Cycle 7 Slowed EVE Frontier Down, and EF-Map's Bookmarks Got Busy

Most of what I've built on EF-Map since Cycle 7 started wasn't on any plan. It came from people using it. I doubt that's news to anyone who builds software for a living, but it's the first time I've felt it this strongly. The tools were mostly already there. What changed in the first week of EVE Frontier's new cycle is that people started leaning on them for real, for actual plans, with a tribe depending on them. And as soon as that happens you get feature requests and bug reports, which I've come round to thinking are the best part.

I touched on this on the EO-Map blog in September, watching a streamer raid skyhooks with EO-Map and shipping fixes while he was still live. Ten minutes of watching somebody use a tool shows you more friction than a week of guessing. This is the EF-Map version, with the numbers behind it, and most of it is about bookmarks.

It isn't more people

First thing to clear up. EF-Map hasn't suddenly got more users. Google Analytics counted 293 users in the first eight days of Cycle 7, against 442 in the first eight days of Cycle 6. That's a third fewer. Sessions were flat, 943 against 934. What moved was time. Engaged time, which is Google's measure of time with the page actually in front of you, went from 22.2 hours to 38.4. Per user that's about three minutes going to nearly eight.

A few caveats. Google Analytics runs in statistics-only mode and you can switch it off in Display Settings, so this is the people who didn't. I've taken Singapore out of every figure, same as the last stats post, because that traffic looks like bots. And it is only eight days. Against the quiet end of Cycle 6 there's the usual new-cycle bump, from 215 users in its last eight days. So people did turn up. It's just fewer of them than last time, doing a lot more.

My read on why, and it is only a read, is the game. With Fog of War your map only shows what your character has found, which I wrote about a week into the cycle. There are still no ship jump drives, so getting anywhere means gates, catapults and player-built Smart Gates, and the new mining keeps you in one place for longer. Everything about Cycle 7 asks you to slow down, plan, write things down and coordinate with your tribe. EF-Map had tools for that last cycle too. The game just didn't need them as much.

What stopped getting used

The flip side is routing. For most of EF-Map's first year, plotting a route from A to B was the main thing people did. In October 2025 the map calculated 704 point-to-point routes a day. In July 2026, the first full month of Cycle 6 without jump drives, it was 22 a day. In the first eight days of Cycle 7 it was 77 routes in total, under 10 a day.

Some of that is just fewer visitors. Page loads were 611 a day in October 2025 and 250 a day in July 2026, so traffic fell to about two fifths. Routes fell to about a thirtieth. It isn't all one cause either. Routes per visit were already sliding through the spring, before jump drives went. But I think losing jump drives finished it off. You can't plot a route and jump down it any more.

The Scout Optimizer is the starkest one. It works out the best order to visit a list of systems, mixing gates and ship jumps, and in October 2025 it ran 11 times a day. The last time anybody ran it was the 1st of September. People still click onto its tab about six times a day this cycle. Nobody has run it.

The routing panel itself is busier than it was, about 38 opens a day against 17 in September. It's just being opened for different questions. The Yeet Planner tab gets most of them, and the Manual Checker, which lights up every system you can legally catapult to from where you are, went from being switched on about 4 times a day in September to about 15 in the first week of Cycle 7. That's not "how do I get there". It's "can I get there from here at all".

Where the time went instead

The User Overlay, which is what EF-Map calls its bookmarks, is the big one. Through the last four weeks of Cycle 6, about 13 sessions a day opened it. In the first eight days of Cycle 7 that was 33, and over the last three days, 57. Tribe bookmarks get loaded every time somebody reads a tribe's shared marks, and that went from about 10 a day to 45, then to 95 a day over the last three days. Map loads overall were up about 45% on the same comparison, so this isn't just more traffic.

People are staying in it as well. A quarter of User Overlay visits this cycle lasted more than five minutes, against 16% in September.

Two caveats again. Tribe loads include refreshes, and an open panel now refreshes itself when somebody assigns you a task, so treat the orange line as busy rather than as a headcount. And alliance bookmarks, which only went in on the 1st of October, have no counter of their own yet, so some of the shared use isn't on this chart at all.

Fourteen changes in a week

I keep a decision log for EF-Map where every production change gets an entry. Going through it from the 29th of September to the 7th of October, there are 46 player-facing changes. 14 of them were the User Overlay, twice as many as anything else. Entries aren't all the same size, and the map visuals bar hides one very large one, but I think it's a fair picture of where the attention went.

The User Overlay is one of EF-Map's oldest features. It's been there about a year and people did use it, but I think mostly they just accepted it the way it was. Then a lot more people started using it at the same time, for real plans, and that's when you find out what it's actually like.

The User Overlay entries in the decision log

From EF-Map's decision log, 1 to 7 October 2026. One more fix went out on the 4th inside another entry, after the community map's regular refresh started making marks and links stop drawing.

Seven of those started with somebody else asking for something, complaining about something or worrying about something. Nearly all the rest came from me using the same tools in the same tribe. A few of the stories behind them.

The backups came from a worry

My tribe is in an alliance with another tribe now, and between us we lean on the shared bookmarks for nearly everything. The worry came up on voice. If one member deleted a folder, it was gone. Not gone for them, gone for everyone, because the whole space is one stored value that gets overwritten on every save. The ideas going round were daily JSON exports, or a live copy of the shared marks mirrored into everyone's personal bookmarks.

I went another way. A live mirror would have copied the bad delete as well, doubled every mark on the map and only lived on one device. So tribe and alliance spaces now have a Recently deleted bin plus a saved version for every day something changed, both kept for 30 days, and any member can restore from either. Copy to Personal takes a folder or a whole day's version into your own bookmarks if you want a snapshot of your own. While I was in there, the limit for a shared space went from 300 marks to 1,000.

