EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi All,

I am struggling with Eve, But I will prevail - with help - thanks in advance,

Mining In a Venture, with 2 Drones, that I thought disappeared due to my Newness.
Last night I put my mining drones to bed with a good night story and hot chocolate.
This morning - Gone. Drone Bay empty.
I have lost around 6 Drones similarly, not so bothered about the ISK.

Is it me or a possible Bug?

1 more please,
any good directions to learn a bit better on using the D-Scanner?
I have a Salvager and cannot find the wrecks - typical of me

Thanks

Drones don't just disappear. Are you sure you recalled them?

Those wrecks you're looking for are probably left-overs from missions or anomalies. Without a bookmark already in the site, or something that can be combat probed down (Mobile Tractor Unit [MTU], ship), there's no way for you to ever get there.

Log into the game, then once you are in-station or in space (doesn't matter), hit ESC to bring up the game's Control Panel. One of the tabs at the top should be Keyboard Shortcuts.

Look through there, and you want to make sure you have the controls for the following:

Drones: Engage the Target (I usually set this to ctrl-shift-E)
Drones: Return to Drone Bay (ctrl-shift-R)

The other drone options you can control by right-clicking the drone box when you're in space. Typically you want the drones to "focus fire" so all of them shoot the same target, and set them to "passive" so they don't react if a player tries to trick you into PVP by tricking your drones. This means, however, that you have to press the ctrl-shift-E for each target that you want to kill with the drones, they won't take the initiative to respond if NPC pirates appear in the belt and attack you.

Then the only other thing you have to do is: when you're in space, right-click the drones in the drone box and "assign to group". Create new groups for each kind of drone you are using (for example: Mining Drones, Small Thermal Drones, Medium Kinetic Drones, etc.). The advantage of having them in a group is that you can give commands to the whole group. So you right-click and launch the Small Thermal Drones, then you ctrl-shift-E and all 5 drones will go attack the target. Ctrl-shift-R and all will return to drone bay.

This takes time, by the way, you have to wait until the drones travel all the way back to your ship and actually enter their drone bay. If you're in danger of dying, just warp away and abandon them; your ship is more costly than the drones, and you can go to station, repair your ship, and then go back and collect your drones later.

When you set up your ship, make sure you put the drones in the drone bay, not in the ship cargo. If you put them in the ship cargo they will just be cargo, and you won't be able to use them. Not all ships have drone bays.

D-scan:

- If you leave it at 360 degrees, it will just give you a list of everything that it sees. Most people leave it at 360 degrees, and just set a distance of 1 AU, 5 AU, or 14 AU. This tells them if any new ships are approaching. So you're sitting in a belt, mining, and you look at the list of people who have joined the Local chat channel (that's everyone in the solar system that you're in). And you look at the D-scan and see a bunch of ships. Maybe they're all mining or transport ships, likely not a threat to you. Then someone new enters the Local channel, and you see an attack ship (like, for example, a Catalyst destroyer class) appear in d-scan. That's a potential threat to you, the Catalyst could destroy your ship, so you may want to warp to a station before they arrive next to you.

- Otherwise you can also narrow the d-scan to 5 degrees, and that will be like a radar ping. So let's say you're sitting in a belt, and the 360 degree d-scan shows 3 mining ships in range, but they're not in the same belt as you because you don't see them. So they could be in different belts or just undocked from the station. So you set the d-scan to 5 degrees, and rotate your camera towards the icon for the station, and press Scan. So d-scan will show you anything that's in the vicinity of that station that you're aiming at with the camera. Rotate the camera towards the planet or asteroid belt icons, and scan each time, and you can tell where the other mining ships are, because they'll only appear in the d-scan when you're aimed at them with the camera.

D-scan is used to find player ships, usually. You can tell which ships are nearby, or you can see if certain ships are near certain planets, asteroids, or stations.

For everything else, you have to use scanner probes, which are a different tutorial.

For your own wrecks, you have to set a bookmark so the computer remembers the location, at the time when you make the wrecks. So you get to a mission area and you start shooting the pirates and they start making wrecks... at that time right-click one of the wrecks and choose "Bookmark this". Name that bookmark "wrecks 6:22pm", because wrecks expire in 2 hours. Then continue shooting the pirates, go complete the mission, and you can return for the wrecks by following the bookmark, you have plenty of time. You only need one bookmark per mission area. The bookmarks are stored in your People and Places, under Locations.

Ok, everything is going to despawn after approx 2 hours, so nothing will be where you were. But if you are checking and confirming the drones are there before logging out, I can't think of any reason for the drones to disappear. I've had wrong icon bugs but I don't recall any missing item bugs.

If it keeps reoccurring, I'd petition it. This is not an immediate gameplay problem, so it will get deferred to every ticket that is, so it might take over a week if lots of people are experiencing in-game bugs. But they will get to you and be able to check the logs and figure it out. At least drones are cheap, especially t1 drones.

If they are indeed disappearing like this, I would send a ticket to CCP and see if they can see anything on their end.

I've never heard of drones disappearing from your ship while docked. That is very weird