EVE New Citizens Q&A

So I accepted a mission from one of the first agents after the tutorial and they sent me out to probe for a data site. It's my first time trying to probe and after about 45 mins I ended up rage quitting. I couldn't even come close to getting a strong signal. The little tutorial screen was up but was no help whatsoever. So today I read a little bit about and feel I have a better understanding of it. I'll give it another whirl tonight. I was hoping some of you guys and gals had some pointers or tips. I also wanted to know, why do I have to launch 8 probes? What happens when the timers run out on the probes?

The video clarified a lot of things for me. Now to see how it translates into the game. Thank you much for the rapid response and +1 for you good sir!

Probing isn't that hard, you just have to get your head around it. Right now, there are 2 spreads. Wide and clustered. You can grow or shrink the scan distance of each probe by dragging the blue probe bubble that shows up in the system view.

In order to scan, launch your probes, get into the system map view and set them to the biggest wide spread you can and scan. this should Identify the cosmic signatures. you will see a series of items in your probe window and a bunch or red circles, spheres or dots in the system map.

The list of items in the probe window will have a small red bar next to it. Click on one of these items and the red circle, sphere or dot will be the only one showing up in the system view window. Take note of the signature ID, which will be something like DRF-708. you only want to work one at a time and this will help you remember which one you are working on.

Adjust your probes to the clustered formation and drag the cube with the arrows over, so the the red dot is in the exact center of the cubes faces. You want to check this from the absolute X, Y and Z view of the cubes faces. You can rotate the map by holding down left mouse button and moving the mouse and you can drag the map by holding down right button and moving mouse. You can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel.

So now that the cubes X, Y and Z faces are centered in the red indicator, scan again. you will see the results for that signature ID climb a bit. The red indicator should resolve into a red dot (if it already wasn't) and may relocate a bit. Zoom in and re-center the cube on the highlighted dot. Zoom out to rotate to another axis and zoom in and center. Do this for all three axis. Now grab the probe scan spheres and shrink them a bit and scan again.

Wash rinse and repeat this until you get to 100%.

When you are through, right click on the signature you just scanned down and save the bookmark. This is important. If you leave the system or dock to change ships, you will lose the scan and have to re-do it.

You can raise Astrometrics, Astrometric acquisition, astrometric rangefinding and astrometric pinpointing and it will make it easier. Raising these along with building a ship specifically for probing means you can probably resolve a signature in 3-5 adjustments. This is really handy in w-space when you encounter a system that has 15-20 signatures in it.

Count yourself lucky. The tutorial used to be " this is the undock button. Press the undock button now." That was it. Welcome to space...boom!