Character creation

Before embarking on your journey into EVE Online, you must first create your character. The choices that you make during character creation affect only your character’s appearance and starting area and will never be a limiting factor for you in EVE Online. The career and destiny of your new pilot are entirely yours to shape and mold.

Choose a Race

Your choices when initially creating a character are solely cosmetic and you can basically go with whatever look or lore you enjoy or fits best with the background or lore you would like for your character. The frigates you will initially have the skills to fly will be of the race you choose, however you are free to pursuing training in the ships of any of the races.

Hovering over the race icons at the bottom of the screen gives you an idea of their general ‘territory’ within the EVE universe, and clicking each will reveal a short description and video about the race’s origins and history.

Choose a Bloodline

After choosing your race, click next, which brings you to the Bloodlines screen. Bloodlines are the cultural branches within a race, and they offer a base culture to build both your character’s look and backstory. Clicking each set of characters highlights then and provides more information about their background.

Sculpt Your Character

After selecting a bloodline, click Next, which brings you to the Character Customization screen where you can customize your character’s appearance.

There are multiple tools you can use to customize the look of your character.

Randomizing Your Appearance

In the upper left corner of the screen is an icon of a pair of arrows in a circle. This button will generate a random appearance for all aspects of your character. Along the right hand side of the screen, just to the left of each option listed there, is another set of randomize buttons. These randomize the individual aspects.

It’s good to play around with the randomize feature at first, as it gives an idea of the myriad possibilities available to you in crafting the look of your new pilot. Randomizing the character often helps establish a base character to start Selecting and Sculpting your final masterpiece from.

Selecting Your Appearance

Clicking the dropdown arrows to the right of each appearance category reveals a list of presets that you can click to select for your character. Several options will also have additional customization tools such as color selectors for such features as skin tone and hair. Use your mouse to drag the choices left or right to scroll through the range of options available to you. Several appearance choices also have a small X in the upper right of their list. Clicking the X removes the feature and resets any changes made to it to the default option.

Sculpting Your Appearance

The EVE Online character creator will allow you to simply hover your mouse over a part of your character's body, clicking and dragging the body part into the shape you want. You can zoom out to adjust the whole body or zoom in to manipulate the fine details. This allows for incredibly diverse options for physical appearance for each race and bloodline. You have a lot of options available to you to alter details, such as eye color, hair and clothing. You can also randomize your appearance, which can be a good place to start if you feel a little overwhelmed with the options. The customization options are split into 7 categories on the right hand side of the character creator window, detailed briefly below.

• Shape - You can manipulate your characters apparent weight and muscularity.
• Complexion - You can alter your character's skin tone and add effects such as aging, scarring and freckles.
• Eyes - You can select from a variety of different eye appearance as well as select your character's eye color.
• Hair - You can set your character's hair style as well as the hair color, beard style (for males) and eyebrows.
• Makeup - You can apply and tweak details such as eye shadow, eyeliner, blush and lipstick for your character. The males have many of the options available to them as well.
• Clothes - Select your character's basic attire. Note that you must select at least one option from either the outer or top and one option from bottom and feet before you are able to proceed through the character creator.
• Body Modifications - This category contains 3 sub-categories for piercings, tattoos and scars. Click the Body Modifications category again to gain access to the other options again.

You can also undo individual changes by back-tracking with the History bar at the bottom of the screen. Made the nose too big and can't seem to find the shape you had before? You can use the history bar to skip back a little bit and fix it.

The options to change gender, bloodline and even race are also available on the left hand side of the screen during character customization.

Once you are happy with your creation you can click on the Next button in the lower right corner and proceed to create your character's portrait. If you want to revisit your previous choices you can always click on the Back button to go and undo any changes you may have second thoughts about.