If you’ve just joined the corporation, these articles will serve as your first step in getting integrated into the corp. If you have any questions about what you read, or feel that something is misplaced or out of date, don’t be afraid to let us know.

So you’ve just joined our space-faring corporation. Now what?

The first and most important thing if you haven’t done it already is to join our Discord. It’s our main method of out-of-game communication, as well as where events and giveaways are posted. You can join our discord channel with this link: https://discord.gg/Gu9H8KRtca

We use a number of out of game services to handle automatic assignment of ranks and roles in places like Discord. You'll need to register your characters with our corporation and link them to your Discord, otherwise your access to things will get revoked.

To register, visit our SEAT (Simple EVE Authentication Tool) here. Log in with your "main" character in the corporation - it will ask to authenticate using EVE's secure SSO portal. Note that we can not see personal details about your account, nor do we ask for information about your characters contacts, ISK wallet, chat channels, or in-game mail.

If you joined the corp with any alts, they will need to be linked to your main character. To do so, click the cogwheel (or visit your profile settings) and link your character there. Log in and connect with whatever character you want to link with.

If you are a returning/veteran player you can skip to the next section.

Before worrying about anything else, we highly recommend that you prioritize finishing the career agents offered near your starting location in the game. These will teach you some common facets of EVE Online, and even if you’re not directly interested in some of them, they will be important to have a cursory understanding of.

If you’re not sure where to find them, you can look in the Agency to determine where your career agents are, as shown:

Open up your Corporation window in the NEOCOM and navigate to Corp Bulletins. This is where you’ll find important links and information.

Make sure to connect to Astral Bookmarks, which should be listed in the bulletins - these are a shared folder of bookmarks that allow you to travel with other corp members across the galaxy, and are a requirement.

You’ll also find a link to our current home system and station, which is where you’ll want to move and set your home station. Once you’ve traveled there, you can open up your character sheet and set it as your home:

The default overview in the game is not very good - do yourself a favor and upgrade early, and familiarize yourself with an overview that more closely matches the common needs of EVE.

Click the “hamburger” icon at the top-left corner of the Overview window, and click Open Overview Settings. Select the Misc tab, then click the button labelled Reset all Overview Settings. Click Yes in the confirmation prompt.

We recommend Z-S Overview as your new overview, though it’s important to note that there are others. To install it, visit the “Z-S Overview” channel in-game by clicking the [+] in your chat box and typing “Z-S Overview” in the new channels to join. Follow the links in the channel to install Z-S Core, and then all the rest of the packs. Finally, end by choosing a layout (Z-S Standard is a good default), as shown below:

Most of the time you’re online, there will be a corporate fleet going, or one will be scheduled in advance. Sometimes people will ask you to join fleet, and you have no idea how.

In order to find the standing fleet, or any other fleet the corporation has going that you have access to, you can use the Fleet Finder in-game. After joining a fleet, pay attention to the Fleet chat channel that opens up, as there may be important operation information in the message of the day linked there.

In EVE, your skills train while you're offline. The rate at which your skills train varies depending on your Attributes - the higher, the better. When you first start the game, you are on a balanced remap. All of your attributes are the same level.

By remapping these attributes (lowering some to raise others) you can direct your skill training in a more focused direction to specialize and decrease the amount it takes to learn skills. As a new player, you'll be rapidly raising a lot of core ship skills in navigation, engineering, and electronics, while simultaneously rushing for Spaceship Command skills and weapon systems skills so that you can get into new shiny ships, and have the guns to fire on them.

For this reason, for the first ~year of skill training, we highly recommend a neural remap that focuses on Intelligence and Perception. This will most effectively cover your bases, and over a year of training, will take off months of training time.

In order to remap your attributes, visit the Attributes page. Here it details your current attribute scores, affected by any implants you have installed. You can remap as many times as you like while you have bonus remaps available. If none are left, you have to wait 1 year before remapping again. All characters start with bonus remaps, so don't be afraid of "screwing up your character" this early, you can always reverse course.

There are some contracts (sell orders, essentially) that are available only to other members of the corporation. These are typically pre-fit ships or assets that are strategically located and ready to go for your convenience at a fair market value price, or below. For example you can find mining ships in our HQ, saving you the trouble of having to go to a trade hub, fitting out the ship, and hauling it back yourself.

To find these contracts, you can visit the Neocom, Financial, Contracts, and clicking the shortcut for contracts assigned to the corporation.

The career agents are taken care of, you've moved to or near our HQ, you've got an overview you like, set up some basic skill training for our ships, and are probably wondering: Now what? What is there to actually do in this fancy corp? Read on, brave adventurer, for some examples of what you can jump into. This list is by no means complete - EVE is a huge game. The following sections below are mere primers on how to get involved in the most common facets of the game that the corp actively participates in.

One of the great things about EVE is there are lots of different ways to make ISK for different playstyles or activity levels. One of the most common and easily accessible ways to make some semi-passive income is by mining asteroid belts. It should be stated early on that this is one of the lower ISK-Per-Hour methods of getting an income going in EVE, but a lot of people love the easygoing nature of it. Our next-door systems have more asteroid belts than we know what to do with, and our free ships for new players should include a Venture - a sturdy, effective mining frigate that can fill up a few million ISK worth of ore per trip. This is a great way to get a bit of supplemental income while you read guides, work from home, or just kick back and be social with corp mates. You may even find yourself in a fleet of other similarly-minded mining ships, or even get your mining rate boosted by one of our highly trained industrial command pilots.

