JaggedCode

Now that you know the ‘how to’ of bookmarks, let’s discuss their uses.

Easy Warp Targets
One thing I forgot to mention before, is that when you are in a system where you have bookmarks, they appear in the main context menu.  So rightclicking in space has the usual belts, planets and stations plus your personal bookmarks.  At the very least, I bookmark stations where our corp has offices.  I have a folder, called ‘Offices’, that has office stations bookmarked and labeled along the office function.

It’s much easier to warp to “Office, HQ” or “Office, Labs” than selecting a station of out a long list of station names.

Mining
How about mining?  Man times the warp-in point for an asteroid belt is quite a distance from the actual asteroids.  Bookmarking a few will allow you to quickly warp right on top of them.  Sure beats the slow crawl of a mining barge across the field.

Looting
You can also leverage bookmarks for faster mission looting.  Many missions are “in deadspace”, meaning you can’t warp to different sections or even us a MWD.  Plus, most mission-runners configure their ships for combat, not looting/salvage.Many will set up another ship for looting, with salvagers and tractor beams.  They bookmark a can in each section of the mission, leaving them there.  After the mission is complete, the “deadspace” is removed but the cans remain.  They then hop into the loot ship and warp to each section, collecting loot and salvaging.

PvP
There are so many ways to use bookmarks for PvP that I’ll only touch on a few basic ones.  One way is to make “safe spots” or “mid-safes”.  What you do create a bookmark while warping between gates.  When you fly through at a later date, you can warp to the safe 1) if you are being persued, 2) if you want to scan for gate campers.  Your foes need to scan you down, giving you time to log out.  Another use is to make docking and undocking bookmarks.  You may have noticed that sometimes when you warp to a station, you still have to travel a short distance to reach docking range.  This is really noticeable in large ships.  With “dock” bookmarks, you place one just above, below, to a side of a station.  When docking, you can now land well within docking range and at a location that your foes aren’t expecting.  An even more crucial bookmark is the “undock”.  This takes some work to set up but is well worth it.  PvPers are know to camp stations.  They depend on the time your ship take to align and warp off.  That window allows them to lock and pop you.  What if you could undock and warp away without worrying about aligning, before they could respond?  That’s the “undock” bookmark.  You create a bookmark a few thousand km straight in line with the undock vector.  Warping to that location is almost instantaneous when undocking.

Bookmarks are critical to PvP, faster mining and mission looting.  The use of bookmarks separates the noobs from the power players.  But, EVE’s implementation has some quirks that needs to be covered.

First, let’s cover creating bookmarks.  The easiest way to create a bookmark is to rightclick on a celestial object (i.e. stargate, station, asteroid) and pick “Bookmark …” from the context menu.  You will have a chance to rename the bookmark.  Once created, you can find them in People & Places Window.  Locations is the tab.  Also, at the bottom, there is a create bookmark button.  This is the only way to bookmark a random location in space.  When using this button your ship’s current location is bookmarked.  An important point is when this location is determined while in warp.  Clicking the button brings up the bookmark naming window.  The location is not captured until you click the button on this dialog.  This is important for making bookmarks between celestial objects.  The third way to create bookmarks allows from remote bookmarking.  Using the search feature on the Locations tab, you can search for systems and stations.  Bookmarking is available in a context menu for the result set.

Managing bookmarks is where we find some quirks.  Folders can be created in the Locations tab.  This helps to organize bookmarks.  Folders are important.  If you ahve your Locations window open and jump to a new system, every bookmark will force a calculation of target jump distance.  Many experienced players will have hundreds of bookmarks, so this causes major delay on jumps.  Another quirk is moving from bookmarks into and out of folders.  You have to drag the bookmark to the folder title, not over the bookmarks inside the folder.  By the way, double-clicking on a folder, a new window opens for that folder.  Renaming and deleting are performed via  rightclicking on a bookmark.  Nothing uncommon there.

Bookmarks can also be pulled out of the Locations and placed into your cargohold / station storage.  This is how we can share bookmarks.  There is an important caveat.  It impacted the servers so much that it caused a major game change.  The crux of the problem is that every bookmark that is dragged between the Locations tab and a hangar/cargohold, the server converts the bookmark into/from an actual item.  Players would trade hundreds of bookmarks at a time, caused huge performance issues.  Now, there is a hard limit of 5 or 6 bookmarks that can be moved at a time (between Locations and hangars).  No limit on moving items between folders, or there is no limit moving between hangars/cargoholds/cans.

A common question is which agent should I use?  That really depends on what you are hoping to gain.

