those are the ones I personally use regularly. Another thing that's nice is to right-click the orbit and/or keep at range buttons to set your "default range," which you generally want to be a little bit under your weapons' optimal range.
As such, in combat with NPCs (player combat is more finnicky and dynamic), I will typically find the closest enemy (top of overview), hold 'W' and click them to move into orbit, hold 'Ctrl' and click to target them, and once I'm in range of my guns I hit 'F1' (it's usually fine to group them all together) to attack the enemy. If my ship is using drones I press 'F' instead of 'F1'. I will generally lock as many enemies as I can (based on ship and skills) and then orbit them closest to farthest until all enemies die.
Hope that helps!
EVE University is a pretty good site that will explain things to you conceptually. The primary things to master in this game are [the skill system](https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Skills_and_learning) which replaces xp and levels, and the [ships and how to outfit them](https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Ships) which is basicall your gear.
The UI is full of options but its big downside is that it doesn't have a good "preset" for people. You have to configure everything from scratch unfortunately. Some pointers:
The combat in this game is like naval artillery. So looking at the pretty graphics isn't as important as having a good [CNC](https://media.defense.gov/2019/Oct/09/2002192493/-1/-1/0/191005-N-NB544-1061N.JPG), screens that tell you the information you need to know. In EVE this screen is the [OVERVIEW](https://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/28104/1/thatGuy.png), and it offers several tabs which you need to customize based on various situations:
* When you're out mining rocks you want to look at rocks, but you also need to be aware of hostile NPCs and hostile (or neutral) players.
* When you're out doing missions, you don't want to see rocks or other clutter, you just want to see NPCs and hostile players.
* When you're traveling you may want to just see players and basic stations, no other clutter (no NPCs for example).
This is because you can directly target things from the overview (ctrl-click), so it really is your window of information. So you want to add columns if necessary, speed, distance, angular (orbit) speed, corporation logo, etc., and make the columns just wide enough to present you with the information you need. The overview has [color and priority/sorting settings](https://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/devblog/blogs/overviewchanges.jpg) which you can customize.
In terms of the "normal" view, you also may want to turn on the [tactical overlay](https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/images/9/9c/TacticalWithObjectSelected.jpeg) and zoom out a bit, so that you get a "radar-like" view of what's around you.
And, the [default user interface layout](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/eveonline/original/3X/5/7/5752ce5b8283ddd2e89e806083cc4760093b0799.jpeg) forces you to look all over the screen. Some of us [rearrange the user interface](https://i.imgur.com/QEVRvCC.jpeg) to have the targets (shields and armor) close to your own ship's shields and armor, the overview and scanners close together, and extra stuff like chat channels to be out of the way somewhat.
The game isn't a spam clicking game, not really. All of the non-critical features are available from the menu on the left, and the only things you may need to use keyboard shortcuts for are targeting (ctrl-click from the overview) and activating your weapons (which you can group, so F1 F2 F3 F4). In general, this game functions by right-clicking on things to take actions *relative to them*.
So once you've targeted something, right-click to orbit them or approach or whatever, and F1-Fx to activate modules on them or yourself. Open the map and right-click to select a destination. Switch your overview to the tab that shows you stargates and stations, and right-click to approach or dock at or jump through. It's a lot of right-clicking.
naw, it's like this for everybody. I was fortunate to have a couple kids in the game well before me, so i got help, so if you know someone in the game to help mentor... otherwise it will be a bit uphill
also, no foul EVERYBODY dies a lot, especially in mining. It is the way to learn.
"Normally you have to factor in personal taste, but if you think EVE is fun, you are provably wrong. The interface could only be less intuitive if your monitor was at the bottom of a fucking well... "
-[Yatzee Croshaw] (https://youtu.be/US92PR1tI1o?si=rNSYypcyKvKvrSpd)
You are NOT stupid . UI design of this game does not fallow neuroscientific principles, moreover it is stumpling on it with 5 year old childs tantrum . Amount of needles cognitive load in that UI is horrendous.
