Implants, boosters and skill books
Implants and boosters are enhancements for a character. Implants are plug in modules that increase a character's attributes or provide combat, mining, or other bonuses. Once implanted, implants cannot be removed without destroying them. They are also destroyed when a character's pod is destroyed. Boosters are one time use, temporary "drugs" that provide combat, defensive, and navigation bonuses.
All players start with a small number of core skills depending on choices made during the character creation process and need to buy skill books in order to acquire new skills. Each skill has a different multiplier, or "rank", that determines how long each subsequent level takes to train. For example the basic skills with low ranks may take the player 10 minutes to train to the first level while high-ranking skills like Capital Ships take months to train to the highest level. Each skill may have pre-requisites - a requirement that other skills must be trained to a specific level before it can be trained.
Ships
Main article: Spaceships of Eve Online
Ships in the Eve universe are organized into classes, varying from frigates to titans thousands of times larger. Each of these ship classes has its own advantages and disadvantages. One should not assume that the bigger a ship is the better it is. For instance a frigate is small compared to a battleship, but players may outfit smaller ships with equipment that impairs the abilities of the battleship. This leaves the battleship vulnerable to attack from other ships. However, some of the weapons available to the battleship can potentially destroy the frigate with a few shots. Ships are also balanced with the so-called signature radius. The smaller an object is the harder it is to target or damage, especially with the larger cruiser and battleship-sized weaponry.
Ship equipment and ship modifications
Ship equipment fits in specially designated slots on each ship. There are three types of slots: high, medium, and low. The amount and type of equipment that can be fitted onto a particular ship is limited by the number of slots available as well as the ship's Power Grid and CPU output.
"High" slots typically fit weapons, Probe Launchers, Tractor Beams and Salvagers. Weapons in Eve are divided into four types: turrets, launchers, drones and smartbombs. Each type requires a different set of skills in order to use effectively, and has distinctive behaviors and uses. Each of the four playable races favors a different subcategory of these weapon types, e.g. Missile Launchers (Caldari, Minmatar and Amarr), Energy Turrets (Amarr), Hybrid Turrets (Gallente and Caldari), Projectile Turrets (Minmatar) and drones (Gallente). Additionally, certain modules have an effect on tactics used in combat including Warp Scramblers and Warp Disruptors (and their counterparts, Warp Core Stabilizers), Webifiers, Energy Vampires and Energy Destabilizers.
Every weapon has its advantages and disadvantages. Missiles are available that do different types of damage, and many launchers can use more than one type of missile. Slower missiles, such as torpedoes, tend to do more damage to large targets. Drones follow the target, and shoot at it, causing different types of damage based on drone type. Smartbombs are area of effect weapons that deal damage to any target within a certain radius of the ship and are available in three sizes to reflect Powergrid and CPU use as well as net damage. Also, there are different types available that deal specific kinds of damage.
"Mid" and "low" slots typically fit support modules, including hull, armor, shield, electronics, engineering, and engine upgrades as well as electronic warfare modules. Electronic warfare is an important part of Eve; electronic countermeasures modules keep an opponent from "locking" onto a target or interfere with weapon systems, and can be countered using various electronic counter-countermeasures modules.
Ship modifications or 'rigs' are one-time use items designed to permanently increase one of a ship's attributes, usually at the cost of another. Like implants and boosters they cannot be removed without being destroyed.
Ammunition, charges and drones
Each of the 4 weapon subtypes (energy, missile, projectile, and hybrid) and each of the 4 weapon sizes (small, medium, large and capital) utilize a different group of ammunition. Each group of ammunition is further broken down into types, each of which has a different effect on weapon performance. Generally this involves improving one area of weapon performance while sacrificing another, for example increased damage with reduced range.
Charges also include Mining Laser Crystals (for improved yield of specific ore types), capacitor booster charges, (for a quick boost of energy), bombs, Repair Nanites and scripts (used to improve module performance in one area while sacrificing another).
Drones are unmanned modules that can be deployed and controlled by the player. Ships' drone bays are limited in size thus only a certain number of drones can be carried. Furthermore each drone requires "bandwidth" to be controlled. Since ships have a bandwidth limit in addition to their drone bay size limit a player can only actively use a part of the drones in his ship's drone bay. Drones can be deployed for example for mining, fighting, electronic warfare or ship maintenance.
Blueprints, manufacturing and research
The majority of in-game items are created by players through the use of blueprints. Original blueprints (BPOs) may be used an unlimited number of times, researched to improve manufacture time or cost, and copied. Blueprint copies (BPCs) have a limited number of runs and cannot be researched. "Tech I" blueprints can be purchased from NPCs. More advanced items (Tech II) can be invented from their Tech I counterpart BPCs. This results in a Tech II BPC that can be manufactured. Manufacturing and inventing from blueprints requires items including minerals mined and refined from asteroids and moons, construction components (themselves created from other blueprints), and items either dropped by or salvaged from NPCs.
Additional items
Starbase structures are needed to build Player-owned Stations (POS). Player-owned Stations consist of a number of modules and one control tower that's available in different sizes. As with ships and ship equipment the number of modules that can be attached to a control tower is limited by the modules' Power Grid and CPU requirements. Modules are available for storage, moon mining, defense, weapons, laboratory operations, manufacturing and ship maintenance.
Trade Goods include various goods for different purposes. Some are used as mission objectives from NPC agents. Trade goods also include POS fuel and supplies, certain research, manufacturing, and copying components and political paraphernalia