Bookmarks

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Original text by Rells
Expanded and updated by Sanfrey Statolomy, Dimensionline.
Copyright Agony Unleashed


Introduction

Bookmarks are one of the most useful things in Eve combat. The expert PvP pilot will have mastered the creation and use of bookmarks down to a fine art. This article will get you started in the study and understanding of bookmarks

Since the advent of the Revelations (Kali) update, Instajump Bookmarks have disappeared from the Eve universe. However, other types of bookmarks are still vital to survival in 0.0. This article covers bookmarks in depth. It is required reading for PvP-Wolfpacks course students and is a skill that you should all learn as well.

Bookmarking Cans and other

The simplest kind of bookmark is to an object in space. If you have favorite mining spots, anchored containers for dropping off loot, or a corporate hangar array at a POS, you can simply create a bookmark at the object in space. For examples, bookmarks to jet cans will speed up mining operations enormously. You can create a group of BMs ahead of time in an asteroid field and use them to set up quick mining ops. Mining barges warp to a pre-selected bookmark (close to several asteroids) and then drop a can immediately and mine into that can. In this manner they can let the haulers know which bookmark to use and they don't risk being several KM away from the new can which slows things down.

Midsafes

One of the simplest and most useful kinds of bookmarks is called a midsafe. It is very easy to make. This is a semi-safe spot that is along the route between two gates. Safe spots allow you to sit in space at a place that is more difficult to find, however, spots that are within 5au of a planet, gate, or belt are easy to scan out quickly so beware. The best way to make midsafes is to target the far gate that you will be traveling to and observe how far away it is. Then warp to that gate. As soon as you start to warp, click "add bookmark" and then wait. When you are halfway between the two gates click "ok." Remember that bookmarks are made when you click "ok" and not when you first click to add one. One thing to remember about midsafes is that they aren't very good safe spots, so you shouldnt linger there. It's quite easy for someone to hunt you down at a midsafe. Due to the quirks in the Eve program, somebody "warping over" you can drop a bookmark and, if they time it right, come back and land right on top of and kill you. (On a few occasions I have "dropped in" on somebody sitting at a midsafe completely by accident -- on one occasion I found a group of anchored cans had appeared at a midsafe I had set up months before!) For this reason, you should make unaligned safe spots (see below).

Aligned Bookmarks

Occasionally, as you and your fleets travel through unknown areas, you will find a need to build a quick bookmark to give you a position some distance off of a gate/station/beacon. Often these are for sniping or for covert ops pilots trying to get a drop on a target. The technique used to make these is sometimes referred to the ladder technique as the bookmarks end up being like rungs of a ladder, being stepped distances from the origin point. If there is a bubble on the gate, pick a celestial that is not in line w/ the bubble. You then start a warp to that celestial at 100. If the celestial is some distance off, you will use the midsafe method of creating a bookmark, but try to make that bookmark shortly after you leave the original grid. If there was a wreck at the gate, as soon as the wreck disappears from your overview, click "OK". This will give you a point to anchor from. Often, the author will call this bookmark "x". Once you land at the destination (100km off the celestial if you did it right), initiate a warp back to your original celestial (gate) at 100km. When you land, create a bookmark there. The author uses temporary names during this process. The bookmark at 100km from the gate is named "A". At this point, warp to bookmark "x". Upon landing at "x", initiate a warp to bookmark "A" @ 100km, and as you land you should find yourself roughly 200km off your original gate. Create another bookmark and call this "B". Continue warping back to "x" and then returning to your previous ladder rung (A,B,C) until you have created a bookmark at your desired range. You then maneuver as needed to get unaligned and create your final snipe bookmark or drop for your fleet. The reason for the shorthand is twofold. First, it takes far less time to type one letter than to type out a complete name for a bookmark, and secondly, since most of the intermediate bookmarks are temporary, they are easy to find in your PnP list and delete later.

Unaligned Safe Spots

These are safe spots that are far away from any celestial object in deep space where you can hide for a time from the enemy. Keep in mind that an enemy can use probes to scan the system to find your ship, but this is a relatively slow process (a couple minutes) and you should have a short period of relative safety there. It is best to have three or more safes and warp around the system if somebody is trying to probe you out. The easiest way to make a safe spot is to use two midsafes that are very far apart. The further away you get from a celestial body and the less aligned you are with two celestial bodies, the safer the safe spot. You can press F11 to bring up a mini-map of the system so you can see your position relative to any celestial bodies.

