Editing Skills and Implants

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==Introduction==

Unlike most console and PC games, EVE Online doesn't have the usual progression where activities earn experience points, which accumulate until you earn levels up, which increase your powers and abilities. In EVE, character progression is based on the training of skills, which accumulate passively, whether or not you are actually logged in and doing game activities. Your skills provide progressive bonuses to your effectiveness in using the ships you fly, the equipment you fit them with, and your interactions with the various systems of the game environment. 

Every profession or career in EVE can be viewed as a set of skills that support the activities that result in entertainment and profit for players and characters. If you're here and reading this, most of this should be familiar, and if you're a member of Signal Cartel, you're here to learn about the exploration trade. Before we jump in, a couple of introductory items... 

===Skill Plans, and Why This Isn't One===

A "skill plan" generally refers to a specific sequence of skill progressions, set forth very carefully to optimize the training of just the right skills at the exact times needed, with the appropriate implants and neural remappings precisely when required to make your character's evolution just perfect. It's number crunching, and theory crafting, and otherwise obsessing over every important detail that could possibly grant an advantage. 

That's not what you're getting here. This is an overview of the skills most commonly used in exploration, with the aim of helping you decide for yourself what you want to pursue, and how far, and when. We're Signaleers, and we forge our own paths, with the help of our comrades. Your decisions are your own, and this guide is just here to help you make them. 

===Skill Planning and Management Resources===

There are several utilities available to assist in tracking and managing your skill training. These range from simple skill queue adjustments to long-term planning with simulations and optimizations. 

====The EVE Portal Mobile App====

There are a lot of compliments and criticisms about the EVE Portal app available for phones and tablets. Whatever its other successes and failings might be, the ability to rearrange your skill queue by dragging and dropping on a touch screen is a very nice feature. It's also very convenient for adjusting your skills as you browse through website guides and articles, without having to open the EVE client and keep it running.

You can also acquire and use skill injectors through the app, and also inject new skills by paying a nominal amount of ISK in lieu of purchasing a skill book through the market. 

If you have the Omega perk of creating a skill queue that stretches beyond the next 24 hours, you can add up to 50 skills that you plan to train eventually, just to have a list of sorts that you can sift through as you go along.

====EVEMon for Windows====

EVEMon is an open source tool for the Windows OS, and can also be run by most emulators or using a virtual machine for Linux and Mac users. Skill queue monitoring and management is available, as well as developing skill plans and other useful features. The installers and binaries are available for free at [https://github.com/peterhaneve/evemon/releases/tag/4.0.20 EVEMon at Github].

One of the most useful features of EVEMon is adding prerequisite skills automatically. If you add a skill to your plan without having all the prerequisite skills, the software will fill the missing skills in for you. This is also possible by selecting a ship or fitting that you want to fly, and having the software build a skill plan with all of the skills required for that equipment. 

EVEMon can also test the effects of attribute changes and neural remaps, and can even suggest a remap based on the skills you have chosen. Bear in mind that the suggested remap is specific to the skills selected, and isn't necessarily the best option if you plan to adjust your skills mid-plan.

====EVE-Skillplan.net====

[https://www.eve-skillplan.net/ EVE-Skillplan.net] is a free browser-based skill planning utility, with the option to directly import your character information, or to create a plan from scratch. The plans can support advanced optimization, including adding neural remapping and implant selection. 

A particularly useful feature is the ability to change your attributes on the fly, with immediate feedback telling how much time would be saved with the new numbers. Considering the usual diminishing returns involved with most upgrades in EVE, being able to assess the difference between a +4 implant and a +5 implant (at 10 times the cost) is well worth it.

====PYFA (Python Fitting Assistant)====

While not specifically a skill management utility, PYFA, the Python Fitting Assistant, allows you to examine various fitting options for ships and equipment without having to actually buy ship hulls and modules. Its benefit for skill training is the ability to adjust your skills and see the effect on a ship fitting. For example, you can adjust the Spaceship Command and Evasive Maneuvering skills to see how they work with different modules to optimize your align time. 

PYFA is a free and open source tool available through [https://github.com/pyfa-org/Pyfa PYFA at Github], with versions for Windows, Linux, and OSX.

===Too Long, Won't Read===

''WARNING! The following recommendations are not the official advice of Signal Cartel, its leadership and membership, or the wiki administrators and contributors. They are not even the advice of the wiki contributor who is writing them... he thinks that you should read the guide. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.'' 

If you're looking at this guide and wondering what you should be doing right away, here's your answer. It's a much better idea to read, and consider, and take your time, but for those who need to take a running leap, here you go:

The immediate factor that will get in the way of successful exploring is not having enough virus coherence to hack cans, which is how you get the loot. Train Archaeology and Hacking both to 3 as soon as you can. 

