Note: The Bookmark Barn sells tactical bookmarks for all all non-wormhole regions in EVE at rates which are very reasonable for established players.
Bookmarks are the colloquial name for saved Locations. Guides for various types of bookmarks in descending order of importance:
- instant dock (instadocks are vital for trade hubs—Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Hek—since you can be instantly destroyed when trying to dock without them):
- if the station is not a kickout:
- undock, immediately save your instantdock (hit Control + B then Enter), then dock once your 10-second session chain timer ends
- bookmark labels may be edited after creation via the Locations and/or Local Locations windows (Control + L or L, respectively)
- if the station is a kickout:
- check if your corporation is under a war declaration. this crossed swords icon will appear if so. this means certain corps can freely attack you in High-Security space
- if the icon appears and you're doing this in HS, consider doing it instead with an alt which remains in a starter corporation (which cannot have war declared on it)
- undock in something cheap & fast like one of the four fast frigates with a microwarpdrive fitted (and maybe overdrive injectors and/or nanofiber internal structures)
- double-click in space back toward the station model. activate your MWD for speed & turn it off if more precision is required (you can also set a specific speed)
- save your instadock bookmark once you're at zero distance from the station and at a position which isn't causing your ship to bump off the station's model, then dock
- usage: warp to the bookmark instead of the station & dock when you land
- if a station or structure is your current Route destination, you can warp to an instadock BM for it then activate Autopilot mid-warp. your ship will auto-dock when it exits warp
- instant-undock (these are also vital for trade hubs, since ships can be destroyed while aligning for warp unless the warp destination is closely aligned to the undock vector):
- with a non-wardecced character, undock in a fast frigate
- enable the tactical overlay if it's not already
- orient the camera so you're looking at the back of your ship & you have a rear view of the forward-facing numbered through-line which is aligned with the undock
- the Jita 4-4 CNAP (EVE's main trade hub) has many undocks which point in different directions, not all of which line up with a through-line
- it therefore annoyingly requires several instant-undock bookmarks. it's the only station like this
- double-click the 200 at the end of that through-line to make your ship start moving parallel to the undock, then activate your MWD
- once you're at least 175 km away from the station (but preferably quite a bit further), save your undock bookmark
- on-grid probes are often a much faster alternative. launch & scan then check if a probe is on the through-line (it often is). if it is, simply save it as your instant-undock BM
- usage: after undocking, warp first to the instant undock before warping elsewhere
- perch (aka ping, tactical, tac, bounce, observation):
- inline perch (the quickest & easiest to make but least safe & useful):
- hit Control + B while you're still in warp to something you want to create a perch on
- save the BM when the distance to your destination changes from tens of thousands to thousands
- you want it to be at least 175 km away in HS/LS (200+ preferable), and at least 500 km (700-2000 preferable) in NS/JS/Pochven to avoid interdiction
- non-inline or unaligned perch (if you have time to make them, these are always better):
- MWD around and/or use probes to make bookmarks at useful positions relative to objects of interest
- if said object is a stargate, it's best to make the perch perpendicular to the line(s) connecting the gates
- this will let you bypass stop and drag interdiction (see #6 below for more on these) and avoid smartbomb camps
- some gates are not in a shared horizontal plane, i.e. they may be "above" or "below" each other; pay attention when positioning your perches
- straight up and straight down are better than nothing, but it's best to be off at an angle and perpendicular (or at least oblique) to obvious warp vectors
- non-gate vectors may also be worth considering: stations/structures, planets/moons, landmarks & other beacons, etc
- safespot:
- inline safe (insecure since it's trivially easy to reproduce): save a bookmark mid-warp
- unaligned safe (a bit safer since it's unlikely to have been reproduced): warp to an inline safe from a location off the line it lies on, saving a bookmark mid-warp
- deepsafe:
- if a Sansha Incursion is occurring in a constellation, you can save its sites. they're often far away from all other celestials in a system
- if a ship is in Abyssal Deadspace at downtime, it's returned to the system in which it activated the filament at a random spot (the spots spawn like Incursion sites)
- dscan (aka offgrid):
- hit Control + B while you're still in warp to something you want to create a dscan perch on
- save the BM when you're between 14.2 AU and ~50,000 km from the destination (closer minimizes warp-to time, farther avoids being one-shot combat probed)
- usage: warp to the dscan BM instead of the location of interest so you can DScan said location without showing up there
- specialized bookmarks:
- structure deep tether: warping to a bookmark that's deep inside a structure's docking radius minimizes the risk of being bumped off and killed
- it's especially nice to use these as an FC returning a fleet home. warp the fleet to a deep tether BM instead of to the structure itself
- structure interdiction avoidance: spots can be both inside a structure's docking radius and outside common interdiction vectors
- stops (aka catches) & drags (aka pulls or slings):
- stops interdict ships short of their destinations (i.e. they catch them before they get there)
- drags interdict ships beyond their destinations (i.e. they pull or sling them behind their destinations)
- these both allow one to interdict a certain vector while potentially leaving other vectors uninterdicted, which is tactically useful
- for delaying, it's optimal to interdict ships ~100 km from the gate (for interdictor bubbles, that's 80 km in front for stops and 120 behind for drags)
- this forces interdictees to waste as much time as is possible. either:
- they burn ~50 km away from the gate at an angle to get around the bubble then waste additional time changing direction & warping, or
- they burn 100 km straight to the gate (double the distance, to balance out not losing time to direction change & warp)
- bombing: Apothne's On Bomb Geometry remains a worthwhile treatise on this subject
