EVE New Citizens Q&A

You could go into wormholes right now but you'll have to learn a lot about navigating in w-space, dealing with Sleepers, and how to avoid getting your exploration ship blown up by other capsuleers.

I would stick to exploration in known space until you are familiar with the way the sites work, and your skills are up to speed. Your Hacking and Archaeology skills will need to be high in order to reduce the amount of time you spend in exploration sites. The less time you spend in the site, the less opportunity other capsuleers have to find you and destroy you.

Check the Wormholes and WH Systems database at http://www.ellatha.com/eve/ - this will help you figure out where you're going in w-space - and the Evelopedia page on Wormholes.

Good luck, have fun!

Exploration is a very possible activity for a new player, at the condition to understand what you can and cannot do. With the classical explorations skills at 3 (+ hacking and maybe archeology), you can find most sites in high sec, especially if you use one of those frigates with a bonus to probe strenght, like the Imicus for example. It's all cheap and you can do a correct amount of money if you are lucky (basically if you find often radar sites (hacking, using a codebreaker), for it's where the serious money is for a beginner).
Then you will have to deal with the npcs who are sometimes guarding the sites. So you also need a bit of tanking and a bit of skills in some offensive stuff (weapons or even better drones, for they take no slot ! exploration can take a lot of slots in a ship if you want to do many kind of sites : a probe launcher, a salvager, a codebreaker, an analyser... and then there's no space anymore for weapons on the ship ).
That's why for a very beginning i would advice the Imicus, both for the probe bonus and the drones.

But if you really want to go into exploration, you must accept one special rule : explo is first of all a question of luck. You can spend 3 days finding only crap, and then suddenly make 200m in one day !

Deep Space Probes are handy for quickly filtering the available sites in a system, to decide whether you want to probe any of them down. Keep track of what certain sites will show up as during the first, single-DSP, 256 AU radius scan. Thus getting Astrometrics 5 is very useful (but focus on Astrometric Rangefinding and Pinpointing first, IMHO).

If you have any exploration or wormhole questions drop me a message or stop by our pub channel BITIN. Always glad to see new pilots interested in wormholes, my favorite part of Eve. They are challenging though and does take some skills and time to be ready but if you want to be an explorer and wormholes spark your interest definately go for it!

Note that if you like scouting and you're interested in wormholes, focusing just on exploration skills to start can actually be a valid strategy. You'd need to team up with somebody else who has a more combat-capable ship, but you can be the eyes of the operation and play a valuable role finding paths for them and watching their backs.

all that needs to be said really