The map answers one question: where to fly. Not "what is happening in this system right now" — this is a reading of accumulated activity over the period you choose, not live intel. The coefficients are still being tuned and the scores will still change: treat a score as a reason to look at a system, not as a verdict on it.
Three steps, and the first one decides almost everything.
A number from 0 to 100, and it is absolute: a system scores the same whichever point you ask from. That is why a result list crossing a region boundary is directly comparable — 55 in Domain and 55 in Delve mean the same thing.
It adds up like this: each criterion turns its raw value into a share between zero and one along a calibrated curve, the shares are summed by weight, and the sum is multiplied by the multipliers. A criterion with no data for that system is dropped together with its weight rather than counted as zero: missing data is not the same as a bad reading. That is why highsec has no "occupancy vs sec norm" — people rat everywhere there, and about equally, so there is nothing to tell apart.
This is the main thing to understand about the left panel.
WEIGHT — the criterion's share of the score. Counted against the sum of all enabled weights, not against a hundred: 30 out of a total 100 gives a third of the score. Zero keeps it out of the sum.
MULTIPLIER — a penalty applied to the whole score, not to a share of it. 0 — no penalty. 1 — a bad criterion zeroes the score entirely, however good everything else is. Values in between cut partially: the presets set 0.7 on incursions and 0.5 on faction warfare, so a system under an incursion loses 70% of its score but does not vanish from the list.
The difference is simple: weight answers "how much does this matter", multiplier answers "is it worth flying there at all if this one is bad".
Scan — where to hack data and relic sites in peace: few jumps and kills, nobody ratting, a dead end beats a crossroads. Null-sec depth does not matter here: relics are the same in all of null, and no NPCs guard them.
Abyss — a staging point for filaments: quiet highsec with a station and weak through traffic. Pod kills carry the most weight — those are the gankers waiting at the exit of a trace.
Green — a leg of a route for running anomalies for escalations and officers: deep truesec, occupancy below the norm for its band, quiet neighbours.
Solo — a lone ratter you can still catch: occupancy above the norm for its band, quiet neighbours, no hunters here before you. Highsec goes dark entirely — CONCORD answers aggression there.
Gang — a leg for a small fleet: targets close to each other, live neighbours, traffic and crossroads instead of dead ends. Ship kills count in your favour here: it means there is someone to fight.
The "+" button asks for a name and saves the current set of weights as your own preset — it stays in your browser and appears in the same row.
Activity in EVE depends on the time of day more than on anything else. The period is what to average over: "now" is the last hour, then 7 and 30 days. The UTC hour window is your prime time: a system that is empty during your evenings but packed during someone else's suits you, and an average over the whole day will not show that.
The score breakdown shows, per criterion, the raw value and how many points it contributed out of its weight. Below it is an hour of killmail intel from EVE-KILL, and this is the most useful part of the page:
The bubbled-camp flag is worth a glance on its own: it means you will not jump in and warp away.
Colouring: by security, by score, or both halves of a node at once. The score scale offers five palettes, which is a matter of taste. Node size can be tied to a metric (jumps, kills), so traffic reads at a glance without reading numbers. "Dim below score" clears everything under a threshold off the map.
"Space class preference" is the quick way to turn the map towards highsec, lowsec or null: it swaps the curve on the Truesec criterion and enables it if it was off.
A zero kill count is missing data, not safety. A covert ops may be sitting there having killed nobody and been killed by nobody: no killmails exist for it.
Wormholes are not on the map at all — known space only. Metrics are hourly and arrive from ESI with a delay; the age of the data the page states itself, in the footer. And once more: the coefficients are being tuned, and the scores will change.