Your Racial Frigate skill and Astrometrics will come next, because your other major obstacle will be scanning down difficult signatures. If you can't get to the sites, hacking won't do you much good. Your starting skills will be good enough to scan down signatures in hisec, but the big risks and the big rewards are in j-space, and your scanning will have to be better. Astrometric Rangefinding is worth training at this point, but Acquisition isn't as important, and Pinpointing has time-consuming  prerequisites. 

If you're willing to upgrade to Omega, train Cloaking 1 as soon as possible. That prototype cloak is a bell-and-whistle worth having. 

That should get you through about a week or so, which means you now have plenty of time to read the rest of this and make some considered decisions.

===Don't Panic===

As previously noted, this is not a skill plan. Fortunately, you probably don't need a skill plan, at least not to start out with. There is plenty of room for flexibility, adjustment, training a useless skill, leveling up the wrong skills first, and all the rest. It's OK. You'll do fine.

==Skills==

In no particular order, but at least grouped by category, here are the skills of the explorer's trade. Learn them well! 

===Scanning Skills===

Scanning skills are the sweethearts of Signal Cartel pilots. They are the bread and butter of our trade. We take screenshots of our character sheets to show each other when we get all of the scanning skills to level 5. Sometimes we frame the screenshots and hang them on the wall with the family photos. OK, maybe not, but scanning skills are very important, and training them properly will up your game as an explorer.

The single most important scanning skill is Astrometrics, which forms the core of what we might call the Astrometrics Family. Each skill in the Astrometrics Family increases a certain aspect of your scanning, with a higher bonus for each level trained. But, even better, each level trained in Mama Astrometrics gives you the same benefits as one level in each Baby Astrometrics skill, all at the same time. We'll go through the benefits of each Baby Astrometrics skill individually, but don't forget that each level of Mama Astrometrics is equivalent to three levels of Baby Astrometrics.

Astrometric Rangefinding increases your scanning probe strength by 5% per level. The benefit here is fairly straightforward: stronger probes can pick up weak signals better, so you're less likely to get down to your maximum scan resolution and still not be able to get the signature to 100%. If you're down to 0.25 AU scan radius, and your probes are centered just right, and you still can't get it to scan down fully, you're usually out of options... high scanning strength will help you to avoid that situation. 

Astrometric Pinpointing decreases your maximum scan deviation by 5% per level trained. This is a little more abstract than the probe strength, but it also makes sense. When you're scanning down a signature, the approximate location of the signature moves around as you reposition and focus your probes. Reduced scan deviation means that the approximate locations of the signature are going to be closer to the actual location of the signature. The net effect is that you will find the actual location of the signature in fewer scans when your deviation is reduced. 

Astrometric Acquisition is probably the least useful of the Baby Astrometrics skills. It reduces the time needed for each scan to be completed by 5% per level trained. This isn't exceptionally useful, though, because the scans don't take very long to begin with, so making them faster isn't much of a priority. Your training time is probably better spent on one of the other Baby Astrometrics, or on Mama Astrometrics. 

If Mama Astrometrics and her Babies make up a happy Astrometrics Family, then the Survey skill is that strange cousin who nobody really likes. Survey is good for using scanners that look at ships and cargo, which is not much of a priority for exploration. The Survey skill doesn't actually make those scans more powerful, either, just a bit faster. If you like to use a cargo scanner to check out your cans before hacking them, the Survey skill will speed up the process, but otherwise it doesn't have a lot of application for explorers.

Also worth training for improved scanning are the Jury Rigging and Electronic Superiority Rigging skills. This includes both rigs to improve scanning strength and rigs to improve virus coherence for data and relic hacking.

===Hacking Skills===

"Hacking skills" refers collectively to the Archaeology and Hacking skills, which allow the use of Relic and Data Analyzers to open the various loot containers (commonly called "cans") found in relic and data sites. Even though the Hacking skill applies just to data sites, the process is usually called "hacking the cans" for both relic and data sites. 

Developing your Hacking and Archaeology skills is critical for success in obtaining loot from your explorations. Every level you gain in these skills grants you an additional 10 points to your virus coherence while hacking cans. The hacking mini-game is covered more fully in [[Hacking |this part of the guide]], but suffice it to say here that virus coherence is essentially your virus "health points" and the more you have, the more success you will have in opening and looting cans. 

The best loot is found in nullsec and wormhole sites, which tend to have much larger mini-game maps, as well as stronger cores to be defeated to succeed at the hack. Training your Archaeology and Hacking skills will enable you to survive the hazards of the mini-game with enough coherence to defeat the core when you find it.