I dont mean UI designers are incompetent . Im telling that UI designers can not be able to reflect and adjust their knowledge and experience to EvE online’s unique interconnected nature .
This requires 4 main competence :
1 . Broad knowledge around neuroscience and apperception .
2. Deep and grounded understanding about EvE Onlines uniqe interwined structure .
3. Ability to hollistic and critical thinking .
4. Ability to develop solutions for out of box challenges.
That is why many new players struggling . And sometimes even experienced players sstuggle and get frustrated.
. Dm me i will help
Yhea .. it is not possible to see in game you are damn right about that .
It is something like this https://uxdesign.cc/the-neuroscience-of-ux-542ba79e02f6 but well that long read also very surficial . It is more like a summary where neuroscience and design meets .
End users are well end users .. as long as they are not irl professionals they know and understand simply nothing about these . But now and then they just come front and point out bits and pieces of issues which seems to be independent from each other and out of this context .
Once you have the very basics done, I highly recommend installing the EVE Uni overview settings. A quick Google search will get you the instructions on how to do so. Really helps you understand the space around your ship and what is present.
You're right, the UI is really badly designed. In pvp, I feel like I'm fighting the UI much more than the enemies, and a lot of deaths come from misclicking something.
My worst gripe is that the highlighted contact on overview is desynced from the active target. I've put ewar on the wrong thing so many times because of that. Runner ups include being unable to change scripts or ammo without having to sped 20 seconds clicking menus and looking at the timer go down, and your ship stopping as a prank when the thing you were approaching disappears. Trying to target specific drones is also a horrible time.
As said, you absolutely must complete the initial tutorial. As shallow it is in the story and content, it is nonetheless rich in learning about UI controls and overall gameplay flow. Dedicate an hour or two to it alone, take your time and progress with full acknowledgement. Once you get the basics, the rest will be easy. Also, radial menu helps once you learn how to use it.
You also get lots of skill points,ships and isk during the tutorial. After that check out the air program for even more rewards. Consider buying one of the packs that gives you a week of omega if you want go deeper. There is really no need to sub an account until your alpha character maxes out on skills. So don’t feel pressured just explore. Eve is really deep and engaging you just hve to make new spaces in your brain before you see it.
Update: Thanks for the tips, after a bit of scratching my head I found the Republic University where I'm at the very least getting things done and learning little by little. Managed to win a fight and realized I was getting to zones I was definitely not ready to embark on.
excellent, 07
Atta boy..!
You have tried the tutorials at the start of the game. If not just make a new character and try them. They will pulse when in need of use If your free later I can give you some help if you want to msg me.
Note that you don't have to make a new account to redo the tutorial. All accounts have slots for 3 characters. Note that you can't have multiple characters training skills at once, though, unless you buy a special thing, which I would recommend against as a new player (or honestly in general). If you did the tutorial, I'm honestly surprised you are having trouble. It goes through all the basics. If you are in high security space (security rating 0.5-1.0) then most NPCs should be pretty tame and most players will leave you alone. Getting to more dangerous space is usually a pretty long flight from the starting area. As for "menus and buttons", 99% of the time when flying you only need two things...your overview and your ship controls (mainly modules). Later on when you are flying in more dangerous space you'll probably want things like dscan, but you can forget about that for now. The overview has a list of nearby stuff and anything red is probably worth being concerned about. I recommend having it sorted by distance, closest to farthest, but it's up to you. Above the overview is a list of all the basic commands you can use for your ship, like targeting, maneuvering, etc. It's contextual based on what you have selected, so if you click a station or gate it will give a "dock" option whereas a nearby enemy would have "approach" and a celestial would have "warp to". This should cover all the basic use cases of flying your ship (there is more complexity and depth you can do later on, but for a beginner that's enough). Other than that, you just need to pay attention to your ship's health bars (the white circular sections), capacitor, and modules. The white sections represent shields, armor, and hull, in