EF-Map now has a Cycle 5 archive at /cycle5. It is a preserved, read-only view of EVE Frontier as Cycle 5 winds down — not the live current map. The archive is available now as a provisional snapshot, and the plan is to refresh it once more with the final dynamic data just before the cycle resets.
The last end-of-cycle was roughly three and a half months ago, before the hackathon. At that point EF-Map was young and historical preservation was not the focus. EF-Map is more established now, and the architecture has reached a point where keeping an end-of-cycle archive is actually practical. Cycle 5 is the first one we are preserving this way.
Why preserve a cycle
EVE Frontier cycles reset the live state of the universe. Once the map and tools have been live for a while, they quietly become a record of what players were doing — where kills happened, which structures stood, how Smart Gates were wired, and where activity clustered. When the cycle ends, that record would normally just roll over into the next one.
A cycle archive lets you come back later and look at what the universe looked like at the end of Cycle 5. That gets more valuable as cycles grow longer and more player history accumulates inside each one.
Why this is now possible
EF-Map runs on a mix of two kinds of data, and that split is what makes an archive feasible.
Static game data includes the main map database, star positions, the routing graph, and the extended Solar System database with its per-system information. This data is not expected to change before the end of Cycle 5, so it can be copied once and treated as the final Cycle 5 static baseline.
Cycle-live snapshot data is produced by our indexers and exporters: the Killboard snapshot, the Killboard replay timeline, the Activity Tracker bundle, the Smart Assemblies snapshot, Smart Gate links, and the Gate Access snapshot. For the archive, we freeze those into static files at capture time. The /cycle5 route then reads from the frozen snapshots instead of the live current-cycle endpoints — the same family of data that feeds our weekly State of the Frontier reports.
What works in the Cycle 5 archive
Most of the map experience carries over, reading from the frozen and static copies rather than live services:
- Map view, search, and routing from the static universe data
- Solar System View from the static Solar System database
- Killboard and the Killboard replay timeline
- A game-wide Activity Tracker overview
- Smart Assemblies overview
- Smart Gates and Gate Access
- Local-only tools that do not depend on live services
What is intentionally not live
Some features only make sense against the current world, so they are switched off in the archive:
- The live event ticker
- The shoutbox
- Wallet and account actions
- Current-cycle and social services
Anything that could make the archive accidentally show Cycle 6 or other current data is disabled, and the archive reads from its own isolated copies. The Activity Tracker in the archive is a game-wide overview; per-player and per-tribe entity drilldown is not part of this archive.
What happens next
Right now /cycle5 is a provisional archive built from the latest capture. A final dynamic capture is planned just before the reset to freeze the closing state of the cycle. After Cycle 6 begins, the normal EF-Map map will follow Cycle 6, while /cycle5 stays put as the preserved Cycle 5 archive.
We can't promise that every last detail of the universe is preserved forever, but the intent is to keep a faithful end-of-cycle snapshot and to maintain cycle archive pages going forward.
Take a look
This is an early step toward EF-Map preserving the history of EVE Frontier across cycle resets. You can explore the current provisional archive now at /cycle5, and revisit it later to see what the frontier looked like at the end of Cycle 5.