Training your Archaeology and Hacking skills to Level 5 will increase your coherence by 50 points, and will allow you to use Tech 2 relic and data analyzers. Using a Tech 2 analyzer instead of the Tech 1 version will increase your virus coherence by 20 points and your virus strength by 10 points, which is a significant improvement. Integrated analyzers (which are beyond the scope of this section) also require minimum skill levels in Archaeology and Hacking.

===Cloaking Skills===

Having a cloaking device isn't truly necessary for successful exploration, but most explorers will have more enjoyable and productive experiences when they have a way to reliably vanish. Being able to conduct your probe scans without having to worry as much about a hunter swooping down to destroy your ship is useful, especially for newer explorers who are still getting the knack for the trade.

The Cloaking skill requires an Omega clone to train, and whether the ability to cloak is worth the monthly expense is yours to decide. Cloaking also requires training CPU Management to Level 4 as a prerequisite. Once you start training the Cloaking skill itself, there are 3 basic milestones.

Cloaking Level 1 will allow you to use the Tech 1 variant cloak, "Prototype Cloaking Device I", which provides basic cloaking functionality. If you engage the prototype cloak, you will be undetectable in most circumstances (as with anything, there will be exceptions). For basic exploration, this will usually be plenty of capability: you can stay hidden while you scan for signatures, keep an eye on your d-scan, or shuffle your bookmarks.

Cloaking Level 3 will let you use the Tech 2 cloak, called "Improved Cloaking Device II". The basic utility for explorers is about the same as the Tech 1 device, but the extra skill training and more expensive module will give you the ability to do the famous "MWD Cloak Trick". There are plenty of YouTube videos on how to do the trick; [https://youtu.be/BHkgZWaWdlo here's a nice short one]. If you are planning on going through jump gates in possibly hostile circumstances (including in hisec when Signal Cartel has a war declared against us) this can be useful, but if you're mostly planning to sit still while cloaked, it might not be worth the extra expense.

Cloaking Level 4 allows you to use the pinnacle of cloaking tech, the "Covert Ops Cloaking Device II". This version will allow you to warp while cloaked, but it can only be fit to certain ships, and most of those ships have extensive training requirements of their own.

There is, of course, a Level 5 of the Cloaking skill, but at the present time it doesn't provide any useful benefits for Signaleers (beyond checking another box for our completionists), as it just reduces the time needed to lock targets after dropping the cloak. This might be good for those who use their cloak to sneak up on their victims, but we don't do that sort of thing.

===Spaceship Command Skills===

Spaceship Command Skills allow you to pilot additional classes of ships, and more advanced ships within a certain class. Different ships will also gain benefits from each level of the relevant skill. This section of the guide will discuss the skills needed for the most commonly used exploration ships. Please note that the "Spaceship Command" skill is covered in the section on Navigation skills, as the bonuses provided affect ship agility and are more pertinent to navigation.

====T1 Exploration Frigates====

Tech 1 exploration frigates are the first and most common ships used for exploration. There are four racial versions, each of which has slightly different fitting configurations. You'll need the Racial Frigate 1 skill to fly them: Caldari Frigate 1 for the Heron, Amarr Frigate 1 for the Magnate, and so forth. Each level of the appropriate racial frigate skill trained will also increase the strength of your scanning probes. 

====T2 Exploration Frigates====

Tech 2 exploration frigates, called Covert Ops Frigates, are upgrades of the four T1 racial frigates. There are two spaceship command skills needed to fly these ships. 

The first requirement is Racial Frigate 5. You should be well on your way to this skill level already, as it's already important for increasing your scanning in your T1 frigate. Each level of your racial frigate skill will still provide bonuses to your covert ops frigate, but these bonuses do not relate specifically to exploration. 

The second requirement is Covert Ops 1, which has some prerequisites. You'll need to train Spaceship Command 3, as well as Electronics Upgrades 5, in order to start training Covert Ops. As with the T1 ships, each level of Covert Ops will increase your scanning strength, and will also decrease your CPU requirement for cloaking devices. 

Also, it's worth pointing out here that you should absolutely have Cloaking 4 trained and a covops cloak fitted to your T2 frigate before undocking.

====Sisters of Eve Faction Exploration Ships====

There are two Sisters of Eve faction ships that have bonuses for exploration: the Astero (frigate) and the Stratios (cruiser). These ships require a combination of Amarr and Gallente spaceship command skills to fly. 

The Astero, for example, requires both Amarr Frigate 3 and Gallente Frigate 3 to fly; as with any ship that can fit a covops cloak, you'll definitely want to have Cloaking 4 as well. Unlike the racial frigates, the Astero's exploration bonuses don't increase with additional levels of frigate skill. Instead, Amarr Frigate levels increase armor resistance, and Gallente Frigate levels increase drone hit points. 