Let’s start with some basic decisions, first.  The agent level depends on your skills.  Encounter (combat) missions of a given level are designed for a certain level of ship.  Level 1 missions are geared toward frigates; Level 2, cruisers, Level 3, battlecruisers; and Level 4, battleships.  If you can fly the correlating ship, then select the appropriate agent level.  There are times when you might want to fly lower level missions.  When grinding out faction standings, Level 3 missions are almost as rewarding as Level 4 but take a lot less time and risk.  I also like to step back and fly smaller craft for fun.

Courier, Trade and Mining missions require a different skill set.  The first two will have you hauling items.  The volume varies but is rarely large.  Many Level 4 Courier missions can be done in a shuttle.  Mining missions obviously ask for ore.  Mining Barges are needed for Level 4s.

Another agent consideration is quality.  Quality is a modifier to the rewards of the missions.  Higher quality agents would pay more for the exact same mission given by a less quality agent of the same level.   Look for high quality agents within your parameters.

So what are the other parameters to consider?  Location is important.  High-sec agents give less reward than low-sec agents (separate from quality).  But remember that low-sec is often haunted by pirates that will scan you down for a kill.  If avoiding low-sec, also look for a system that is far from low-sec.  Encounter missions are usually restricted to the constellation of the agent.  The other types of missions might send you farther.  Don’t mission next to a low-sec system if you want to avoid PvP.  Also, if your corp is centered in a particular region, it’s probably a good idea to stay nearby for support and corp ops.

On to the more subtle factors.  Selecting an NPC corporation is important.  You will be building standings with the corp and it’s related faction, along with collecting Loyalty Points.  High corp standings  reduce service prices, such as refining/reprocessing fees.  With high skills and corp standing, one can perfectly refine ore/items.  That is, get 100% of the minerals without loss to waste or corp tax.  Also, at 8.0+ standing, one can create jump clones if the NPC corp has a station with cloning facilities.  Along the same lines, faction standings offer some benefits.  High faction standings help jump to higher level agents with related corporations.  Also, high faction standings are required for a corp to anchor a high-sec POS (tower).

The corporation LP store is an important consideration for some players.  Corps offer ‘Navy’ items from their LP store in exchange for the LPs one collects from missions.  Some items are in high demand and are far better than even T2 items.  Amarr armor repairers are prized, for example.

Finally, agent division dictates the frequency of mission types.  Encounter missions are profitable but are risky and require salvaging/looting to maximize return.  Courier / trade missions are much faster, require less in ship requirements, but pay little.  But many can be run in the time it takes to complete an Encounter mission.  Mining is great if you is your focus.  Again, encounters revenue comes from mission rewards, LPs, bounties, loot and salvage.  The other types just pay in rewards and LPs.  Divisions dictate the frequency.  See http://wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/Missions_guide#Finding_a_Better_or_Higher_Level_Agent for division details. Note that this is not 100% accurate.  I have been running missions for a manufacturing agent.  Rarely do I see combat missions.  Most are courier with a few mining tossed in for fun.

Hope this helps!!

So it takes you a while to fly from your current system to Jita, huh?  Are you using Auto-Pilot to fly there?  That’s called ’slow-boating’.

Here’s a little history.  Back in the day, CCP wanted to use travel as a great equalizer.  Whether you were a noob or a veteran, everyone would warp 15km from target and have to fly the rest of the way.  Well, it didn’t take long for players to realize that that could bookmark a spot 15km past the gate and warp to it, dropping them very close to the intended jump gate.  That meant that for every stargate in a player’s route, there could be bookmarks — LOTS!!  In fact the bookmarks became a really big issue.  CCP finally realized that things had to change but how?

The final solution was to allow players to ‘warp to 0′ manually, but Auto-Pilot warps 15km out.  (Tons of bookmarks were automatically destroyed when the change was rolled out.)  This gives players a logistics decision when traveling — do I use Auto-Pilot to go AFK or manually warp to get there faster?

The last interactive option to consider is ‘Add 1st Waypoint’.  It’s a small improvement, if any.  Basically, you select the next stargate, start warping to it, rightclick on it in the overview list and pick ‘Add First Warp’, then turn on Auto-Pilot.  Assuming you have set Auto-Pilot to stop at each waypoint, your ship will warp & jump.  Once it jumps, Auto-Pilot will disengage.  You can now re-iterate the process until you are a jump from your destination.

