Exploration

Scanning

Main article: Scanning

The main object of an explorer is to track down hidden areas found in systems across all of the EVE universe. These areas contain valuable items or other points of interest, but cannot be warped to initially. Instead, a player must use their ship's scanner and their Probe Launcher to track down the “signals” of these hidden areas through a process generally referred to as “probing,” or “scanning,” or “exploring.” If you’ve ever heard someone mention that they are going to “probe down a site”… this is it!

You’ve found a quiet system to explore and are safely nestled in a comfortable spot. Cocoa and blankets are optional. Time to explore! Pop open your ship’s scanner using the little button on your ship’s HUD that has a picture of a radar screen on it (or press ALT-P). While you were parking your ship somewhere, your scanner was busy! It’s more than likely tracked down a few points of interest throughout the system. Note that if your scanner readout says “No Signals Detected,” that means the system is currently empty. Head to a different system to explore, but note that you can always come back to this system again later to see if anything juicy has appeared.

When you first enter a system, none of its Cosmic Signatures will have any identifying information besides a generic designation, such as “MRM-213”. However, much like Cosmic Anomalies, Cosmic Signatures come in several types. You just won’t know exactly what you are tracking down until you pull out your probes!

A Good Place to Start

When you first begin exploring, you will likely want to stick to high-security space: systems with a security status anywhere from 0.5 to 1.0. You will be pretty safe in these systems, but there are some best practices you can start to follow so that they are routine as you move into exploring more dangerous space.

  • Explore in quiet systems
    • Pop open your Star Map and set it to look for “Number of players in the last half hour.” This will set your map to display large or small circles that indicate how much traffic a particular system has seen recently. In high-sec space, your biggest annoyance as an explorer will be other high-sec explorers: there are only so many exploration sites out there, and you will be racing other explorers for them. Areas with lots of traffic typically won’t have any exploration sites of interest to you, and the ones that do appear will likely be pounced on by someone else. Don’t get into a tug-of-war with other high-sec explorers: find a quiet stretch of systems somewhere and do your exploration there!
  • Explore from a safe place
    • While probing for exploration sites, your ship will be motionless for extended periods of time. This is dangerous in many parts of EVE. In high-sec, you will probably be perfectly safe idling some distance from a dockable station, or, say, 100km out from a planet. You will be even safer if you have a cloak fitted and activate it when you get to your spot. Indeed, you can explore cloaked so long as you remember to launch your probes first before engaging the cloaking device. In low-sec and other dangerous parts of space, you will want to explore from what's called a Safe Spot, and you will pretty much always want to be cloaked. You can find more info on locating and using Safe Spots in the Bookmarks lesson, and high-sec is a great place to get in the habit of using Safe Spots to explore unhindered!
    • After finding a safe spot for your ship, an extra precaution you can take is to point your ship in a semi-random direction away from the system’s major points of interest and (if you're not cloaked) then activate your Afterburner or Microwarpdrive. You can safely do this while focusing the majority of your attention on your probing. This is very helpful if you are flying without a cloak: the forward momentum makes it harder for hostile players to track you down, and even if they manage to, you will have a head start on them and should be able to escape!

Probing Down an Exploration Site

The goal of probing is to increase a Signature’s Signal Strength to 100%. Your system has a few Cosmic Signatures listed, and you’re well versed in what could possibly be out there. Let’s probe one down in this video, or as follows below.

