Exploration is one of Eve’s more diverse PVE activities. It involves a wider area of different game mechanics that are not strictly related only to Exploration, but can be found in other parts of the game too.

The main focus of exploration is, to scan down Cosmic Signatures that can be found in every system by opening the Probe Scanner window and make ISK out of the sites that can be found through them. There are different kinds of sites that require different modules on your ship or sometimes even a mining or combat fitted ship.

The next section of this guide will cover the basics of using your Probe Scanner to scan down cosmic signatures. This will cover the skills, ships and modules that are commonly used for exploration. In the next sections, I will give a brief overview of the different kind of sites that can be found and cover the skills, ships and modules that are needed to finish these.

Scanning

To scan down a Cosmic Signature you will need a Probe Launcher loaded with Scanner Probes fitted to a high slot of your ship. You can launch the probes by clicking on the launcher. When you have probes launched, you can see and move them in the Probe Scanner window (Alt-P).  The probes scan within the blue sphere and try to triangulate the signature that must be within the indicated area of effect of the probes. You can change the probe size with the slider in the lower part of the window. The smaller the size of the scanning area, the better the results will be by a scanning attempt. However, if the signature is outside of the area of effect, you will get no result at all.

Scanning down a site is actually quite easy once you get a the hang of it. However, since this is actually very hard to explain without seeing it in action, I will just link this video that nicely shows how to use your probes to scan down a site.

If you want to get some practice scanning, there is also an career agent that will walk you through the mechanics of scanning and provide you with some basic equipment to get started.

Now to the game mechanics around scanning. There are three attributes of the scanner probes and launcher that influence the outcome of a scanning attempt.

Scan Strength: This attribute of the scanner probes measures how many percent of the signature’s signal you can discover by a scanning attempt. The higher the value, the easier it will be to scan the signature down to 100%. If you scanned it down to 100%, you will be able to warp to the signature. If you scan down 25% or more, you will see what type of signature you are scanning

Scan Deviation: This attribute of the probes measures how far away the exact location of the signature is off the displayed location, if you have less than 100% accuracy on your scan. The lower this value is, the easier it is to place the scanner probes on top of the signature location. Remember that you will not get any results for a scan if the exact location is outside the probing area of your scanner probes.

Scan Duration: This is an attribute of the probe launcher and specifies how long a scanning attempt takes.

You can see the current values of the attributes in the upper left corner of the probe scanner window.

Scanning Skills

There are four skills that directly influence your scanning attributes.  The main scanning skill is Astrometrics, which allows you to use probe scanners and gives a 5% bonus per skill level to all three of the above scanning attributes.

Additionally there are three skills that each improve one of the scanning stats, which are Astrometric Acquisition to decrease activation time, Astrometric Rangefinding to decrease deviation and Astrometric Pinpointing to increase scan strength.

Scanning Ships

Basically any ship with a probe launcher fitted can do exploration. However, there are a couple of ships that have hull bonuses to the scan strength of your probes.

Every race has a T1 exploration frigate, which gives a 7.5% scan strength bonus per level of the racial frigate skill.

There is also a T2 version of each exploration frigate, which give a 10% bonus to scan strength and duration per level of the Covert Ops skill. Furthermore, the T2 version can warp cloaked with a Covert Ops Cloaking Device II fitted.

The Sisters of Eve faction has three ships that give a fixed hull bonus to probe strength. This is the frigate sized Astero (37.5% bonus), the cruiser sized Stratios (37.5% bonus) and the battleship sized Nestor (50% bonus). The Astero and Stratios can also fit a Covert Ops Cloaking Device II and warp cloaked. All three hulls have bonuses to drone hitpoints, damage and armor resists, which makes them quite combat capable.

Finally, there are the three special edition ships, which all have a fixed 37.5% hull bonus to scan strength. These are the Sunesis (destroyer), the Gnosis (battlecruiser) and the Praxis (battleship).

Scanning Equipment

The most crucial items for scanning are the Core Probe Launcher and Core Scanner Probes. There is a T1, T2 and also a faction version of the Core Probe Launcher available. The T1 version gives no bonus to scanning, while the more advanced launchers do increase scan strength by 5% or 10%.

Additionally, you will need to load probes into your scanner, which come in a T1 and a faction version, which have a higher base scan strength.

To further increase the three scanning attributes, there are three mid slot modules available that increase the corresponding attribute . All three have a T1 and T2 version and need the corresponding skill to use.

For your rig slots, there are two kinds of modules available, which increase scan strength and decrease scan duration.

Finally, if you still want to increase your stats, you can use skill hardwiring to increase the  three skills and there is even the Virtue attribute enhancer set, which increases scan strength.

Types of Signatures

Once you reach an accuracy of 25% on a signature, it will show you the type of site that you are scanning. There are a couple of different types that can be found:

Relic Sites: These sites are non-combat sites that contain a couple of loot boxes that might contain salvage. To open the boxes, you will need to activate a Relic Analyzer on it. A Relic Analyzer is a mid slot module that starts the hacking mini game on the targeted box. If you complete the mini game successfully, you can open and loot it.

Data Sites: These sites are also non-combat sites that contain loot boxes. This time you will need a Data Analyzer mid slot module to start the mini game and loot it. The loot from data sites contains mostly items needed for invention of T2 blueprint copies.

Gas Sites: Gas sites contain gas clouds that can be mined by a mining ship fitted with a Gas Cloud Harvester module. The mined gas is used to produce combat boosters.

Combat Sites: These sites are very similar to missions and contain hostile NPCs, that might drop expensive faction loot. In order to run these sites, you will need a more or less properly fitted combat ship. These sites have different difficulty levels from very easy to hard.

Wormholes: These are temporary stargates that often lead into wormhole space.

With this quick overview of the different signature types, I will end this first part of the exploration guide. In the next part, I will explain how to run data and relic sites, how to successfully finish the hacking mini-game and the required equipment to do it. So stay tuned!