The icons came from two people at once

The hover card used to show one note per system. If a system had your mark, a tribe mark and an alliance mark, you saw one of them. One person asked for every mark on the card. Somebody else wanted to know what was at a system without hovering at all. So marks can now carry icons, gates, catapults, storage, turrets, network nodes, fuel, shops, hazards and a handful more, and they sit above the star on the map. Hover the star and the card lists the marks there, up to six of them, each with its space and folder name.

The first version laid the icons out in a row, which looked daft at four icons, so they're a square block now. The tiles also had an edge in the mark's colour. I thought that would help. Once a busy area had a dozen marks on it, it was a bit garish, so that's off by default and a menu option if you want it. Nobody asked for either change. I used it for a while and didn't like it.

Small asks that matter more than they look

Most of the rest are small. A link on a mark used to say "Catapult". Somebody complained, fairly, that a Mini and a Heavy aren't the same thing when you're planning, so links carry the size now. Someone wanted to plan a dormant NPC stargate into a route along with their catapults and gates, so there's a Stargate link you can mark Planned, In progress or Active. People keep transponder codes in their notes, and the only way to copy one was to open the editor, so every mark has its own transponder field with a Copy button. Structures get re-pointed in game, and a link's destination couldn't be edited, so now it can.

The task lists are probably the biggest single change. A mark can carry a checklist, and in a tribe or alliance space you can assign each task to somebody, who gets a notice within about a minute. The first version only listed people who had opened the panel since I shipped it. I found that out when one of the alliance wasn't in the list. So it now reads the full tribe membership from EF-Map's chain indexer.

One I took away. Merge Dups was a button that merged marks sitting on the same system. Alliances stack several marks on one system on purpose, and one click merged them all, so it's gone.

The layout refresh on the 1st of October wasn't a request at all. It was me wanting a year-old panel to make a better impression on the people who were about to use it a lot more. The sidebar became one collapsible section per space with its own New folder button, the toolbar went onto one row, there's a breadcrumb saying which folder you're in, and notes edit on double-click rather than single click, which was opening the editor every time somebody just tried to select a row. Nothing was removed.

Shared Storage, from using it myself

Shared Storage is a small app for a storage unit in game. You put it on your unit and other people can take from and add to a shared shelf. I built it in July, and it's a tool I use every day. Ocky and I are in separate tribes, and the game doesn't really let you share items even inside a tribe, so we've been leaning on it since it moved over to Cycle 7 on the 1st.

The first version was a text list that mimicked the game's interface as it was when I built it. Name, amount and a button per row. After using it from an alt to see what a visitor actually gets, that was the wrong way to do it. The game's newer inventory windows are icon grids you drag between, so Shared Storage became an icon grid you drag between, and everything you move goes through as one transaction. Then I moved twenty stacks one at a time and added multi-select. Then the amount box needed Enter to confirm, which worked fine in Chrome and did nothing in the game's own browser, because the game's browser doesn't send the key event Chrome relies on. So it listens for the key press itself now.

The one I like most came from a really ordinary moment. Where did I leave the Brine? I've got three storage units. So the Shared Storage panel on EF-Map now has an Items tab. Search an item and it shows you the total across your units and which unit has how much. People with lots of units can hide the ones they don't use, put the rest in order and give them private labels. And there's a Share view where you add any character by name, from any tribe, and they see the units you pick, read only, in their own panel.

It's a small tool and the numbers are small. On chain, 10 different wallets have made 558 Shared Storage transactions this cycle, and 7 of the 187 storage units in Cycle 7 have the shared shelf switched on. I'd guess a fair few of those are mine and Ocky's. Since the icon grid went in, one transaction can carry a whole batch of moves, so that count undersells what's actually been moved. But it's been used every day, and that's how the friction got found.

Shared Storage in the first week of Cycle 7

From EF-Map's own counters and the Sui chain, as of 7 October 2026.

The vanity work

Some of what I've done this cycle is just making things look nice. Frontier Timelapse replays the community charting the map since the reset, with kills ringing in where they happened. Newly charted systems ignite when they arrive on the map. Kill zones get heat rings that grow with the fighting. The star you've selected glows now, at any zoom. Map text shows kills, new systems and planets as you zoom in. None of it changes what you can do with EF-Map.

I still think it matters. When something is about to get a lot more use, I want it to feel like somebody cares about it, and people do notice when a tool is pleasant to sit in for an hour. With engaged time per user up two and a half times this cycle, people are sitting in it for longer than they used to. Some of it came from the other map, too. The way the heat rings scale with the fighting, the ring that flares when a new system is charted, system names sitting beside their star instead of on top of it, and a fix to the jump range bubble all came over from EO-Map, which is starting to pay EF-Map back.

So yeah

None of this is a new idea. Build something, people use it, they tell you what's wrong with it. But I don't think I'd felt it properly until this week. When nobody's leaning on a tool, I'm guessing at what people want. When they're using it for real, they just tell me, or I trip over it myself because I'm using it too. The routing tools aren't going anywhere, and if jump drives come back in a later cycle, I'd expect routing to come back with them. For now the work goes where the use is, and at the moment that's bookmarks.

If something in the User Overlay or Shared Storage gets in your way, tell me. Most of this week's changes started exactly like that.

Related Posts

EVE Frontier Cycle 7 First Week: Flight, Mining and Fog of War is my take on the cycle itself, and why Fog of War slows everyone down.

Bookmark Links: Tracking Catapult and Gate Builds in EVE Frontier is where the route links on marks started, back in July.

Shared Storage: the Simplest Way to Share Items in EVE Frontier covers how the shared shelf works and how to switch it on for your own unit.

Two Months of EF-Map Usage Data, and How EO-Map Compares is the longer look at the same counters, and where the data traps are.