The Stratios requires both Amarr Cruiser 2 and Gallente Cruiser 2, which in turn have Amarr and Gallente Destroyer 3 as well as Spaceship Command 2 as prerequisites. As with the Astero, additional levels of Amarr and Gallente Cruiser grant bonuses to armor and drones. 

The third SoE faction ship worth mentioning is the Nestor battleship. While it does provide scanning bonuses (and has the classic ring-and-spindle styling as the other SoE ships), it can't fit the covops cloak, and also can't pass through certain types of wormholes due to its size. For those reasons, the Nestor is not recommended for general exploration.

====T3 Strategic Cruisers====

Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers are arguably the apex of exploration ships, and as such require high levels of training in many skills. While a thorough discussion of these is beyond the scope of this section, it is worth noting that the specific spaceship command skills for a T3C can usually be left until last when training to fly strategic cruisers. The Racial Destroyer and Racial Cruiser skills provide no benefits to flying exploration frigates, and aren't a priority as you work up to the T3C requirements. 

If you do have your sights on a T3C, you're much better off training the prerequisites that will help you in the present: training Navigation 5 or Mechanics 5 benefits any ship, so you're using your training time more efficiently. Of course, this only applies to pilots focused just on exploration; if you plan to fly destroyers or cruisers for other activities, your priorities could be different.

====Caveat On Spaceship Command Skills====

Just because you meet the spaceship command requirements to fly a particular ship doesn't mean you are ready to undock one and take off into the nearest wormhole. Successfully flying any ship requires proficiency in a number of skills: being able to fly the ship around is pointless if you can't operate the fitted modules that are needed to actually do the work. A full treatment of the skills needed to be adequately prepared to fly each available ship isn't the point of this section, but a warning is in order. ''Spaceship command skills alone will not make you a competent pilot of any ship. 
''

===Navigation Skills===

Training up your Navigation Skills will have you moving through space quickly and efficiently.  This section will discuss the Navigation skills that have direct benefits for moving around space, as well as some other skills that augment the basic navigation skills. But first, we'll cover the very important topic of ship agility. 

====Navigation Skills For Agility====

Your ship agility is a general measure of how quickly your ship will turn, but for exploration there's a particular agility measure that is exceptionally important... align time. If you look around, you'll find loads of discussion, debate, and even flat-out arguments about what's a good align time and how best to get it. 

In short, your align time is how long your ship will take to enter warp when you set a destination and engage. Shorter align times are better, especially for explorers: our best bet when threatened is usually to run away, and a fast align time gets us into warp and hopefully away to safety before we lose the opportunity. So-called "insta-warp" ships are deliberately fitted to align fast enough for it to be impossible for an enemy to stop them from warping, but fast align times are still important even without taking it to that extreme. 

Ship fitting for quick align times will be covered elsewhere in this guide, but here there are two Navigation skills which are absolutely essential: Evasive Maneuvering and Spaceship Command. Evasive Maneuvering will increase your ship agility by 5% per level for all ships, and Spaceship Command will increase agility by 2% per level. Ships only have a certain number of slots and other resources available for fitting, and training your agility skills will mean that you need to use fewer agility modules, leaving more slots open for other things.

A quick note: there is an Advanced Spaceship Command skill, which also increases agility... but only for ships that require Advanced Spaceship Command to fly in the first place. Training that skill won't be helpful for exploration ships. 

====Navigation Skills For Getting Around====

The first navigation skill to cover is... Navigation! Many other skills have a certain number of levels of Navigation as a prerequisite, and as an added benefit each level of Navigation increases the sub-warp speed of your ship. There's not a lot of call for moving at sub-warp speeds, often called "slow-boating", but it will get you to a jump point, docking perimeter, or cargo opening range a little faster. 

To discuss the use of navigation skills to get around, it's important to have a basic grasp of "capacitor cost". The bank of energy available for you to use to operate your ship in EVE is called "capacitor", and is displayed as orange spokes in the center portion of the round ship information HUD element, right in the middle bottom of the screen. As you use modules that require energy, the available capacitor will reduce, and it will recharge when you turn those modules off. If you run out of capacitor, your modules will shut down on their own. With that basic understanding, we can discuss the benefits of many of the navigation skills. 

