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Eve is a dangerous game and in it there are more ways to die than moons, planets and suns in any given region. The following guidelines are meant to teach old and new players how to be more successful at stayin' alive in Eve and specifically Nullsec.
Despite the title, this guide will not help you stay alive indefinitely. It rather helps to increase the time between each death.
The most important tool at your disposal is the Local Chat. While the chat can be ignored most of the time, the Member List is priceless.
Four reasons making it so damn awesome:
Like almost everything in Eve there is one exception though, which is Wormhole Space. One of the reasons why Wormhole Space is considered dangerous, is because people will only show up in local when they used the chat. Considering how vital local is for survival, this is a major disadvantage.
Local is great, but to really make use of it, you have to set it up correctly first.
The first thing you want to do is set up your local window:
Secondly, you need to change your Overview Settings to show the correct icon colours. This is part of Unfucking your Overview. If set up correctly it shows friendlies with blue and green, neutrals in grey and enemies in red or orange. This allows you to quickly gain knowledge how dangerous a system is by checking your Local Chat.
Probably the second most important tool is the Directional Scan you have. It allows you to scan for objects in a 360° angle and a maximum range of 14.3 AU, which translates to 2,139,249,551km (so a whole f*cking lot). It is advised to keep it open all the time, so you don't have to take the extra step of opening it when you need it.
You may want to use an Overview Preset (marked green in the image to the right) to filter for certain types (marked blue) of objects.
Intelligence, or Intel for short, is a great tool, but depends very much on others to work well. Since you are one of “the others” for another pilot you should try to contribute to the channel as well.
It is important to know that the Intel Chat is one of the few taken very serious in Eve. If you post anything beside valid Intel or status requests you will attract the anger of others and you could even get banned from the channel (very bad).
Some people like to have the Intel Chat in separate window, but it's also sufficient if you have it among your chat windows, if you keep it in focus when you are travelling.
While you may be tempted to use Autopilot for those long trips, it is highly discouraged in null-sec. You will die 99.9% of the time because you cannot escape a gate camp by being AFK (not to mention the 20km warp issue).
We all know these strategic roadblocks. In null-sec, gate camps can consist of several players, anchored bubbles, and bubbles from both regular and heavy interdictors (make sure to learn the difference in mechanics between the two ships and their bubbles). There are different ways to deal with camps depending on the ships types of both the campers and yourself, and if there are bubbles or not.
“Bubbles” are the colloquial term for the fields created by Mobile Warp Distruptors (“anchorable bubbles”), Interdiction Probes (“dictor bubbles”), or Heavy Interdictor ship-based fields (“hictor bubbles”). They will impede the warping or jump-drive activation of any ship in their radius, and are a frequent tool for large-scale tackling in fleet fights as well as traps laid at nullsec gate camps.
Unlike warp disrupters, warp scramblers will disable MWDs, MJDs, & MJFGs at the expense of activation range. They make burning back to gate in an MWD ship significantly slower.
Stasis Webifiers significantly reduces the velocity of the targeted ship. Makes burning back to gate difficult. Actually will decrease time for target to warp if not disrupted/scrammed.
Covert ops cloaking device allows appropriate ships to warp while cloaked. Non-covops cloaking devices can still be used for the MWD+cloak trick to escape gatecamps http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Cloak_Trick. Useful for warping to a safe and cloaking up until the coast is clear.
Slower velocity than MWDs, but easier fitting requirements and not shut down by warp scrams. There are also some ships that can fit an oversized AB. The Afterburner skill and it's related support skill, Fuel Conservation, significantly increase speed and reduce capacitor use.
Gives your ship a significant speed boost, but can use a lot of capacitor. Also can be shut down by warp scramblers and scripted warp disruption field generators. On smaller ships, MWDs will increase your time to warp. Related skills: Acceleration Control, High Speed Maneuvering.
They give your ship a bonus of resistance to warp scramblers and disruptions. They will help you warp off if your attacker doesn't have powerful scramblers and disruptions. They will not help you with bubbles. The trade off is that your ship will take longer to lock its targets.
Essential for traveling around null-sec, tactical BMs can be the difference between arriving safely at your destination or dying in a fire. You can make them yourself (time-consuming), or you can check out the pre-made packs that several people have for sale on our forums.
A safe spot is a point in space that is not on any grid that be accessed through the regular overview. You can make as many personal safe spots on a system as you want or need. They are useful to hide from your enemy or as a safe location to re-fit your ship or scan anomalies and signatures.
Many people have safe spots within 14AU form the gates, so you can use your directional scanner to keep an eye on who is coming and going on the system.
They are very easy to make following this steps.
You can access your safe spot through the “people and places” menu. In that menu you will find three categories, contacts, agents and places. In the “places” categories, it should be listed as “spot in the your system solar system”. You will want to rename that to something meaningful because during your eve career you will make hundreds of this spots around several systems. Naming this spot, Safe 1 will work fine. To do that you can right click on that location and hit “edit/view location”. This will open the dialog once again, you can rename the location, add notes and put it in a sub-folder to keep them organized.
Some recommendations:
Once you learn to navigate thruogh bookmarks and safes, your survival rate will increase notably, specially if you are mining or exploring.
Perches are BMs that are over 150km from your destination that allow you to scout it out before committing. These allow you to warp 150km+ above a gate or station to see if it's camped, then warp down to it to continue on your journey. Perches can also be used to avoid gate bubbles so that you don't have to slowboat to a gate.
Depending on the size/proactiveness of your Corporation, you may see tactical bookmarks already in existence for commonly traveled systems & stations. Simply right-click in space to see any available BMs. You can add corp BMs, but can only edit them if you have the “Communications Officer” role for your corp. Alliance BMs do not exist at this time.
With the January 2016 patch, grid size was massively increased, from 250km to 8,000km. This has caused many off-grid, insta-undock, and safe spot BMs to now be on grid.
Station docking radii vary greatly. Some stations you can undock and still remain in docking range for several km, yet on others you will be out of docking range almost immediately upon undock. This can be a problem when undocking around hostiles, as you can be bumped, webbed, or blapped before you are able to get back within docking range. Creating instant-undock BMs (or using corp BMs) can ensure you can escape a non-bubbled station camp. Insta-undocks must be over 150km away from and within a straight line of the undock. Your ship will instantly warp before the enemy can target you, and then you can safely warp off. Insta-undocks can also be used for scouting on the way to the station. Warning: for popular stations, enemies WILL have the location of the corp BMs, so warp to them at range or use your own when there are hostiles in system.
The docking radius for a station varies depending on its physical model. It is possible to exit warp yet still be several km from docking, which can result in you getting blapped by enemies camping the station. In order to prevent this, create a BM (or use your corp BM) that is at 0km and well within the docking radius (but not inside the physical model, which could cause a bad bump). Now you can warp to the station at 0km every time, and safely spam dock.