Does anyone do exploration stuff? It seems like something I'd enjoy, but I'm not sure if it's something I should go for. I already have lvl.5 mining, refining, and something else related to digging fancy things out of space rocks, so I got good bank coming from that. I'm just wondering if it's worth the time to train the skills for a second source of income.
I've done exploration pretty extensively, basically from the day the mechanics first came out. I'm also doing it pretty regularly today, seeing as I live in a wormhole.
K-space (non wormhole space) exploration can be a fairly steady stream of income but not an extraordinarily large one. Before settling in W-space I mostly did low-sec exploration for a living. What I did was running radar and magnetometric sites (hacking and salvaging). Radar sites drop decryptors for T2 production which sell for 1-10 million each, with each site dropping anything between 0 and 5 of those, give or take. I'd estimate average income to be 5-15 million per site. Magnetometric sites these days drop T2 rig blueprints, which can be pretty valuable if you get one for a popular rig (cargo expansion, cap recharge, etc.). I haven't done these much, since back when I did them they didn't drop those, only really crappy amounts of salvage, so I'm not overly familiar with the prices here.
Then there are combat sites, gas clouds and wormholes, of course. Gas clouds (ladar signatures) are for booster production, and isn't all that lucrative unless you're actually producing the boosters, from what I've heard (I might be wrong, though), so I'd stay away from that. Combat sites and wormholes (unknown signatures) are fairly different from each other. Combat sites are very much like a mission, a small deadspace pocket with NPC pirates of varying difficulty, with the notable exception from missions that they can potentially escalate, i.e. generate another (generally slightly more difficult) site a few jumps away.
Wormholes are links to W-space, 0.0 security space where there are no stargates and no local chat channel. They contain difficult combat sites, very valuable ore belts (containing every ore in game except the rarest one, name escapes me at the moment) and fairly lucrative gas clouds that provide the basis for T3 manufacture. They are risky however, as you have to deal with both dangerous rats and players that can be difficult to see coming.
As for the ships you'd need you can probably solo any low-sec combat or radar site in a decently skilled battlecruiser. The most difficult unknown combat sites might get a bit hairy, though. High-sec sites are easier and less lucrative, and can probably be soloed in a cruiser or even less. You'd also need a scanning ship (and skills) for scanning down the sites, preferably a covert ops frigate, but a scanning frigate works in high-sec. If you want to start raising wormholes, C1 and C2 wormhole (the systems high-sec wormholes usually link to) anomalies are doable solo in a battlecruiser with good skills, albeit pretty slowly. A group of 3 or four well-coordinated players should not have too much trouble unless they get jumped by other players, either. C3 WH's are generally soloable in a T3 cruiser only or possibly in a very tanky battlecruiser, but you'll take the better part of an age doing each site. I live in one of these, and we usually do a site in 10 minutes with four people, usually one logistics ship, two battleships and a T3 cruiser. C4 and up are probably inadvisable to try to solo since here almost all enemies scramble you and only very expensively fitted ships will survive the kind of damage these sites do.
I'm Avaan Eclipse ingame and I usually hang around the B12 channel when I'm online, even if that's not terribly often.
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Topic: Eve Online (Read 275474 times)