Explorers frequently use afterburners and microwarpdrives ("AB's" and "MWD's" for short) to get around nearby locations quickly. The Afterburner and Fuel Conservation skills will increase your AB speed, and lower the capacitor cost of using the AB. The Acceleration Control skill will increase the speed boost of both AB's and MWD's. Finally, High Speed Maneuvering will reduce the capacitor cost of operating your MWD. In short, these skills will give you more speed for a longer time when you use an AB or MWD. Most exploration ships can only fit either an AB or an MWD, but not both, so consider training the first couple of levels of each of these skills, and then training the higher levels depending on whether you prefer the AB or the MWD. You can always go back and train the others later. 

Finally, there's Warp Drive Operation, which lowers the amount of capacitor strength needed to go to warp speed. To understand why this is useful, it helps to understand how your warp drive uses your available capacitor. When you set a destination and go to warp, you will immediately use a certain amount of capacitor as the cost of getting into warp in the first place. Then, the EVE system will calculate the amount of additional capacitor that needs to be used to travel to the destination, based on your ship, fitted equipment, and relevant skills. That amount of capacitor is also removed, at which point the ship goes into warp and heads toward the chosen destination. 

There are a couple of ways in which this can go wrong, though. If the chosen destination is too far away, the ship will use all of the available capacitor to travel as far as possible towards the destination, and then stop midway. This isn't usually a major problem, because your capacitor will recharge while you are warping, and after you stop you can then start another warp to your chosen destination and complete the trip. 

It's also possible, though, that you might not have enough capacitor available to even start warping in the first place, perhaps because you've been using your limited amount of capacitor for other things... and when you tell your ship to warp away, it just sits there, which is usually a major problem. The Warp Drive Operation skill helps to avoid that eventuality, and also leaves more of your capacitor available for long trips after you enter warp.

====Other Skills That Support Navigation====

Considering that successful navigation relies on more factors than just those covered by direct navigation skills, here are a few skills from other areas that can help you get to the places you want to be. 

From the Engineering skills, training Power Grid Management will open up the ability to train Capacitor Management and Capacitor Systems Operation. Capacitor Management will increase your total capacitor by 5% per level trained, and Capacitor Systems Operation will reduce your time to recharge  by 5% per level. More capacitor means longer warps, and more other things that you can use your capacitor for and still be able to enter warp when you need to. Training these skills also opens up options to equip modules that will increase your capacitor performance. 

The Jury Rigging skill requires a few levels of Mechanics as a prerequisite, but will open up the possibility to equip modules to your ship that can greatly increase your agility, speed, and capacitor economy. Following up with the Astronautics Rigging skill will make even more rigs available, as well as decreasing some of the drawbacks for using rigs. 

Finally, a few levels of Thermodynamics can be very useful. This skill allows you to deliberately overheat a module in order to force extra performance out of it. There's a risk of heat damage to other modules, and of burning out an overheated module completely, but sometimes losing a module is better than the alternatives (such as losing your entire ship and all of your modules). Many types of modules can be overheated, but for this section of the guide it's worth noting that overheating an AB or MWD can provide up to 50% extra output.

===Other Important Skills===

There are many resources to help you figure out what general skills are important to train ([https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/The_Magic_14 EVE University's Magic 14] is well regarded), so the focus here will be on skills outside the usual exploration choices that are often useful for explorers. 

====Drones====

There are two basic types of drones that are often used by explorers: light scout drones, and ECM drones. T1 frigates typically have a drone bay large enough to house a flight of light drones, and the Astero has a fairly large drone bay as well. Drones aren't much of an option for T2 frigates, though, because only the Helios has a drone bay, and it can only hold a single drone. 

Light scout drones basically provide a way to deal some damage in a pinch, especially for exploration ships that don't have an actual weapon fitted. Fitting a weapon requires a high slot, and exploration ships can plan to take up one high slot with a probe launcher and a second one with a cloak... and some ships only have two high slots in the first place. With Drones 1 and Light Drone Operation 1, you can add a little firepower. 

ECM drones can be used to break an enemy target lock and allow you to warp away to safety. There's no guarantee that it will work, but drones are fairly inexpensive and don't take up any fitting resources, so using them as a possibility of escape at least gives you a chance. These drones are a longer training commitment, requiring Drones 5 and Electronic Warfare 4 before you can train Advanced Drone Avionics 1, which will let you launch ECM drones. If you plan on sticking with a T1 frigate or moving to an Astero, it's worth considering.

====Infomorph Skills====

Jump clones are extremely useful, especially if you want to participate in different activities within Signal Cartel. When you activate a jump clone, you essentially teleport your consciousness into another body in another place. Each level of the Infomorph Psychology skill will give you one additional jump clone to place at a station with a clone bay. You can switch between jump clones every 24 hours, and the Infomorph Synchronizing skill can reduce that interval by one hour per level. 

