Science & Industry

Assuming they work the same as grav sites used to, then it's several days. Haven't seen the inside of a barge in ages though....

Once the actual site has been spawned by someone initiating warp to it the site will last for about 3 days, despawning at the next down time 72 hours after the time it was spawned. If it is spawned right after down time you can get almost 4 days from it.

As far as the respawn, there are a lot of theories. It is hard to verify as random sites can spawn anywhere in EVE. My understanding of the mechanics is that when a site is despawned, either from the timer running out, or it being completed, it will respawn within 5-15 minutes. This is evident with the hidden belts spawned by ihub upgrades in sov null sec, but is hard to verify with random sites as they will rarely respawn in the same system, or even constellation. There is no way of predicting when another random ore site will spawn in a specific system, or even constellation, once the existing site has despawned. The spawns are random. You can get several ore sites in the same system at the same time, or go months with out seeing even one. Random is random.

The fact that random sites can truly respawn anywhere in EVE (within their set security range) can be observed in some remote rarely visited systems, such as hard to access high sec islands. It is documented that you can go into some of these systems and see over 100 sites show up on scan. There was a thread a few days ago of someone that found a system on a high sec island with 166 sites. How does this happen?

When sites are respawned they appear randomly through out EVE. high sec sites are often the fastest to be respawned due to the higher number of high sec explorers, and how easy high sec sites are completed. These sites will occasionally re spawn in remote systems on high sec islands. They do not despawn and move until they are actually spawned by someone initiating warp to them. So remote systems like this can collect sites over time, just as rtarely visited wormholes can have an abundant number of sites. Until some eager explorer finds the system, and completes/despawns those sites returning them to the cycle.

With the changes to scanning that we saw with Odyssey anomaly sites are cycled far more often, as no probes or scanning skills are needed to find them. I would love to find one of these remote high sec islands full of ore anomaly sites. Considering the sites spawned in the main areas of high sec are completed so quickly, there has to be some remote system where at least some of them are accumulating.