In order to get the best bang for your buck, you’ll want to sell you ore to the corporation - not keep it for yourself, or attempt to refine it on your own. This is because 50% of the rock’s minerals will be wasted with starting skills. Ouch! Fortunately, the corporation has several characters with months of training and expensive implants available to refine your ore at much higher efficiency levels, meaning more money in your pocket. You can even choose to ask them to give you the minerals back instead of just ISK, if you’d like to use it for manufacturing yourself.

In order to sell ore to the corporation, you’ll want to use our Buyback Program. The latest information on how to do that is in Corp Bulletins under “Ore Buyback”.

If you're feeling extra daring, we are bordering a selection of low security systems. These can sometimes contain more valuable ore, or even Gas, a more valuable resource that spawns with the tradeoff of your venture being at risk of destruction by other players in open PVP. It's not a matter of if you will be destroyed, but when. Additionally, our wormhole system can sometimes offer highly desirable ore, as well as moon rocks (worth 2.5-3.0x that of high sec ores). For more information on how to get involved in that, see the Wormhole section below.

If you like the idea of shooting NPC ships into the dirt, looting their wrecks, salvaging them for parts, and going back home to collect rewards, then mission running is a good place to start as far as combat PVE gameplay goes. EVE has a myriad of different mission types, though the most commonly done are the security missions, and distribution missions. Security missions are all about shooting the baddies and bringing home the goods - our HQ system offers up to level 4 security agents that will give you increasingly difficult objectives as you gain Standings with their corporation. Distribution missions are hauling missions, commonly referred to as "FedEX" missions. All you usually have to do is pick something up and drop it off somewhere else. They're comparatively dull, but are often used to speedily increase standings.

Missions can be done in a fleet as well - if you want to see what higher level missions look like, corp members are likely more than happy to bring you along to a level 3 or even a level 4 mission to share standings and rewards. Alternatively, you can take a salvage destroyer and 'clean up' the wrecks and loot left behind by some of the mission runners who don't mind letting you have it. Salvaging left-behind wrecks can be a somewhat lucrative career just on its own.

Familiar with how missions are run, but want more of a challenge? Does the idea of roguelike, dangerous and unpredictable PVE gameplay inspire you? Well, Abyssal Deadspace may be of interest to you. Abyssals can reward significantly higher rewards than regular missions, but are more dangerous - and if you don't successfully complete the mission in 20 minutes, you lose your ship and your pod.

Abyssal deadspace is separated into seven difficulty categories, commonly abbreviated as T0 through T6. T0 abyssal sites are able to be completed by a brand new character in a basic frigate fit - so if you want to experience Abyssals and get your feet wet, you can take a frigate from the Trial hangar in the HQ, grab one of the Tranquil filaments, and get started. For information on how Abyssals work, how to do them, and what to expect, please consult the video below as a starting point. Note that Abyssals can be the most dangerous, costly, and rewarding PVE experiences in EVE at the higher level of difficulties, so if you enjoy them and specialize, they can be incredibly lucrative. Please do your due diligence on research before committing significant sums of ISK to this activity.

As part of Astral Acquisitions, you have access to our growing database of corporate blueprints, allowing you to manufacture weapons, ammunition, ships, and all sorts of other essentials for use or profit. If you've completed the Industry-focused Career Agent, you'll at least be familiar with the basics of how industry works. Information on where you can access these blueprints, and how to use them, is available in-game under Corp Bulletins.

One of the areas of EVE that people can't seem to get enough of is PVP - very few games are like it, where you risk your hard earned ISK and ships in dangerous conflicts that are, very often, quick and decisive. A lot of people are lured in by "box art" battles of hundreds of players slamming lasers and missiles into each other for hours, but the reality is most of the PVP in the game that you'll experience are short, one-sided ganks. In order to help bridge that gap, we regularly host pvp roams under our glorious fleet commanders.

There are also public fleets such as Spectre Fleet where experienced fcs from across the community in a myriad of different corporations and alliances all set aside their differences in the good name of fun, and take new and veteran players alike on guided fleets in order to get fights. You can join these, even with basic skills - many of the roams have new player friendly fits, or the fits that they do use can be "downscaled" in order to fit your skills.

More information on how to join these fleets is in our Discord.

Does the idea of "treasure hunting" in space appeal to you? Exploration might be one of the facets of the game that suits you well. Assuming you've completed the exploration career agent and have a basic familiarity of how your probe scanner operates, you can take one of the scanning frigates in HQ (or build your own) and go hunting down for wormholes, data/relic sites, or DED combat sites. With the scanning frigate itself, you'll be able to venture into the data and relic sites to hack or analyze the containers inside for loot that can be sold on the open market or to industrialists. If you find a combat site, you can come back in a PVE ship and clear it for a chance at valuable loot, or let other corp mates know about it and see if they're interested in using it or helping you. And if you find a wormhole, you can (carefully, as wormholes are open PVP dangerous space) explore it to find even more valuable data/relic sites, gas sites that miners would be interested in clearing, and more.

Astral owns a wormhole, a beachhead in arguably the most dangerous space in EVE. Where pvp is open and where you cannot even tell if there are any other pilots lurking in system by looking the local chat. Knowledge of the Directional Scanner and general game mechanics are paramount to keep you safe.

If you want to take advantage of wormholes, you'll want to familiarize yourself with wormhole mechanics, as shown below. Additionally, the corp has some hard requirements for participation, both to protect you as a player, but also to protect the corporation and its allies in times of need, due to the volatile and hostile nature of wormhole space. The requirements and means of participation are outlined in Corp Bulletins.