Insta-Undocks

These are great bookmarks to have to leave a camped station. The way to make them is to undock in a speedy ship with a microwarp drive, click your speed bar to get to max speed, and then click in your MWD without changing your heading. Continue flying out 2000km or so from the station and then mark the BM. Now when you undock you will be automatically aligned with the BM and able to instantly warp off. When using an insta-undock, beware if there is a bubble or interdictor. Also do not linger at insta-undocks; they are not safespots instead warp away from them quickly if there are hostile forces in the area.

Tactical Bookmarks

A tactical bookmark is a bookmark placed close to the gate, station, or other object for various purposes. For example, you might place a bookmark 2000km off a gate so that you can scan the gate to make sure the opponent doesn't have an interdictor or bubble. We talk about other, more advanced uses of "tactical bookmarks" (and how to make them "on the fly") in the PVP-WOLFPACKS class.

Labeling Bookmarks

There are almost as many labelling schemes for bookmarks as there are 0.0 pilots. The key is to make sure that the BMs are understandable at a glance. I have developed a mark-up derived from the early days of bookmarks themselves. It is largely symbolic which makes the bookmarks easy to read and to share when you get used to the system. One useful hint when naming bookmarks is to edit the name of the bookmark in Notepad or a chat window and merely copy paste to the bookmark name dialog. This will make you marking and naming process significantly quicker.

If you have a lot of bookmarks already you should rename them as you use them. When you go through a system at your leisure, take a moment to rename the BMs in that system to the scheme here. You might find that you have duplicates or BMs that are just bad. As you go through them, they will slowly be reorganized without having to spend hours renaming. Once you get your BMs renamed and especially if you spend time doing them all, you should put them in your corporate hangar for people to update theirs.

Insta-undock bookmarks should have the station name (abbreviated) in brackets with the UNDOCK and the distance indicated in the bookmark. Often I will have station bookmarks as well for stations that I use a lot: this is so I dont have to hunt through the right click menu every time I want to go to the station. In systems with dozens of stations this will save you some headches. The following is an example of a typical pair of station bookmarks in my People and Places.

 |> [V-M2-CFO] % UNDOCK @2500 <|
 [V-M2-CFO]

The @ sign is used to indicate the distance from the referenced object. The units of distance are assumed to be kilometers unless otherwise indicated; in the case where the distance is in Astronomical Units, the suffix au is added to the number. In the previous example, the undock bookmark is 2500 km off the station aligned directly straight out from the undock point of the station. If the bookmarks are to a station such as an Agony Unleashed office, I will often prefix them like the following.

 |> [AGONY: V-M2-CFO] % UNDOCK @2500] <|
 [AGONY: V-M2-CFO]

Bookmarks to cans in asteroid belts are written with angle brackets wit the name of the belt. The following is for the third bookmark in belt 2 of planet 7.

 <VII - AB2 3>

Planetary bookmarks are written with parentheses and usually an extra space inside the parentheses for readability.

Often you will want to label the positions where you like to place mobile warp disruptors to make them easy to position perfectly the next time. Bubble location bookmarks are written with a custom brace composed of 3 minus signs and a round brace and the name of the gate or location on which the bubble is placed. The bookmark should indicate the alignment that the bubble is set up to stop.

 ---(Planets -> Taisy)---

Star bookmarks are written with an * on each side of the system name:

Player owned structures (POSs) are written with curly braces with the corporate owner ticker

Sniper spots, observation points and any other points close to gates, stations or other objects are known as collectively as tactical bookmarks. Tactical bookmarks are written with an invented brace on both sides and include the distance the sniper spot is set up for and the gate it is set up on. The @ symbol serves to dictate the distance from the referenced object. In the case of a gate in 0.0, the name of the gate is entirely in lowercase to make sure that it is easy to distinguish beween letters and numbers in the gate name.

You should also indicate the alignment of a gate by using the percent sign followed by the name of the gate or object with which the bookmark is aligned. The following examples are a tactical bookmark 1500 km off the 93pi-m gate and aligned with the g-m4i8 gate. The second example is aligned with planet three. The final bookmark is merely above the gate aligned with nothing. Putting the alignment right after the name of the reference for the tactical makes the bookmarks sort properly without resorting to invented identifiers. We can use the same alignment string to indicate that all bookmarks are aligned to the same spot.

 |> 93pi-m % g-m4i8 @1500 <| 
 |> 93pi-m % (III) @800 <|
 |> 93pi-m % ABOVE @100 <|
 |> 93pi-m % ABOVE @300 <|
 

In the case where you have more than one alignment for ABOVE, you can label them with numbers like ABOVE-1 or with other references like ABOVE-LEFT. This will help you distinguish your alignments from each other.

