I’ve long wanted to encapsulate these thoughts on contemporary safe spots. Sadly, this issue is terribly unimportant, and who the hell plays EVE in 2024, am I right? But the fire burns inside me nonetheless. And now it burns inside you as well. Bobspeed, Capsuleer.
To anyone who finds EVE fascinating, but doesn’t actually want to play it themselves, I can highly recommend the “Empires of EVE” books by Andrew Groen. The two volumes span the time from beta to 2014 and talk about the wars and empires of Null Sec. The author interviewed loads of players. It’s a fascinating read.
For someone who’s never played EVE, what does a safe spot do? Are you unable to be attacked in it, or just less likely to be detected?
In EVE everything within 1000km is on the same “grid”. within a solar system you can only warp to known locations. That includes locations that were manually saved or celestial objects like moons and planets.
That means when someone warps to a moon, they can see anyone who warped to that moon, since they are on the same grid.
A safe spot is a location that isn’t on the same grid as a known location. You can still be scanned down by someone, but there are ways to know about it.
Edit: Its been a while and I’m no expert, so anyone feel free to correct me.
Yup that’s it, someone has to actively scan you down to reach you in a safe spot making you safe from anyone who don’t have a scanner, also you can see if someone is scanning you inside your safe spot
EvE expert here, in addition to this, safe spots are created by warping between two points and using the “save bookmark” feature to drop a pin mid-warp. You then turn the ship around to warp to the empty location you saved. Making multiple safe spots and warping between them will drag you away from common warp vectors and celestial object allowing for some truly remote locations. This is important for being able to run and hide until your aggression or log-off timers expire (without a cloaking device).
Back in the day there were exploits that would allow people to throw themselves more than ~14 AU away from objects you could warp to and make safe spots. Most of these have been removed from the game but the ones that remain are golden tactical tools for Fleet Commanders and are worth a ton to keep secret.
A safe spot can be thought of as a place that’s hard to reach
OMG I can understand that I need to touch grass