The first major benefit of jump clones is that you can transport to almost anywhere in New Eden instantaneously, without having to worry about how many jumps are between your destinations, or the dangers of traveling through possibly hostile areas. If you want to range far and wide exploring, but still be able to get to Zoohen to take part in an event, using a jump clone will let you quickly get to the station, and then go back to where you left off afterwards.

The second reason to use a jump clone is to change the implants you are currently using. When you jump to a new clone, you bring your skills with you, but you leave your implants behind. Because you can't remove implants without destroying them, this is the only way to have different implants for different situations, or even to keep a "clean clone" with no implants at all. For example, if you wanted to be part of a hugs fleet, where getting both your ship and your capsule destroyed is almost a certainty, you won't want to bring your expensive implants along to be lost. Jumping into a clean clone, particularly one near where the fleet is forming, will keep your implants safely elsewhere. You might also want to keep clones with different skill hardwiring implants in the locations where you need those skills enhanced.

====Cybernetics====

The Cybernetics skill will allow you to use more powerful implants, for both attribute increases and skill hardwiring. Most lower-level implants can be used with just Cybernetics 1, including attribute enhancements up to +3. Cybernetics 3 is commonly required for mid-level skill hardwirings. Cybernetics 4 is required for most of the upper-level implants, such as +4 attribute implants, and some of the most effective hardwirings. The really elite implants will require Cybernetics 5, such as +5 attribute implants and skill hardwirings like the Blackglass hacking implant. 

====Miscellaneous Skills====

There are several skills that can be very useful without much training time at all. These are generally either specific to a certain task, or just used to make your life in New Eden a little easier. 

Any Signaleer who plans on working with the [[ESR:EvE-Scout Rescue Cache (ESRC)|EvE-Scout Rescue Cache]] program should train Anchoring 1. This only takes a few minutes, and will allow you to sow a cache if you find yourself in a j-space system without one. You don't need the Anchoring skill to tend a cache. 

The Marketing skill will make it much easier to sell your exploration loot, because each level of the skill will allow you to sell your items at a greater distance from your currently docked station. Training to Marketing 2 will allow you to sell your items in systems within 5 jumps from your current location, and Marketing 3 extends that to 10 jumps. If you don't want to haul your loot back to a SC home station for hauling to a main market hub, some Marketing skill will help you to get better prices without having to visit stations in every system you visit in order to check prices. Another advantage to the Marketing skill is being able to sell your items in a major hub without the risk of flying in a system like Jita, where expensive ships and cargo are often attacked in spite of hisec CONCORD presence. You can dock a few jumps away from the hub, and sell your loot at hub prices from a safer distance. 

Salvaging can be worth training, as explorers often have opportunities to salvage wrecks during the course of regular exploration activities. If you plan to fit a salvager module, then some levels in the Salvaging skill might serve you well.

==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.

==The Fast Track==

Sometimes it's not a lot of fun to wait, and training skills, especially at the highest levels, can take a very long time. There are some ways to move things along, though, but they're not for everyone, and some of them have significant drawbacks. However, in the interest of completeness, some of the ways to reduce or eliminate the time needed to train your skills will be covered here. 

There is a large warning needed, though: ''training skills are not the same as player skills.'' You can skip over a lot of training time if it's worth it to you, but be careful not to outpace your learning to be a competent pilot. Many people have "jumped the queue" in skill training only to lose massive amounts of time, ISK, and real-life money by flying off in a ship that they lacked the knowledge to pilot. [https://imperium.news/alod-pay-to-win/ Don't be this guy.]

===Accelerators and Boosters===

Accelerators are a type of consumable item that grants a bonus to your attributes over and above any implants you might be using, for a certain period of time. A booster is similar, but generally grants bonuses to certain skills rather than raising attribute scores. These items can be purchased in-game for ISK through the usual market system, and they are also sometimes awarded as prizes for events or as log-in rewards. 

It's worth your training time to put two or three levels into the Biology skill, which will increase the effective length of any accelerators or boosters that you purchase or are given. 

===Neural Remapping===

A neural remapping allows you to adjust your attribute scores in a more permanent manner in order to emphasize the training of certain skill sets. Every character starts with 19 or 20 points for each attribute, but a neural remap will allow you to change that distribution. You only get the opportunity to remap once a year, so any changes you make will be yours to live with for a long time. 

It's generally not recommended for starting characters to use a neural remap. One reason is that beginning characters need to train a wide variety of skills, so specializing early on will always create disadvantages as well as the intended advantages. You might also want to do different activities with the same character, making balanced attributes a better choice. Also, a remap is semi-permanent, which might leave you stuck with attributes that were useful for your first intended career but not so much for the career you changed your mind to pursue instead. 

