As the title, which active activity does not affect NPC standing at all?
I want to maintain relatively high standings towards all empires.
Exploration? Abyssal? Mining? Living in wormholes? Living in null-sec?
Need to choose one as my next main activity.
You can do missions and still maintain high standings aith all 4 empires.
@Imiarr_Timshae has all 4 over 7.0 if im not mistaken.
Generally youll want to avoid storyline missions and run all 5 arcs when you have a chance.
My main char (not this one) has all 4 major faction above 8. This is only possible by playing the epic arcs over and over every 3 months. In the Minmatar and Caldari arcs there are a few missions where you need to be careful to not lose standings with Ammatar or Gallente.
You can still play Level 4 missions but you need to deny all missions where you have to fight against one of the empires. Trouble is that you can only deny one mission for free every 4 hours. Otherwise you will lose standings with the agent, the corp and the faction (very tiny).
Most missions are against the pirate factions (Blood Raiders, Serpentis, Sanshas, Angels). If you don’t mind to lose standings with them, you can still play those missions. Some missions are against Drones or Mercenaries and you will not lose any standings.
Oh, and as Geo Eclipse Oksaras already said: Always deny storyline missions, because they have a huge impact on faction standings.
Other activies like Abyss, Exploration or wormhole ratting are free of standing losses. Mining also, except you kill belt rats which will affect standings with their pirate faction and corps.
My personal advice is to not care too much about standings. You just restrict yourself from playing a lot of very profitable missions. Or from denying missions you really don’t want to play. Or from participating in faction warfare. Try to see faction standings as some sort of resource/buffer to work with.
Ask yourself: Why you want these high faction standings? To be able to accept all Level 4 missions? Once you have the corp standings above 5, your faction standings only must remain above -2 before the agent stops talking to you. And keeping the faction standing above -2 is not that hard. Just switch to an agent from the other side from time to time and play their storylines to rebalance the standings. Or use the SoE arc to fix standings.
The only benefit of really high faction standings is the reduction of broker fees in NPC stations. You can reduce your broker fee to 1.5% with the broker skill alone. Another 0.2% by grinding the base corp standings to 10. And by another 0.3% for grinding the base faction standing to 10. Or you just use player built trading stations and your empire standings won’t matter at all.
It’s much easier to create dedicated market alts if you really want to optimize trading to that level. Grinding one faction to 10 is much easier if you don’t need to maintain standings with the others.
All else fails if you drop your npc standings, you can always hire us at USIA (link in bio) to get your standings (corp & faction) back up.
I believe @Sentenced_1989 has all 4 major Factions above 9.0 standing.
Everybody posted some great advice. Course I’ll also throw in my 0.02 ISK worth as well and put in a plug for ‘The Plan’…
As for your actual question:
Which activity does not affect NPC standing at all?
Most activities in Eve will in one way or another have an effect on standings.
These activities have no effect on standing at all:
Manufacturing (BPC production), Planetary Industry (Commodities production), Trade (Market sales), Exploration (Hacking sites), Transport (Contract courier)…
For more info on those topics, check out Uniwiki:
https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Main_Page
My main has +4 with all empire factions by doing distribution missions. You can do most story lines but keep in mind, on average [in my experience] you will lose .5 faction for every +1 faction gained. In other words alternate between factions, faction gain is slow but overtime the gain is real.
Yeah, gaining balanced standings with the 4 main Factions does take some time to complete when doing regular missions for Storyline offers.
However it can be done fairly quick and easy by accessing the various agents listed in ‘The Plan’.
True, it is slow but there are advantages. You never lose standings with an NPC corp, Higher faction with individual corps affects your sales tax and reprocessing fees. You earn LP, and while you Empire Faction may be 1.0, you corporation standing may be above 5, allowing for lvl 4 distribution, more isk more LP.
I put a clone/ships in all 4 empires and just rotate through them. I found it a good way to learn the different ships/weapon sys.
Cheers for mention! Yep, I have them all pretty high
My alt is also within 0.10 difference with all of them, with exception that alt has Ammatar on 5.1 as well, so all the agents in EVE are pretty much unlocked to me.