What about ships?  Well, they do make a big difference, especially when ’slow-boating’ it.  The smaller ships generally fly faster, turn faster and warp faster.  All three affect your travel time.  Flying faster is important when you have to make that 15km run to each gate when using AP.  If you are going to manually jump the whole way, it doesn’t speed doesn’t matter.  Overdrive Injectors and Nanofiber Internal Structure (aka Nanos) increase your base speed and other modules decrease it.  Turning faster is important, especially when flying very large ships.  It can take 30 seconds or longer just for a freighter to align to the next gate.  Again, smaller ships are generally faster at turning.  Inertial Stabilizers and Nanos increase this while armor plates and other modules decrease turn speed.  Lastly, is warp speed.  Yep, you guessed it.  Smaller ships are generally faster.  One difference is that there are no modules that affect this attribute.  Only one or two rigs improve this.

What’s the fastest class of ships?  Interceptors with the highest base speeds and warp speeds up to 13 AU/second.  My ‘Zephyr’ flies at 746 m/s, has 1.38x inertia and warps at 16 AU/s.  Another noteworthy class are blockade runners.  For transports, they can best all but interceptors.

Oh, here’s a final suggestion for traveling. Make an Overview Tab for traveling that just displays stargates and stations.  I hate jumping into a busy system and having my target bounce around my overview list because of people jumping in and warping away.

EVE-Online is a complex game.  It can be overwhelming and take some time to learn.  Some basics are often forgotten by many players when starting.  General Settings and Key Bindings are usual casualties.

General Settings

To reach the settings, hit the ESC key.  That should bring up the configuration window.  General Settings is the first tab.  There are a few options I change:

• Show Session-Change Timer ON:  Docking/undocking & switching ships causes a session change.  There is a 15 second span of time where players cannot change again.  This option places a timer icon in the upper left of the screen until the time has elapsed.
• Show Window Identification ON:  I run multiple clients.  This handy option puts the character’s name in the window title.
• Show Tutorials OFF: Great the first time or two.  Don’t need them after that.
• Show Welcome Pages OFF: Same as tutorials.
• Small Station Service Buttons ON: I value my screen space and this saves a bit.
• Merge “Item” and “Ships” Into Station Panel ON: Another screen space saver.  Feels weird not having this windows outside the Station Panel.

There is one option that I do switch often.  It toggles whether ‘Show Info’ tries to re-use a currently open Info window.  When I am comparing items, I turn this off.  Other times, I just want one Info screen up, so I hit ESC and flip this switch.

Key Bindings

Key bindings are not EVE’s strong suit.  It would be nice to have target cycling and a few other things that exist in most games.  Oh well, enough dreaming.  The most important key binding is AutoPilot.  It is oft used by new players.  The second group of important bindings is for drone users.  Drone AI is not the most reliable and they get targeted a lot.  I usually set up bindings to engage and return to drone bay.  To round out the changes, I often add bindings for the more common windows.

Tip for Faster Learning

First thing you should do on a new character is get the six Rank 1 learning skills and train them to 3 or 4. They cost about 45,000 isk each. Check your character sheet, first. You probably have some already.

These give a huge boost to skill training for just a bit of time.

The 4.5 million isk learning skills are well worth the money, but wait until your 3rd month. Get some core skills trained early to make the game more enjoyable.

QUICK!  Save your settings in EVEMon.  Start it up, go the File Menu and down to Save Settings.

I lost ALL my log in info, which is no big deal.  But also lost all my plans.  My main guys had about 10 plans each.  I had saved a few plans individually to share between my alts, but many are lost.  I can recreate them, but this bugs me.

Causes … I did clean a lot of files off my machine, yesterday.  Besides uninstalling several apps, I also cleaned out temp files.  Maybe EVEMon saves files in a cache folder or something.  Dunno.

There are a few ways to find agents. The most common is to just check out all the stations near you until you find one you like. That’s not very efficient. You should probably have a preference on the faction and type of mission you run. I’ll leave the faction up to you and your corp. You should have a preference for combat missions or hauling/mining missions.

Anyways, here is how to find an agent….

First, bring up the People and Places window. It’s the second button in the upper left, next to your name. (I blurred out mine to protect my innocence.)

So, search by faction for Caldari, Minmatar, Gallente, Amarr, or something different like Khanid. You will get a list window. Rightclicking on the faction in this list will bring up a context menu. Select ‘Info’ from context menu, then select the Member Corps tab.

Now, you can guess what these corps mostly have (though most have a fix of agent types.) Khanid Innovation is a research corp. Khanid Transport will have lots of hauling missions. Let’s check out the navy! Click on the blue Info button or rightclick and pick Info from the context menu.

Selecting the Agents tab brings up the agent categories. There are several and I encourage you to visit EVE-Info’s website to see the difference. All the above groups of agents give out 90% combat missions. Some of the other groups, like “Transport”, give …well, hauling missions. Get it?

So let’s find an agent that noobs can use.