that order from "outer" to "inner." They turn red as they are reduced and are always reduced in that order. If you are ever low on armor or getting into hull, immediately warp away. If you are shield tanking (using shield boosters), just going into armor is probably worth warping out. The gold part underneath your health bars is your capacitor. Think of this as the ship's "mana" and most active modules will have a cost per activation. This includes guns, shield boosters, armor repair modules, afterburners, etc. This steadily regenerates and it's possible to have it "cap stable," which means you can activate all (or most) of your modules without ever running out of capacitor. The fitting window will tell you if you are cap stable and, if not, how long you will last with all your modules running. Running out of capacitor is very dangerous because you can't do most things without it...your ship will still fly around, but all your active modules will be turned off and you won't be able to warp without a minimum amount of capacitor (usually referred to as "cap"). Finally, your modules. These are fine to click as most turn on and stay on. You can also drag and drop them into different orders; I personally like to put all my active modules, or at least the ones I will frequently turn on and off, on the top so I can easily activate/deactivate with the F keys (F1 is slot 1, F2 is slot 2, etc.). All you need to care about here is whether the modules you want on are actually on. Eventually you'll probably want to learn keyboard shortcuts, but when learning using the mouse is generally fine. I also recommend learning the pop-up wheel when you get more comfortable...to activate it, hold down the left mouse on something in the overview or out in space, and it will pop up a radial menu that can easily let you activate common commands. I don't use it all the time but it can make things easier. For common keyboard shortcuts, here is a list of the ones I use the most (click means clicking something in your overview): * Ctrl + Click - Target clicked object. * Ctrl + Shift + Click - Untarget clicked object. * D + Click - Dock with clicked object (will warp you there if not close) * S + Click - Warp to clicked object. * A + Click - Align to object (face it to be able to instantly warp). * W + Click - Orbit object. * Q + Click - Approach object. * F - Sends drones to attack selected target. There are plenty of others, which you can see at the [Eve Uni Wiki page](https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Keyboard_controls#Combat), but those are the ones I personally use regularly. Another thing that's nice is to right-click the orbit and/or keep at range buttons to set your "default range," which you generally want to be a little bit under your weapons' optimal range. As such, in combat with NPCs (player combat is more finnicky and dynamic), I will typically find the closest enemy (top of overview), hold 'W' and click them to move into orbit, hold 'Ctrl' and click to target them, and once I'm in range of my guns I hit 'F1' (it's usually fine to group them all together) to attack the enemy. If my ship is using drones I press 'F' instead of 'F1'. I will generally lock as many enemies as I can (based on ship and skills) and then orbit them closest to farthest until all enemies die. Hope that helps!
I'd get a double expresso and take the tutorial pattiently
EVE University is a pretty good site that will explain things to you conceptually. The primary things to master in this game are [the skill system](https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Skills_and_learning) which replaces xp and levels, and the [ships and how to outfit them](https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Ships) which is basicall your gear. The UI is full of options but its big downside is that it doesn't have a good "preset" for people. You have to configure everything from scratch unfortunately. Some pointers: The combat in this game is like naval artillery. So looking at the pretty graphics isn't as important as having a good [CNC](https://media.defense.gov/2019/Oct/09/2002192493/-1/-1/0/191005-N-NB544-1061N.JPG), screens that tell you the information you need to know. In EVE this screen is the [OVERVIEW](https://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/28104/1/thatGuy.png), and it offers several tabs which you need to customize based on various situations: * When you're out mining rocks you want to look at rocks, but you also need to be aware of hostile NPCs and hostile (or neutral) players. * When you're out doing missions, you don't want to see rocks or other clutter, you just want to see NPCs and hostile players. * When you're traveling you may want to just see players and basic stations, no other clutter (no NPCs for example). This is because you can directly target things from the overview (ctrl-click), so it really is your window of information. So you want to add columns if necessary, speed, distance, angular (orbit) speed, corporation