EVE New Citizens Q&A

I'd really like to get into exploration but the tutorial is less than sterling with the finer points of the idea. I was taught how probes work and how to look for things, but my learning stopped there, and now I'd like to get back into it.

Tips, for a semi-noob, on all things exploration?

Basic Rookie suggestion for scanning:
- Skill up to have 5 probes active at once.
- Warp to the system's star if you're in Hisec as it usually makes it easier.
- Drop1 probe, go to the system map, right click the probe, and select a scan range that covers the entire system.
- Scan. If you get any hits there's something in system. If it's already named, you could have found it without probes.
- Drop the remaining probes and arrange them in cardinal directions around the first probe. Use the arrows as clicking on the square in the center of the probe will sometimes move it along the z-axis. For now, you want them all pretty much lined up.
- Press shift and click on any of the light blue scan fields of any of the probes and reduce the scan range to cover the system. Scan again.
- Once you start getting hits, move your probes. Two important tricks here:
-- Click Shift before moving the probes once they're in the right formation. This will move all the probes at once (just as it will change the scan range of all the probes as suggested two steps up).
-- As the scan range gets smaller, you need to start moving your probes closer together in order to maintain overlap. Press ALT (pretty sure, may be CTRL, I don't have the game open right now) before clicking on the arrow. If you do that, when you drag that probe closer to the center probe, it will move ALL the probes toward the center. This will save you a TON of time.

Good luck!

ETA: Remember that space is three dimensional! You may need to change your perspective to insure that your probes are not above or below your target.

Exploration in a nutshell:

1. Find a system you want to explore for signatures/anomalies
2. Use a single probe set to max range to see what signatures/anomalies are in the system. Position your probe such that it covers the surroundings of all the planets. If necessary, use two probes or do two scans.
3. Use 4 (or more) probes to probe 100% signal strength on the signatures/anomalies you're interested in.
4. Warp to the signatures/anomalies and run the sites.
5. Move to next system, repeat ad nauseum

For step (3), the basic technique is to use 4 probes in a square pattern, set such that the edges of each probe's range sphere touch the probe center diagonally across. Move the group of probes as a whole, or resize their scan ranges together, by holding down the shift key and dragging one. Hold down the alt key to expand/contract the probe locations symmetrically from their collective center point. Move the probes' collective center point to the signature you've found, and then progressively shrink the scan ranges and coverage area until you get 100% lock. There are other more advanced techniques which use other geometric patterns and/or more probes, but 4 probes in a square does the trick for starters.

For step (4), generally speaking you'll want a different ship. Good scanning ships (scanning frigates and covops frigates) aren't good at running sites, and combat ships aren't good at scanning. Of course, you can use a T3 cruiser for the best of both worlds, but that's a long way off for a new pilot.

Site types (observations are for hi-sec, since you're just starting out)

• Magnetometric sites: very lightly guarded or often completely unguarded, cans drop salvage materials. Bring a salvager and/or an analyzer. Utter crap and a complete waste of your time in hi-sec, though recent Inferno changes may improve this since they can now drop BPCs for certain new modules.


• Radar sites: generally the big score in hi-sec, these sites are quick and can be high-ISK-value. Usually pretty lightly guarded by a few frigate rats, cans contain consumables for invention (datacores, decryptors, skillbooks, and parts for data interfaces).


• Gravimetric sites: contain asteroids. Not useful unless you're (a) desperate for a place to mine without getting casually ganked, or (b) desperate to mine some ores not normally found in hi-sec.


• Ladar sites: don't normally appear in hi-sec, you can do gas mining in them for booster materials.


• Wormholes: these will appear as 'unknown' category on your scanner. When you get > 75% it will show "Unstable Wormhole" at which point you can choose whether to continue scanning or not. They lead to (surprise) wormhole-space, which has its very own forum that-a-way. Advanced pilots only.


• DED and Unrated combat sites: these also appear as 'unknown' category on your scanner. They lead to combat sites which can be very lucrative in terms of items dropped, and can lead to 'expeditions' in which additional sites appear in your journal. However you'll need a good combat ship to tackle them, and the unrated sites in particular can be a nasty surprise if you show up in too small of a ship. DED 1/10 are for frigates, 2/10 are for destroyers, 3/10 are for cruisers, and 4/10 for battlecruisers. Unrated sites can be entered with any ship, strongly recommend looking up the site before diving in or you might get kersploded on entry. If you don't look it up beforehand, you won't know if it's a DED rated or unrated complex until you warp to the site, at which time you'll get a pop-up notification.


• Cosmic Anomalies: These don't need to be probed down, they can be found with just your ship scanner. Like DED or Unrated sites, these are combat sites but they tend to be easy and the rewards tend to be pretty low in comparison. They also don't usually have an acceleration gate.

If you're having trouble getting a 100% lock on a site due to weak signal strength, you can improve your skills (Astrometric Pinpointing/Rangefinding), your ship (use a scanning frigate or covops ship for the bonus, fit Gravity Capacitor Upgrade rigs which are cheap), or your scanning modules (Sisters scan probe launcher, sisters scan probes), or even your implants (low-grade virtue set, Poteque pharm 'prospector' set).


http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Probing

Quick suggestion, even for newbies if you really are interested in scanning (not just exploring, theres also pvp ship scanning and wormhole mapping etc) train to 6 probes rather than 5. This will allow you to do the standard 5 probe formation (4 probes intersecting flat and one in the center) with an extra half size cheater probe in the center next to the 5th but half size. I'v found this decreases my search time and gives much more exact results.

These are some little things I do when I'm scanning.

Train so that you can use 6 probes, and do the standard formation, 1 up, down, left, and right, and also 1 above and below.

When scanning in highsec, I tend to scan in much less populated systems. These systems generally have more signatures in them, and you are much less likely to be doing the signature with someone else.

When scanning in lowsec/nullsec, I always have a cloak fitted for obvious reasons. So if I see combat scanners on dscan, I can just cloak and wait for the probes to go away. The cloak also helps if you jump into a gatecamp, so that if you happen to jump into a gatecamp, you can just cloak and allign wherever you want to go, and then uncloak and warp. I don't know about anyone else but it normally works for me.

Hope this helps, and happy exploring!