Staying safe in low-sec with safe spots
4th November 2008 – 9.16 amWhen you are in a low-sec system in EVE Online it is a good idea to have some 'safe spots' prepared. A safe spot is simply a place you can safely sit your ship temporarily with little risk of being accidentally stumbled in to by another, perhaps hostile, pilot. It is worth emphasising both that this is a temporary measure and that there is little risk in being found, as you can still be found by someone actively looking. A golden rule in low-sec is to keep moving. Staying in any one location for too long will get you killed.
Stargates are dangerous places to linger, as without a way of knowing what's on the other side you could quickly find yourself in trouble when a fleet unexpectedly jumps through looking for a fight. Space stations are not safe spots, neither are asteroid fields, planets or moons. For a start, they can all be trivially found and warped to using standard overview settings. Space stations can be risky because there could be hostile pilots inside and out, and without support you won't know if you are undocking in to an ambush. Warping to an asteroid field carries the risk of finding someone ratting or mining, which could mean finding an easy target but just as easily dropping in to a well-guarded mining operation. Either way, they are far from a safe place to hide from other ships. Planets and moons tend not to have much traffic around them, but as they can be found on the overview and warped to easily, as well as being easy places to pause to scan nearby asteroid fields, the chances of a roaming pilot bumping in to you are too high to warrant staying near a planet or moon for long.
To be safe—at least temporarily, and certainly safer than loitering at any of the above places—you need to find and get to an arbitrary point in space. This safe spot is set-up in such a way that it is improbable to the point of being impossible for another pilot to warp in to the same location unless they are specifically scanning for other ships in the area. A Mule in EVE has an excellent post about setting up safe spots, and Mynxee's comment is worth bearing in mind too. The instructions on how to make a safe spot are clear and easy to follow. As they rely on your continually moving in a system to create the bookmarks a safe spot can be made relatively safely as you progress through systems, without first requiring a quiet system. You can jump in, warp to a celestial object, bookmark an arbitrary point along the way, repeat until you have your safe point, and then you can warp to that safe point and assess its suitability. If it could be safer you can start the process again, all the while being relatively safe from aggressors.
Personally, I have been making safe spots in a more efficient and convenient manner. When out roaming with my experienced corporation we often jump in to a low-sec system and warp as a fleet to one of their prepared safe spots. Once there, I bookmark that location. And there you have it: one bookmarked safe spot location. I have created a folder within my 'locations' directory that contains all my safe spots. With this folder ordered on the number of jumps away each bookmark is I can quickly see if I have any safe spots in adjacent systems, which is handy whilst travelling. The safe spots are also labelled appropriately if they are within the ship's scanning range of a stargate, which is about 14.2 AU. I can then easily warp to a safe location from where I can scan the stargate to look for any ships on the gate without having to get close enough to appear on their overview. Whilst I won't be able to tell what is on the other side, it will at least alert me to a threat on the gate or whether there are scouts present that hint at bigger ships on the other side of the gate. Being able to gather this information makes travelling much safer.
I had also best label the safe spots as being made within the corporation, so that if I should leave the corporation for any reason I know to avoid those locations. Or perhaps to seek them. I suppose it will depend on my reasons for leaving.
One Response to “Staying safe in low-sec with safe spots”
Thanks very kindly for the mention. I appreciate the linking indeed. I hope to be posting information on ECM ( a new article) I am working on, as well as updating that safe spot post.