Hello! If you’re starting this little drive-by guide after the 14th December 2010 then you might as well skip right to the third part. The first two bits address learning skills, which have been removed as of the aforementioned date; so you can skip them entirely. Huzzah!

I thought I’d write some entries on how I go about creating industrial mule characters. Once I’ve got the basics trained, I’ll expand outwards towards invention and whatnot, unless there’s more interest in heading for capital/T3. Let me know anyway; there’s a few months before it’ll get to that point.

I figured this would be of interest for some, and good for me to chronicle, since I’ve done this six times before. To make everything nice and clean, I dropped some ISK and went for the Power-of-Two-with-PLEX offer from CCP and got myself a ‘prepaid’ six month account to tinker with.

My adventures in test-tube avatars assumes that they’re also trust-fund babies: They get their ISK from a Sugar Daddy/Mama (i.e. your main). You can do it without, but it’ll take longer, as you’re about to see.

So, meet Eilean Siar:

It only now comes to mind that I didn’t touch her lips at all. Wonder why. Oh well!

The first step of any shiny new alt is to make the most of that equally shiny 100% boost to training speed. To many, this elicits a groan of displeasure, as thoughts of months of training time being taken up purely by learning skills swim about in your head and haunt your dreams. This isn’t quite the case for industry characters though. My mules only really train Industry and Science skills. The attributes for which are Memory and Intelligence. So there’s a potential 6 learning skills we can just ignore. That trims it down a fair bit.

Day One

Dock at the school (if you aren’t already), and buy the following skills:

• Cybernetics
• Analytical Mind
• Instant Recall
• Learning

Inject and train Cybernetics to level 1 immediately. The interesting thing about implants is that +5s need level 5, +4s need level 4, and +3s only need level one. This is a mere half an hour of training time for a boost of 3 points in all attributes (if desired). Of course, Eilean is only interested in Memory and Intelligence, which shaves a chunk off the cost to your main.

While this is training, buy up a Memory Augmentation – Basic, and a Cybernetic Subprocessor – Basic. You can probably get them cheaper if you fly off to a trade hub, but I was playing it lazy. I got mine for about 10.5m each. This is where you can see the investment being a bit too much for brand new players, or unsupported alts.

Inject Instant Recall, Analytical Mind and Learning, and add them to the queue in that order until you hit Instant Recall IV. This will be the end of your queue for the day:

1. Cybernetics I
2. Instant Recall I
3. Analytical Mind I
4. Learning I
5. Instant Recall II
6. Analytical Mind II
7. Learning II
8. Instant Recall III
9. Analytical Mind III
10. Learning III
11. Instant Recall IV

Once Cybernetics has finished training, pause the queue, insert the implants, then resume. You’ll shave a few hours off the total, but not enough to let you add another skill the the queue, so that’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

The Money Bit

So, ISK spent so far:

Item	Cost (ISK)
Total:	21,282,890
Cybernetics (skill)	67,000
Analytical Mind (skill)	45,000
Instant Recall (skill)	45,000
Learning (skill)	31,500
Cybernetic Subprocessor – Basic	10,464,900
Memory Augmentation – Basic	10,628,990

Just over 21mil. If you drop the implants to begin with, its less than a million. That’s much more palatable to the newbie. Just keep in mind that it’ll be slower, and that this set of posts is tailored to the financially-supported alt.

Tomorrow: Moar expenses! Yay!