EVE New Citizens Q&A

When I first joined the game after being invited by a coworker I was given the advice that I should 'have dscan up at all times'. However, I've got a few questions and he's not online.

1) Dscan seems to fill my entire screen with a system map or something which blocks me from seeing whatever I am doing. Is there a way to change this? How can I have it available at all times?

2) How do I use dscan? Can I just leave it set to 360 degrees and mash the button every few seconds?

3) How do I filter the scan results to omit things like wrecks and citadels?

As Les said, you can decouple it from the scanning interface, and you should!

As for use, you can use it defensively to get a heads up when someone is stalking you or offensively to track down targets and aid in scanning.

Defensively: keep d-scan at 360 degrees and max range, as a WH player I hit it nearly every second (you can key bind it to an unused mouse button for easy clicking) although that's probably overdoing it a bit. In low sec or null sec when local is empty I'd just hit it once so you know what is POS-trash (empty ships floating around in space) and then only start hitting it whenever a hostile enters local.

Offensively: use a narrow angle and point your ship at anoms, planets, gates, beacons, etc... if you see someone there, you can warp to him and start shooting. If there's a lot of potential sites, you can also play with the range first until you get a narrow range in which you see your target (for example, he's on d-scan at 6.4AU but off at 6.3AU) then use a narrow scan at whatever is in that range.

Using D scan is very important in Eve but knowing what to do and knowing why you are doing it are two different things. If you follow perfect instructions with regards to effectively "using" dscan but you don't know why you are doing it or what you are looking for then it's fairly useless to you.

If you do a youtube search for "dscan eve" you will come across some videos. It can help to see what other people are doing. There are also written guides out there. I would recommend looking up some information and then using that knowledge so that you can get practical experience. Then go back and learn some more and apply it.

I would say that part of knowing how to use dscan defensively is knowing how others will be using it offensively. So you will likely want to check out some guides on how to use it for hunting and maybe even try it out so you can get a feel for that side of things also, even if you never intend to hunt.

TL;dr
there is enough to learn about dscan that a text wall here could not effectively cover it so search for guides and then practice, rinse and repeat.