Safe spots are numbered and marked with a composite brace on both sides that will make them obvious in the GUI. Deep safe spots are very far away, more than 20AU from any other astronomical object and are labeled as a deep safe. All safe spots are labeled with the distance to the closest astronomical object.

 |--01: @3au --|
 |--02: @25au --|

Midsafes are marked like safe spots but with the objects that that the midsafe is between. This tells you what objects the midsafe are between. You can also add the distance syntax to indicate the location of the midsafe. Some examples are below:

 |-- Babirmoult - Anckee --|
 |-- (VII) - Anckee @3au --|
 |-- Babirmoult @3au - Anckee --|

Sharing BMs

By all means share your BMs with other corp mates. However, be wary of giving out safe spots, sniper, observation, and instant undock BMs. There are always spies and you could end up warping in on a huge fleet. Even without spies, someone else could get your safe spot busted with probes and you may not even know it is broken. For that reason you should never ever give out safe spot BMs or put them in a corporate hangar. If you would like to share a safe or sniper spot then give it to the pilot personally or through the contract system.

To copy a bookmark, open your people and places window and go to the window with all of your bookmarks. Then click on a bookmark, hold down SHIFT, and drag it to your hangar or cargo hold. You can copy up to five BMs at a time, and you can no longer queue up the bookmarks. After you have copied them, you should put them in a can labeled with the region; this is called packaging of BMs. Packaging is a good trick, because it would seize both your client and the other person's client if you tried to trade them unpackaged.

To import a copied bookmark drag it from your hangar or cargo hold and put drop it in your people and places window. You can drag as many bookmarks as you want into your people and places, but process takes quite a long time, so beware. You can drop the BM right on a folder to sort them instantly into that folder. When you get BMs out of a corporate hangar don't forget to replace the ones you take!! Agony pilots, for example, are required to make two copies for other AGONY members when they get a new set of tactical bookmarks for an area.

Organizing and Managing Your BMs

Some people prefer to have all of their BMs in one folder. That is fine but it can get problematic if you have a large collection of them and have to scroll down to one in particular; perhaps to share it with a corp mate. To make this easier you can create folders and sort your BMs into these folders. Keep in mind, however, that these folders are client side only whereas the BMs are stored server side. Therefore, if you reinstall your client or delete your cache you will have to resort them.

You can sort your BMs however you want but there are a few common ways that are easy to use and very efficient when you need to recreate folders. First of all, sort all tactical, sniper, and safe spot BMs into folders by region with the folder title like "Region: Aridia Safes and Tacticals". Next take all of your asteroid belt mining op bookmarks and sort them into folders depending on the system name such as "System: Babirmoult". Now when you use these bookmarks, you only have to know what region you are in to find the travelling BMs. To do the actual sorting click, make people and places sort by region, select the BMs for a region and then drag them to the appropriate folder.

Managing your BMs is even more important than organizing. Whenever you jump into a system your client has to sort the bookmarks and figure out which ones are relevant for that system. If you have tens of thousands of BMs this can get costly to say the least. This is the reason that getting them from a whole region from a hangar can be a pain. You may only use 30% of the BMs in a particular region and if you move to another region, you may never use the old region BMs anymore.

Make sure you don't take more BMs than you need. Corporate BMs in cans should be labelled appropriately such as "Tribute Main Corridor" or "Venal mining ops". Take only what you need for your own sake. Also make sure you delete old bookmarks that you don't need. The best ways to do this is to drop them in the corporate hangar, labelled appropriately, and then delete them from your people and places. This means that other people will be able to have them if they need them and you will be able to re-acquire them if you need them again.

Conclusion

If you follow these guidelines you will start to accumulate a list of really great BMs that will allow you to fly much safer all over the place. However remember that BMs don't make you invincible. Bubbles and interdictors can ruin your day. If everyone marks their BMs the same then there will not be any confusion over their purpose. Advanced PvP pilots make extensive use of bookmarks using a number of techniques that are taught in advanced PvP University classes as well as many that we don't currently teach others. Once you realize the potential of bookmarks, the imagination can devise hundreds of tactics that will help you take the fight to your opponents.