====Well, If You're Going To Do It Anyway====

If you really want to do a neural remap early on, that is of course your prerogative. New characters starting out get one standard annual remap, as well as two bonus remaps, so even if you make a really terrible choice, you at least have the option to fix it without having to wait for a whole year. 

As long as you're sure you will be sticking with exploration as a career, here is an example of how you might decide on a a neural remap that could be suitable:

Most of your exploration skills have Intelligence as the primary attribute, and Memory as the secondary attribute. Navigation is the most important exception, and has Perception as the secondary attribute. In addition, most of the Mechanics, Electronics, and Engineering skills are based on Intelligence and Memory. So:

Perception 17, Memory 21, Willpower 17, Intelligence 27, Charisma 17 

You'll essentially be shorting your combat skills, as well as a lot of the trade and industry skills, but those aren't really useful for exploration in the first place. Dropping Perception to 17 is an issue for navigation skills, but adding a relatively inexpensive +3 implant will bring perception back up to the pre-remap 20.

The biggest liability here is the reduction in both Perception and Willpower, which can be problematic for Spaceship Command skills. However, beyond Racial Frigate skills and later Covert Ops, there are not a lot of requirements for exploration ships until you start looking at T3C's. That's probably far enough off to consider another remap to adjust to the need for skill levels in cruisers and gunnery.

====Patience Is A Virtue, So Is Decisiveness====

If you want to do an early remap, you probably won't do any lasting harm, beyond depriving yourself of the opportunity to make better use of a remap further down the line. Just remember that the purpose of a remap is to deliberately unbalance your attributes. That creates benefits for some skill training, and corresponding detriments for others. Neural remapping is a sword that cuts both ways, so be careful when you start waving it around.

===Omega Clones, Skill Injectors, and Expert Systems===

Omega clones, Skill Injectors and Expert Systems bring us to the increasingly gray area where real-world money can enter into the equation. Whether or not you are willing to spend actual money on your EVE character is your decision to make, and this section is only intended to give you a better idea of your options. Take the information as you will, but please use your best discretion if you decide to put actual money into your character, and don't spend more than you want to or can afford. 

Before jumping into the possibilities for reducing your training time with real-world funds, a brief explanation of PLEX is in order. PLEX is sort of a middle ground between ISK and actual money. You can buy PLEX with real money, you can sell PLEX for ISK, and you can buy PLEX with ISK. The cost to buy PLEX with real money is set by CCP (the company that owns the game), but the exchange rate between PLEX and ISK is market-driven as with other EVE commodities. 

Whether having a direct and transparent route between in-game currency and out-of-game currency is a good thing is the subject of much debate, but for our purposes here we only need to acknowledge that it is the case, for better or worse. 

====Omega Clones====

The simplest way to speed up your training is to upgrade to an Omega clone, which is what EVE calls its premium or paid subscription. Omega clones have double the training speed of free-to-play Alpha clones. You can purchase Omega time by the month for real-world money, or you can pay for it with PLEX that you buy from other players with ISK. 

There are other perks that Omega players enjoy, but for this section on skill training we'll just note that Omega clones train faster, get access to more skills, and can train as many skills as they want with no cap on total skill points per character. Enough said.

====Skill Extractors and Injectors====

A skill extractor is a purchasable item that allows a player to remove a certain amount of skill points from a character; the usual amount is 500,000 skill points, although there are smaller versions that are somewhat less expensive. Once the extractor is full, it's known as a skill injector. Skill injectors can be used in two ways. 

The first possibility is for the skill points to be injected back into the same character, but into different skills than before. This is a way for experienced players to change careers for a highly trained character. 

The other possibility is for the injector to be sold on the market, allowing another player to purchase those skill points and inject them into one of their character's skills, shortening or eliminating the training time for those skills. Skill injectors are a free-market item, which means that they sell for as much as people are willing to pay. 

Daily Alpha Injectors are a type of skill injector that, as the name implies, can only be used for Alpha clones, and only once a day. Each injector adds 50,000 skill points to be allocated as the player likes, and skill points from these injectors can be used to exceed the Alpha skill point cap. These can be purchased with ISK at market value, or with real-world money at a set price. Whether these are a good deal or not varies based on supply and demand within the EVE markets. 

The net effect here is that you can spend the ISK you earn to shorten your training time. You could also spend the ISK that you get from selling PLEX to shorten your training time. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is for you to decide, and whether you want to take advantage of that situation is also for you to decide.

====Expert Systems====

Expert Systems can only be bought with real-world money. These are essentially sets of skills, chosen to support a specific career path, that you can rent for one week at a time. Depending on who you ask, Expert Systems are a good way to try out a career to see if you like it, a starting boost to make new players' first few days easier, a completely useless feature you can easily do without, and a blatant ploy by CCP to sucker new players out of a little cash up front. Or some combination of those things. Here we'll focus on the skills granted by Expert Systems for exploration, and how useful brand-new players are likely to find them. Whether Expert Systems are a good thing or not, and whether you care to use them, is up to you.

