I should probably start with who I am, since this is the first proper post on this blog. My character name in EVE Online is Lacal. I bought the game on a disc in a shop in 2003 and played it on and off for a long time, mostly solo hunting, and then I did not play it at all for about eight years. I am not a coder. I describe myself as a vibe coder, which means I think of a feature, get an LLM to build it, click on it, and if it works I ship it. That method built this map, and it built the one before it.
EO-Map is a free map of New Eden that runs in your browser. It draws all 5,485 solar systems of known space and the 2,604 wormhole systems, 8,089 in total, either in 3D at their real positions or morphed into the flat schematic layout you know from the in-game map. It plans routes, shows live kills as they happen, colours space by sovereignty, activity, security and a dozen other things, and it plays back nineteen years of sovereignty history. There is no account, no paywall and no advertising. You can just open eo-map.com and use it.
Where it came from
For about a year before this I built a different map, for EVE Frontier, which is the newer game from the same studio, now called Fenris Creations. That map is called EF-Map, and if you are wondering, yes, the names differ by one letter, I chose both, and I now routinely say one when I mean the other. EVE Frontier is what pulled me back to that universe at all. When I joined in early 2025 it genuinely felt like the EVE Online I remembered from 2003, and the map started because I could not work out what order to visit a couple of hundred stars in. A year and a few thousand commits later it was a fairly serious piece of software.
Then on 12 August I cloned the whole EF-Map repository, all 3,507 commits of history, and started ripping the Frontier universe out of it so I could drop New Eden in instead. Six days later it was live. I wrote about that on the other map's blog at the time, and the short version of why is boredom. EF-Map had reached the point where I was inventing features because I had AI subscriptions sitting there and no new problem to point them at. Cloning the map into a much bigger game with a completely different data landscape was the first thing in a while that felt like a real challenge again.
As I write this it has been 21 days since the clone and 15 days live, with 794 new commits on top of the inherited history. I checked the numbers in git before writing them down, because my memory rounds things in whichever direction makes the better story.
Someone already did the data work
The pleasant surprise was the data. EVE Frontier is an alpha game and almost nothing about it is handed to you. Getting information for that map has meant pulling it out of the game client after every patch, indexing a blockchain and reading other people's repositories to work out where the truth lives.
EVE Online is a different planet. There is ESI, a mature, documented API, and there is the Static Data Export, which is the game client extraction step already done and published by CCP. I pinned a specific SDE build, 3464040 from 11 August, generated my own compact databases from it, and cross-checked the gate graph against ESI's own route endpoint to make sure my routes agreed with CCP's. They did. A day of that replaced what took months on the Frontier side.
The rest of the data comes from ESI on a schedule, plus a few third party sources that are credited where they appear. zKillboard feeds the live kills, EVE-Scout and Signal Cartel feed the public Thera and Turnur connections and the storms, and CCP's monthly economic report feeds the regional economy view. Everything the map shows about the universe comes from somewhere you can check.
How it is built
The rule I carried over from EF-Map is that your browser never fetches shared data from upstream. A collector on my server polls ESI on its own schedule, honours CCP's cache headers, stays inside a polite budget of 200 requests an hour, and publishes snapshots to Cloudflare, which is what browsers actually read. Live kills go collector to storage to a small worker that pushes them to you over a websocket. So visitor ten thousand costs CCP and me the same as visitor one. The market crawl is big enough that it got its own container and its own limiter, because one hungry crawl was starving the map feeds. The one exception is deliberate. If you sign in with EVE's own SSO, your browser talks to CCP directly for your own character data, and that token never touches my servers.
The map itself is a three.js scene. On first load you get a 1.5 MB database of systems, gates and security, and the 20.8 MiB detail database with planets, moons and stations comes down in the background afterwards and is cached. Routing is a small Rust program compiled to WebAssembly, a bidirectional Dijkstra, running in a web worker in your browser. Nothing about your route leaves your machine. The whole thing lives under a hard boot budget of 800 kilobytes of gzipped JavaScript, enforced on every build, and it usually sits within about one percent of that ceiling, which is a fight I lose slowly and win back in passes.