As for how to get there, back in 2015 I started declining the storyline missions and skipping missions that require to kill enemy factions (so not taking Matar mission to kill Amarians, not taking Gallente missions to kill Caldari, etc…). Just doing this 2 things keeps your standing locked in. You still gain standings with corporations, but the empire ones don’t move.
From there, I did epic arc round the galaxy, which you can do every 3 months, also made a guide in nice format to help me out: Quantum Anomaly
Epic arcs give you standings with given faction without affecting the other ones. Back in 2019 I’ve semi retired from EVE, so I’ve only done like 1-2 rounds instead of 4 per year. You can get to +7-8 pretty fast, but I’ve been over 9 for years now 
My last run on Amarr took me from 9.74 to 9.78, just amazing for the effort required
So overall, any activity won’t affect NPC’s standings unless you kill them or accept storyline missions from factions that hate them (this includes pirates and empires factions alike).
Mining doe not effect them
The only time my NPC standings are affected is when my fleet shoots NPC pirates at a gate.
Fleet fights, blops hunting, exploration, planetary interaction, producing, hauling and selling my stuff at markets, sometimes mining… I think >95% of my gameplay in null sec has nothing to do with NPCs.
Edit: haven’t mined in a while, but I recall I did get negative standings to the local pirate faction when fighting them off. I didn’t care for that, but if you do, mining may not be a good example.
There are instances where I’ve lost NPC standings when shooting people in lowsec.
I don’t know details, but I know they are were part of faction warfare, so I’ve made a note not to kill pods. Ship kills were some really small drop, but a pod once dropped me like 0.5 standings with their faction (not security status, the actual empire standing)
There are ways in which you can get L4 standings with all four major factions on a day 1 toon. It just costs quite a bit in tags.
Personally, I have a spare Omega account that I solely use to run the SOE Arc daily and share the standings with my main mission running toon. I create 3 toons, run the Arc on all of them, biomass them, create 3 more, rinse, repeat. You can get faction standings quite fast that way, as well as SOE standing…
Scamming
As far as PVE goes,
Epic Arc faction standings gains (from the final mission completion) come 100% free of Derived standings, although any rats killed during the missions themselves will still negatively impact your standings.
Anomic Mission Burner Rats are 100% faction-free and can be killed with zero negative impact on your standings. Killing the Burner Hawk, for instance, has zero penalty to Caldari standings.
Killing roque drones, in most circumstances, has no effect on any standings. EDIT: Also some mission generic NPCs are faction-free, as are some event site NPCs, but don’t ask me which ones exactly.
Other than that you will take hits to faction whenever you:
kill faction rats, plain flavor or special (Faction ticker, Officer, etc.)… penalty is the highest value rat killed every 20 minutes, so you can commit mini genocide for 20 minutes and only get nicked for the value of a single battleship rat.
complete storyline missions, COSMOS missions, Faction Warfare missions, literally anything that GIVES faction standings that ISN’T an Epic Arc… you will gain standings towards the main faction and gain/lose derived standings towards other factions.
Lastly, there is a way to actually mitigate standings losses (even Derived standings losses) via social multiplier boosters (capsuleer day Glamorex boosters for example). The math behind them is a bit complicated to wrap your head around but there is a reason why people go nuts buying those boosters while they’re out…
Especially us in the standings business
It takes a bit of effort, but you can remain positive with all empires and factions. I currently have 7.0+ faction standing with the four main empires, and 2.0+ standing with all other factions, including pirate factions. I also have 2.0 to 10.0 standing with 162 NPC corps.
Only do security missions against rogue drones or unaffiliated mercs. Interbus has quite a few of these missions, as Interbus is neutral to everyone. As a result, Interbus also has no storyline missions. You do gain LP for these missions, but Interbus has no LP store to spend them in.
Do the epic arcs every time they are available. You can also share missions with other players and gain standings that way. For example, if another player takes an L4 security mission for Caldari Navy and kills a bunch of Gallente ships, that player will take the negative standing penalty for killing Gallente ships and not you, as long as you just sit in station and don’t shoot any Gallente ships. You will gain Caldari Navy standing without even having to undock…
Theres virtually no way in fleet mechanics for negative hits to standings unless you kill a ship, even if the other is on grid, they wont be penalized
Some missions give penalty for being on grid.