Going back to the very first part of this section on skills, you might recall that there are some skills that you should probably train to level 3 as soon as possible. As far as those particular skills, an exploration Expert System will start you out with Racial Frigate 3, Astrometrics 3, Astro Rangefinding 3, Archaeology 3, and Hacking 3. With those skills already trained, you should be able to fly a T1 frigate out into a hisec system, find a wormhole to j-space, and scan down a relic or data site there. You'll have a reasonable chance of a successful hack, if you have a decent understanding of the mini-game and above average luck. Without those skills, you might get stuck finding a site in j-space to hack, and it's unlikely that your hack will be successful without a very heavy dose of good fortune. 

You can check out the rest of the skills that come with the Expert System by looking at the tab in your in-game character sheet (don't bother looking at the EVE website for details, because for some reason they aren't there). Here's a general summary of what you'll find there in addition to the essential skills just mentioned:

Long Range Targeting and Target Management can be useful if you want to use a cargo scanner to check out your cans before hacking them. Signature Analysis and Sensor Compensation are less useful: you don't need fast targeting for cans that don't move, and anyone who could be jamming your sensors could just kill you instead. 

Evasive Maneuvering and Warp Drive Operation are useful skills, but the align time you'll get from Evasive Maneuvering 3 as opposed to the Evasive Maneuvering 1 that you'll get even without the Expert System isn't going to make your align time crisp enough to save your ship without the right modules. Warp Drive Operation will help you avoid those situations where you have to initiate your warp twice, although that isn't a very serious problem in most circumstances. 

There are a lot of shield and armor related skills included that vary according to which racial Expert System is chosen, and how important they are is debatable. On the one hand, a determined and moderately skilled explorer hunter will destroy you with or without shield and armor improvements. On the other hand, your ship comes with shields and armor, and it can't hurt to make them a bit better since you're going to be bringing them along anyway. You probably won't run into any NPC enemies (generally called "rats") that will be just dangerous enough for better shields and armor to make a big difference, but fortune does favor the prepared. 

Probably the most useful of the skills included that aren't specific to exploration are the sort that help you manage your resources and fitting. You'll get Capacitor Management 3, Capacitor Systems Operation 3, CPU Management 4, Electronics Upgrades 3, Energy Grid Upgrades 3, and Power Grid Management 4. Some of these will give you more resources for using modules in-flight, and others will make it easier to fit different modules to your ship. How much benefit any particular one will be for your specific situation will vary, but all things considered it's a decent collection. 

Possibly the best way to determine whether an Expert System is worth it to you is to look at the skills it provides and figure out how much sooner you can start using those skills with the Expert System than without it.  Just looking at the skills that have an immediate and direct impact on exploration, and that you don't get for free as starting skills (Racial Frigate 2 and 3, Astro Rangefinding 2 and 3, Archaeology 2 and 3, and Hacking 2 and 3),the overall training time at the Alpha rate of 15 points per minute is 5 days and 18 hours. 

So, an Expert System that provides those skills immediately will put you almost 6 days into your exploration training from the very beginning. If you queue up those same skills to train normally while the Expert System is active, you will finish training them to the Expert System's level about one day before the Expert System expires and the skills revert to only what you have trained. 

Is that worth it? It's your choice, and hopefully we've made it a little easier to see the whole picture.

==Conclusion==

Choosing your skills according to a certain plan or theme can provide a useful sense of structure, whether you determine the order of skill training yourself or use someone else's recommendations. The other possibility is to train skills as you decide you need them, which is the purpose of this section of the Signal Cartel exploration guide. If you're not sure what to train next, any of the skills here are good choices. 

You can pause training on a skill, and move another one to the top of your queue instead, without losing your progress. Are you training Astro Rangefinding when you decide you want to fly an Astero? Move your Amarr and Gallente Frigates to the top for a while. Having a lot of trouble with your can hacking? Make Archaeology or Hacking your focus for a bit.

The only real risk for skill training is the possibility of training a skill at a high level for weeks, and then realizing that you really didn't want or need it after all. This is easy to avoid, though. The time spent training a skill increases rapidly in comparison to the benefit of training, which stays the same for each level... which means that by holding off on a time-consuming skill level training you aren't missing out on as much. Also, you have this guide: choose a skill from here that you like the sound of, and the time you spend on it won't be wasted as you progress in your exploring career.


{{Thanks|Chaz Foxtrot|2118629634|both}}