Editing Skills and Implants (section)

==Implants==

Implants give you the ability to speed up your training, and also to add or enhance skills. Every clone (your body in the EVE universe) has ten implant slots: 5 for implants that increase attributes, and 5 that improve skills. In order to use implants, you will need to train the Cybernetics skill, at increasingly greater time costs for the more potent implants. 

Implants can be very useful, but they also come with drawbacks. For one thing, implants can be quite expensive, with the most advanced implants running into hundreds of millions of of ISK. Also, once you add an implant to your clone, you can't take it out without destroying it. Finally, if someone destroys your capsule after blowing up your ship, any implants will be permanently lost. 

As with anything in EVE, the implants you fly with will be dependent on what benefits you want, how much you're willing to spend, and your acceptable level of risk. 

===Attribute Increases===

Attributes in EVE are used to calculate the time it will take you to learn skills, and that's all that they do. Every skill has a primary attribute and a secondary attribute that govern training time, so adding implants to raise those attributes will accelerate your learning. But by how much? 

EVE University's wiki gives a more detailed look at the [https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Skills_and_learning#Effects_on_Skill_Training math involved in skill training], but here we'll keep it as simple and accessible as possible. Even though Alpha clones and Omega clones have a different base training rate, the time savings can be expressed as a percentage that is the same for both. 

The Alpha training rate is set at 15 points per minute, and the Omega rate is twice that at 30 points per minute, with no implants at all. If you were to add a +3 implant for both the primary and secondary attributes for a particular skill, the training rate will increase to 17.25 points per minute for Alphas and 34.5 points per minute for Omegas. So, with +3 implants, your training time will be about 87% of the time without implants. That works out to a savings of about 3 hours for a day-long train, or about 1 day for a week-long train. 

Omegas can use more potent implants, which can increase attributes by 5, but the math works the same way. An Omega with +5 implants for the primary and secondary attributes for a skill will train it at a rate of 37.5 points per minute, which works out to about 80% training time. That's a savings of not quite 5 hours per day, or about a day and a half per week. 

So, how much is the savings worth to you? At the time of this writing, a +3 implant costs about 10 million ISK, and a +5 implant is around 100 million ISK. As with anything in EVE, implants have diminishing returns, so eventually a small improvement costs a lot more time or ISK. If you need to prioritize your implant purchases, Intelligence is going to help most exploration skills, with Memory coming in second place. A Charisma implant, on the other hand, is going to be almost useless.

===Skill Hardwiring===

Implant slots 6 through 10 are for skill hardwiring implants, and they work almost exactly like they sound. If there's a trainable skill, there's probably an implant that corresponds to that skill. If you have the skill trained already, the implant increases the benefits gained from that skill, just as if you had trained additional levels. If you don't have the skill trained, you still get that skill's benefit as if you had. There are even a few skill hardwiring implants that give benefits that aren't available as trainable skills. 

So, skill hardwiring works for you in two important ways. For one, you can upgrade a skill to a certain extent without spending the training time. For another, if you've already trained an important skill to the maximum level, a hardwiring implant will let you gain more benefits over and above the ordinary cap of the skill. 

The skill hardwiring implants that tend to be the most useful for explorers are the Poteque "Prospector" series for increasing scanning and hacking skills, and the Eifyr and Co. "Rogue" series for navigation. 

The "Prospector" implants are available in a few different strengths (and of course higher prices) for Astrometrics skills, as well as for hacking and archaeology. The hacking and archaeology implants will only increase your virus coherence by 5, though, which is not very significant for the generally high price.

The "Rogue" implants provide a full range of benefits to navigation skills, but especially of note are the Evasive Maneuvering implants. As discussed earlier, higher levels in Evasive Maneuvering will shorten the ever-elusive align time, freeing up fitting slots for other uses. The Rogue implants also provide options to increase your warp speed, which is not available as an ordinary trainable skill. 

Also worth mentioning is the Neural Lace "Blackglass" implant for hacking. The "Blackglass" implant has the interesting effect of increasing your virus strength at the cost of losing virus coherence. It's an interesting trade-off: if you run out of virus coherence, you fail the hack, but with enough virus strength you can often destroy a defense node in a single hit and never lose coherence in the first place. The "Blackglass" implant only provides benefits for data site hacking... but if you use an integrated analyzer you can get those benefits for relic sites as well.

It's important to note that you'll need to make more trade-off decisions when selecting skill hardwiring implants than with attribute increasing implants. There are five attributes, and five implant slots for attribute enhancements, and they don't overlap or conflict. Skill hardwiring slots are not so simple, so you'll often find yourself needing to choose between implants that require the same numbered slot.