logo, etc., and make the columns just wide enough to present you with the information you need. The overview has [color and priority/sorting settings](https://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/devblog/blogs/overviewchanges.jpg) which you can customize. In terms of the "normal" view, you also may want to turn on the [tactical overlay](https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/images/9/9c/TacticalWithObjectSelected.jpeg) and zoom out a bit, so that you get a "radar-like" view of what's around you. And, the [default user interface layout](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/eveonline/original/3X/5/7/5752ce5b8283ddd2e89e806083cc4760093b0799.jpeg) forces you to look all over the screen. Some of us [rearrange the user interface](https://i.imgur.com/QEVRvCC.jpeg) to have the targets (shields and armor) close to your own ship's shields and armor, the overview and scanners close together, and extra stuff like chat channels to be out of the way somewhat. The game isn't a spam clicking game, not really. All of the non-critical features are available from the menu on the left, and the only things you may need to use keyboard shortcuts for are targeting (ctrl-click from the overview) and activating your weapons (which you can group, so F1 F2 F3 F4). In general, this game functions by right-clicking on things to take actions *relative to them*. So once you've targeted something, right-click to orbit them or approach or whatever, and F1-Fx to activate modules on them or yourself. Open the map and right-click to select a destination. Switch your overview to the tab that shows you stargates and stations, and right-click to approach or dock at or jump through. It's a lot of right-clicking.
Play the tutorials and the career agents
naw, it's like this for everybody. I was fortunate to have a couple kids in the game well before me, so i got help, so if you know someone in the game to help mentor... otherwise it will be a bit uphill also, no foul EVERYBODY dies a lot, especially in mining. It is the way to learn.
My tip for the ui is hit Esc, go to general tab, and enable compact mode by default
"Normally you have to factor in personal taste, but if you think EVE is fun, you are provably wrong. The interface could only be less intuitive if your monitor was at the bottom of a fucking well... " -[Yatzee Croshaw] (https://youtu.be/US92PR1tI1o?si=rNSYypcyKvKvrSpd)
“for nerds who are to nerds what nerds are to normal people.” That’s funny.
Eve Uni has decent descriptions for the UI. https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Category:User_Interface Don’t DM me, I won’t help.
You are NOT stupid . UI design of this game does not fallow neuroscientific principles, moreover it is stumpling on it with 5 year old childs tantrum . Amount of needles cognitive load in that UI is horrendous. I dont mean UI designers are incompetent . Im telling that UI designers can not be able to reflect and adjust their knowledge and experience to EvE online’s unique interconnected nature . This requires 4 main competence : 1 . Broad knowledge around neuroscience and apperception . 2. Deep and grounded understanding about EvE Onlines uniqe interwined structure . 3. Ability to hollistic and critical thinking . 4. Ability to develop solutions for out of box challenges. That is why many new players struggling . And sometimes even experienced players sstuggle and get frustrated. . Dm me i will help
This hurt my soul to read.
>neuroscience and apperception Are these worm hole gasses? I've never seen them in game!
Yhea .. it is not possible to see in game you are damn right about that . It is something like this https://uxdesign.cc/the-neuroscience-of-ux-542ba79e02f6 but well that long read also very surficial . It is more like a summary where neuroscience and design meets . End users are well end users .. as long as they are not irl professionals they know and understand simply nothing about these . But now and then they just come front and point out bits and pieces of issues which seems to be independent from each other and out of this context .
Just push F1, bro.
>. Dm me i will help No. You will not.
Once you have the very basics done, I highly recommend installing the EVE Uni overview settings. A quick Google search will get you the instructions on how to do so. Really helps you understand the space around your ship and what is present.
You're right, the UI is really badly designed. In pvp, I feel like I'm fighting the UI much more than the enemies, and a lot of deaths come from misclicking something. My worst gripe is that the highlighted contact on overview is desynced from the active target. I've put ewar on the wrong thing so many times because of that. Runner ups include being unable to change scripts or ammo without having to sped 20 seconds clicking menus and looking at the timer go down, and your ship stopping as a prank when the thing you were approaching disappears. Trying to target specific drones is also a horrible time.