So Compare Regions is one of the older panels on EF-Map, and the article that used to sit at this URL described a version of it that never existed. Mining revenue per day, kill counts, sovereignty, trend arrows, a CSV export button. None of that was ever built and none of it is in the code. I have rewritten the whole thing against the files that actually draw the panel, so what follows is what it does today and nothing else.
Quick context if you are landing here fresh. EF-Map is a free 3D map of EVE Frontier, and it ships the entire universe as a SQLite file your browser downloads once, about 5 MB. That file holds 24,026 solar systems across 274 regions and 2,163 constellations, plus 7,072 stargate rows. Compare Regions is the panel that takes all of that and gives you one row per region, so you can sort the whole map instead of clicking through it.
What the panel actually shows
You open it from the left rail. It is disabled while you are in Solar System View, because it is a universe-scale tool and there is nothing for it to say about one system. It opens as a resizable window at 900 by 520, and the size you leave it at is stored per panel in local storage, so it comes back the same next time.
There are five tabs across the top. Overview, Travel, Density, Planets and Raw Data. They are all the same table with different columns showing, and Raw Data is all twenty metrics at once, laid out at 1,240 pixels wide, which is the main reason the panel is resizable at all. Sorting is a click on any column header, clicking the same one again flips the direction, and your choice is kept in session storage so reopening the panel puts you back where you were. The default is systems, descending.
Overview also gets a row of six summary cards above the table. Largest region, best connected, most isolated systems, densest, shortest estimated traversal, and how many regions have a station. Each card is a button. Clicking a card, or clicking any row in the table, picks a representative system in that region, which is the one with the most planets, highlights that region on the map behind the panel and opens the single-region stats window on it. Best and worst values in each visible column get tinted, and isolated-system counts get a warning marker instead of a good one. Ties are all highlighted rather than the code picking one arbitrarily, which matters more than you would think when half the map is tied at zero.
Every number is computed in your browser
There is no API call behind this panel and nothing about your session goes anywhere. The map database is fetched once, cached in IndexedDB and parsed in a worker at load. When you open Compare Regions it builds one big message containing all 24,026 systems with their positions, their gate degree, their planet count and a station flag, plus every stargate with its length in light years, and posts the lot into the region stats worker in a single go. The worker buckets the systems by region and computes all 274 in one pass. Nothing is precomputed on a server, which is also why the panel shows a loading state for a moment when it opens rather than appearing instantly.
There is a quirk in there I am not proud of. Compare Regions borrows the same worker the single-region stats card uses, so it temporarily swaps that worker's message handler for its own, splits the result into the compare cache, then puts the original handler back and forwards the event on so the single-region flow still works. It has worked for a long time and it is exactly the sort of arrangement that looks fine right up until two things fire at once. There is also an inline fallback if the worker cannot start at all, and I should be honest that the fallback returns zeros for the traversal estimates rather than computing them.
The number I did not expect
The interesting column is not systems, it is isolation. A system counts as gated if at least one stargate touches it, and isolated if none do.
174 of the 274 regions do not contain a single gated system. Only 100 regions have any internal gate link at all, and not one region is fully gated. The largest region on the map is HK1-Y-41 with 222 systems, and none of them are on the stargate network. The best connected region is 5917:C, which manages 29 of its 30 systems, and 50 regions are more than half gated. The median region is 72 systems and the smallest is a single system on its own.
The other thing that fell out while I was checking this. Every one of the 7,072 stargate rows connects two systems inside the same region. Not one stargate crosses a region boundary. The worker filters gates down to same-region pairs before it computes anything, and it turns out that filter throws away nothing whatsoever. I would not have guessed that, and it means the gate network is 100 local pockets rather than a road system, which is the single most useful thing this panel taught me about the map.
Stations are thin too. 98 systems have one, spread across 95 regions, which is why the station column is a yes or no pill rather than a count.
Why half the columns say "est"
The travel columns are estimates and the tooltips say so, but it is worth knowing how rough. The worker walks each region with a greedy nearest-neighbour route. It starts at the highest-degree system, and at each step it prefers a gate path over a ship jump and otherwise takes the shortest option, with gate paths found by a breadth-first search over that region's gate graph. That gives you a plausible cost for crossing a region, not an optimal one. Treat it as a way of ranking regions against each other rather than as a route to fly.
Footprint is a convex hull over the x and z coordinates, so a 3D region flattened onto a plane, and density is systems per 100 square light years of that hull. A tall thin region and a flat wide one can have the same footprint and read as the same density while being nothing alike in practice, so I would use density as a sorting key and not as a measurement.
Minimum jump range is the column I trust most. It unions every system already connected by gates, then sorts every remaining pair that spans two components by distance and merges them cheapest first, and the last merge it needed is the answer. That genuinely is the smallest ship jump range that would make the entire region reachable. Worth remembering that no ship jump-drive module is available in the live Cycle 6 client, so that column is forward planning rather than something you can fit today.
What it does not do
No security status and no star class. Those columns exist in the map database and they are NULL for all 24,026 systems, because the fields are not present in the game client data EF-Map extracts from. Anything anywhere quoting an average security rating for an EVE Frontier region is inventing it.
No market values, no kills, no mining totals, no ownership. Compare Regions is pure geometry and topology out of the client extraction, and it does not know that players exist. Live activity is a separate problem with a separate data source and it lives in other panels.
No CSV export and no saved comparisons either. Both would be straightforward, neither has ever been asked for, so neither got built.
What I actually use it for is the isolation column. If you are looking for somewhere to set up that nobody stumbles into, sort by isolated systems descending and you have a shortlist in one click. If you want somewhere you can move around without a jump drive, sort by connectivity and there are only about fifty regions worth looking at. That is a smaller and blunter tool than the old version of this article claimed, but at least it is the one that exists. If you want a column added, or the estimate tooltips saying more than they currently do, tell me and I will change it.
Related Posts
Smart Gate Routing: Bidirectional Dijkstra and Gate Directionality covers the router that has to work around all that isolation, and why it searches geometrically instead of walking the gate graph.
The Query Console: Ask the EVE Frontier Indexer Your Own Questions is the tool for the questions Compare Regions cannot answer, the ones about what players are actually doing.
What EF-Map Knows About Every EVE Frontier Solar System goes one level down, from regions to what is recorded inside a single system.