The scanner window, with two Anomalies and a Signature

  • You already have the scanning panel open, but let’s hit F10 to open up the Solar System Map. This is a “wireframe” representation of the system you are currently in, complete with all the major celestials, like planets, moons and the sun. Since you have your scanning window open, there should be some green and/or red dots and spheres on your map. These represent the Anomalies and Signatures currently tracked by your scanner, as well as their general location. Green dots indicate areas that you can warp to, either an Anomaly or a Signature you have scanned down. Red dots or spheres represent the general area in which your ship’s scanner is detecting the signal of a Cosmic Signature. We’re going to have to narrow that down in order to warp there.
  • The bottom left of your scanner window has an icon that looks a bit like an atom. That’s the shortcut for the “Pinpoint” probe formation. Press it, and your ship will launch its payload of probes and automatically arrange them in a Pinpoint formation. Neat!
  • You should now notice that some blue spheres have appeared on your Solar System map. That’s the general area that your probes can currently scan. The center probe in this formation is represented by a white box with arrows sticking out of it. You can click and drag those arrows to move the probes around: by default, dragging that center probe will move all the probes together in formation. This is useful. Now, in order to start tracking down a Signature, you will need to drag your probes so they are centered over one of the red Signature dots or spheres and then press the Analyze button on the middle left of your scanning window. This will scan that area more thoroughly with your probes, and will take a few seconds to complete. If the signature’s red sphere is larger than the area your probes’ blue spheres cover, hold alt and expand the sphere size. This will increase the range of your probes so you can scan the whole red sphere. If all this is done correctly, the scan will complete and increase the Signal Strength of your chosen Signature. This is listed on the far right of your scanning window.
  • The goal of probing is to increase a Signature’s Signal Strength to 100%. As you continue to increase the Signal Strength, you will begin to learn more and more about the Signature: first, what type of Site it is, followed by the specific name of the site, and then finally, the Signature’s actual location so you can warp to it! Obviously, this is why we’ve picked a ship and equipment that raises the scan strength of our probes: it makes it much easier to get this number to 100%.
  • Now, it’s unlikely this first scan got the signal to 100%. In order to further increase its Signal Strength, we’re going to have to give our probes more power by reducing the range of their scan. We do this by clicking and holding the outside edge of one of the probe’s blue spheres and then dragging it inward. This will decrease the size of your scan. Now, re-center your probes on your signature’s dot or sphere and hit the Activate button again. If done correctly, your smaller scan area should still catch the Signature and will end up increasing its Signal Strength.
  • Most Signatures can be probed down by repeating this process: reduce your scan range by a step, re-center your probes on the Signature, and scan! It’s just that easy.
  • Once you’ve raised the Signal Strength to 100%, the Signature’s Signal Strength will turn into an arrow you can click to warp to the newly located Site. Congratulations! You’re exploring!

Probing Tips and Troubleshooting

  • You may occasionally come across a Signature that refuses to hit 100%, despite the fact that you have your probes centered on it at their minimum range (0.25 AU). If this happens, there are a couple things you can try before giving up and resolving to raise your probing-related skills.
    • Holding the SHIFT key down will allow you to maneuver individual probes, rather than your entire formation. If you are using the Pinpoint formation as recommended, you’ll notice that five of the probes are along the same plane, with four hovering around the outside of the center probe. Shift these four probes around the center probe so that they form a cross, with one probe at each cardinal direction. Activate your scanner again: this in and of itself may be enough to make the Signature warpable. If not, move the four probes closer to the center probe. You’ll want to get them pretty close, without having them overlap. Zooming your view in using the mouse wheel will help here. Alternate shifting the cardinal point probes closer and activating your scanner to see if this raises the Signal Strength enough.
    • If the above isn’t quite enough to get the Signature to 100%, you can try shifting the entire formation of probes in a single direction a very small amount and then re-scanning. Since the dot that represents the Signature’s location isn’t 100% accurate until its Signal Strength is 100%, you can sometimes squeeze out an extra percentage point or two of Strength in this manner. This can be a bit tedious, however, as the margin for error is so small. It’s recommended that you only try this if you are painfully close to 100% Signal Strength!
    • Note that as a new explorer, sometimes you’ll just plain be unable to scan a Signature all the way down to 100%. This is very unlikely to happen in high-sec space, but if it does, don’t let it get you down. Just remember, one day your skills and equipment will be good enough that no Signature will be able escape your grasp!
  • After you’ve probed something down, you may notice that your scanner used to have a bunch of Signatures on it, but now does not. This is because launching probes and reducing their range has removed those Signatures from your scanning region. This is easy enough to remedy, however. You can either expand your probes’ range to their maximum and re-scan, or temporarily switch the Spread formation and re-scan a larger area. In both cases, make sure your probes are covering as large a space as possible: the entire system, if you can. That should find those missing Signatures easily!
  • While scanning, once you have a signature down to a single dot, double-click the signature in the scanner window. This will center your star system map on the signature, and, more importantly, make the camera rotate around it (instead of around the sun), which makes moving and aligning your probes much easier.

Site types

(Look at specific Sub pages for information)

Exploration sites are divided to cosmic signatures and cosmic anomalies basead on how they are located. Cosmic Anomalies are areas of interest that radiate a strong enough signal that you can jump to them immediately after your ship scanner finds them. You don’t need to do any fancy probing or anything: just click and go! Of course, since everyone can easily see these sites, they’re typically less rewarding, and possibly more crowded than Cosmic Signatures. Cosmic Signatures are the bread and butter of an explorer. These are hidden areas that cannot be warped to unless tracked down by probes. Because of this extra step, Cosmic Signature exploration areas can be very lucrative, even in high-sec space!