The universe is a lot smaller
The first thing that broke in the clone was scale. The Frontier cluster spans about 14,480 light years along its longest axis. New Eden spans about 101. Everything visual in the inherited code was tuned in light years and inherited assumptions about the bigger universe, so the nebula collected a fraction of its intended light and did not show up, the warp flythrough turned out to have a scale hack in it, and the first search that highlighted a few thousand of them drew one solid orange blob. The two products did not even agree on the length of a light year, because CCP's jump maths use a rounded value.
Once both maps agreed on what a metre was, comparing the universes was nearly free, so the Compare Universe Scale feature exists on both. On EO-Map you pull the camera back until the Frontier cluster surrounds New Eden. I think it is the best single picture of how different the two settings are, and it only exists because the mismatch broke everything first.
Replaying a day of destruction
Some of EO-Map is EF-Map code doing its old job in a much busier universe. The kill flashes existed already, I pointed them at zKillboard's feed, and because EVE Online produces vastly more kills the same feature immediately looked completely different. Then I added a replay tool that takes a recorded window of kills and plays it back across the map at speed, which is how this video happened. One full day of EVE Online destruction, 15,218 kills and around two trillion ISK, in four minutes.
Every flash in that video is a real kill as reported by zKillboard, placed at the system it happened in. Kills the map cannot place honestly are counted in the data but never drawn, because inventing positions to make the video busier would defeat the point.
Nineteen years of history
The other thing EVE Online has that a new game cannot is history. The sovereignty panel has a History tab that animates player-held space changing hands from 2007 to now, just over 131,000 recorded holder changes. I rendered the full run out as a video as well, nineteen years in six minutes.
Mistakes were made
It took fifteen days and a Reddit user for anyone to notice the map was upside down. Looking straight down at New Eden everything was right, north was north and east was east. Rotate to look along the plane of the galaxy and every system that should sit above it was drawn below. A mirror flip in one axis, invisible from above, obvious from the side. I had not noticed because I only ever look at the map from above, which is how nearly everyone consumes it, and I have not played the game in eight years. Someone who plays looked at it side-on within days of finding the site and the fix went live on 27 August. That is the whole argument for why I care about people finding EO-Map at all. I can get the code and the data pipeline right, but current game knowledge lives with current players, and their corrections only reach me if they see the thing.
What has shipped since
The launch on 18 August had routing, jump planning, activity, incursions, faction warfare, the 2D and 3D layouts and the universe scale comparison. The day after, sovereignty and the live kill ticker went to production, and the day after that the sovereignty history and the force projection tools. EVE SSO with Set Destination arrived on the 21st, so a route you plot can be sent straight to your client. The star colouring modes and a reworked route ribbon followed on the 22nd.
The 23rd is the one I am most pleased with, because that is when wormhole space arrived. All 2,604 Anoikis systems are drawn at their real coordinates from the SDE, which puts them a long way off to one side of New Eden, and the public Thera and Turnur connections from EVE-Scout draw as live links into it. Storms, Skyhooks and alliance rankings landed on the 24th, market supply on the 25th, and regional economy, activity against typical, and route risk on the 26th. My Geography, market history and the economy tab in the tools library went out on the 28th and 29th. On 1 September a sovereignty vulnerability view and a usability pass driven by community feedback shipped, and on 2 September a Creator Mode for people making videos and battle reports, plus this blog.
I would not read that as a plan. It is what happened, in order, and most of it came from either something a player asked for or something I noticed was broken. The Creator Mode post is a good example of the first kind.
What it costs, and what it does not
EO-Map is free and it stays free. There is nothing to buy, no premium tier, no adverts and no sponsored placement anywhere on the map. Hosting and the development tooling do cost money, so there is a Support button in the top right with a buy me a coffee link and a Patreon that are shared with the other map, and if you would rather say thanks in game you can contract unwanted items or ISK to Lacal. None of that is expected.
So that is what EO-Map is and where it came from. If you play EVE Online, or used to, go and poke at eo-map.com and tell me what is wrong with it. Recent form suggests there will be something, and the upside-down map is the reason I say that with a straight face. As features land I will write them up here, and if there is something the map should do that it does not, let me know and I will have a bash at it.