Open the Security group. You will see two subgroups of agents, those you can use and those you can’t. Every group is broken down this way for you. Under each agent’s name is the station where you can find them. So if you wanted to use the first agent, you would set your autopilot to Kihtaled.

Tip: you can rightclick on the agent to bring on a context menu with “Set Destination”! Mind you, make sure you are not heading into low-sec, if getting ganked is something you avoid.

And, if you want to keep to a particular system, feel free to scan through all the agents, looking for your destination. Here, I highlight a Danera agent, where I used to mine ore.

That is about all it takes to find an agent you can use.

But what about agents I can’t use?  When can I use them?  How will I know?   Bring up the Info window on an agent you currently cannot use.

The last thing listed, Compatibility, is the standing you need with either the agent, the agent’s corp or the agent’s faction.  You will only build standing with this agent by running missions for him/her.  That’s out.  You can build standing with the agent’s corp by running missions via agents in his corp that you can access.  This is the most common approach.  In this case, we are talking about increasing your standing with Khanid Royal Navy.  Lastly, you can build up your standing with the Khanid faction so high that you can use many agents in related corps.  This third approach is a long process though.

So when will you know?  Every mission has a standing reward for success, and usually a loss for failure.  So after any particular mission successfully completed, you may have earned enough standing to open up some agents.  I like to check for new agents every few missions.

Oh!  You probably want to know how to see your standings with all these agents, corps and factions.  [Need screenshot!]  It’s on your character sheet.  Click on the first button in the upper left, under your name to bring it up.  Along the left edge of the window, you’ll see a Standing tab.  You want to check the “Liked By” and “Disliked By” tabs.  If a faction, corp or agent is not listed, then you have no standing, which is equal to zero.  That’s better than negative standing!

You can also see how fast you are gaining standing here.  Rightclick on an entry and select transactions.  You’ll see percentage entries from missions.  The value is part of a calculation I’m not sure about, but suffice it to say that missions give out different amounts, based on difficulty.

Lastly, a bit of advice.  If you are going to run missions, seriously consider some of the social skills. Social, Negotiations and Connections are all really worth the time.  Social increases the standing you are rewarded per mission.  Negotiations increases the non-standing rewards, like money and items.  Connections raises your standing based on it’s current value.  Here’s an example.  Assuming Connections 4, with a friendly corp where you would normally have a standing of 0.01 without Connections, you would have an effective standing of 2.0, opening up most all level 1 agents.  It’s not a flat bonus, however.  If your standing was 8.0, Connections 4 would only increase it to 8.4 or so.  The bonus is based on how far below your standing is from 10.0, which is perfect.

There are a ton of calculations related to squeezing maximum profit from mining. It can all get a bit confusing when all you really want to know is, what pays the most?

First thing to know is that no matter the ore, your lasers pull the same volume (m3). So you might get more Veldspar per cycle than another ore, it’s real value to you is profit by volume … not units.

I wrote a little PHP page to figure out profit / m3. The mineral prices default to market averages around August 1st, 2007. You can click on the link below the tables to adjust the prices for you. (Values are stored in your browser cookie.)

http://www.jaggedcode.com/eve/ore.php

Did you know there is a whole forum category dedicated to skills in EVE? Skills and their training are very important in this game. Here’s a link to a great post on learning skills

Learning Skills

Here’s an excerpt from Tripoli’s fantastic post:

The following list shows the most effective order to train the skills. When you finish this list, you’ll have all 11 learning skills at level 4. If you do not want (or cannot afford) to train the advanced learning skills, simply omit them from the list.

- Instant Recall 1
- Analytical Mind 1
- Learning 1
- Instant Recall 2
- Analytical Mind 2
- Learning 2
- Instant Recall 3
- Analytical Mind 3
- Learning 3
- Instant Recall 4
- Eidetic Memory 1
- Eidetic Memory 2
- Eidetic Memory 3
- Analytical Mind 4
- Logic 1
- Logic 2
- Logic 3
- Learning 4
- Eidetic Memory 4
- Logic 4
- Spatial Awareness, Iron Will, and Empathy 1-4 (Order does not matter. Train level 5 of these before training their advanced counterparts if you want to stick to the optimal order.)
- Determining the best order in which to train Clarity, Focus, and Presence is a little tricky. For each skill, take your current attributes and plug them into this simple formula: Primary + ( Secondary / 2 ) Whichever skill gives the highest result, train it to level 1 first. Repeat this until all three skills are at level 1, then repeat this same process for levels 2-4.

For the average player without implants, this process would take about a month and you’d be training 2.19 times as fast as you were to begin with. Though it would eventually be worthwhile to train the learning skills to level 5, it can literally take years to make up the time spent training them. That said, many people do actually max them all out, myself included.

You really ought to read this!