Guide: Probing

They love to tell you
Stay inside the lines
But something's better
On the other side
John Mayer - No Such Thing

Hey. Decided to go looking for wormholes huh? Couldn't or didn't get the test server going in time to get a handle on scan probing? Didn't understand it before and still don't? Want a quick reference guide instead of an entire video to find some specific information?

Yeah me either.

But given that I've already done it, I guess I might as well put this up:


We can start by hitting the scanner button, that's circled in white. Once it's up, hit the map button. If you're playing in low-sec space, this is the point where you should be safed and cloaked.


This brings up the solar system map. Some of you have seen it before, some haven't. A small preview:


Go ahead and decloak, drop a probe, and recloak. I'll wait.


Wow, that bubble looks kinda cool doesn't it? If you're already in the center of a system, neat.

If not, you're going to want to know how to move the probe to the center. Here's a couple of helpful hints. Those little arrows on it? Yeah they're not just for show. Click it and drag it. If you hit shift while doing so you'll move all of the probes you have out in the same direction.


Now that you've got it in the center of the system, you'll notice it may not cover everything. You want to start at 32 AU and work your way down. You can resize by grabbing the outside of the bubble and dragging. If you have multiple probes out, holding shift while doing that will resize all of them to the same dimension.


Or you can resize a single probe by right clicking the probe in your scanner menu.


Once you cover the system properly in bubbles that don't touch each other, hit the Analyze button.


That starts a scan.


Your first hit on a signature will look like a bubble. Anomalies are usually so easy to find that at this point you've got their location already locked down.


That bubble means that the signature is from somewhere inside it. You'll want to shrink the size of your probe radius to get a more accurate reading. Notice that the anomolies already have 100% strength at this point.

After you shrink the probe's size down you get a hit again, but the size of the hit is smaller. That's good.


Hmm. Lets try skipping 8 AU's and go straight to 4 AU's.


Bah, no signature hits at all. See the scanner results? Lets go back up to 8 AU's.



Ahh a hit again. So 8 AU's is as small as I can go. Time to start triangulating then. Drop 3 more probes.


Once again, pay attention to their location in space. Move them using the arrows. Don't forget they are three dimensional, so you may or may not need to move them up or down as well.



Your probes should cover the bubble something like this:


Ahh we've got the second stage of hits. It's a circle where two probes intersect. That means the location is somewhere on that circle. Move your probes again so that all four cover the space of that circle.


Before we scan again, take the time to create a filter that will ignore the anomolies. That way we can focus solely on this signature.


See how they dissapear from the map? Now we're ready to scan again.


A point hit. Good. A point hit means 3 or more probes have a signal at that location. If it's only 3 probes, the location will be off by a fair amount. If you get two point hits very near each other, just treat it like a circle hit and cover both at the same time.

You only need 4 probes to get a location narrowed down, so lets resize our probe radius to 4 AU's and move all four to cover that point hit. Make sure that you take note of the hit's location on the plane of the solar system. In this case it's actually above my probes, so I'm going to click one of the arrows that move a single probe up and down, hold shift, and move all four at once.

Once that's done, and the point is covered by probe radii, analyze again.


New hit, resize to 2 AU, and move the probes.

New hit, resize to 1 AU and move the probes.


You're done. Signature found at 100% by four probes. If you're not done at this point, just keep resizing and moving the probes until you are done.


You can right click on the hit, and warp to it. Remember if you warp to a hit from the map, and once you get to where it should be it's not there, you've only got a hit with three probes. Just move them a bit and try again. Once you've arrived, bookmarked the location, and left, you can then recover your probes(truthfully you can do that any time you want).


Hit the button and watch them return.


And you're done.


Pretty simple I think. Hope you find this useful.

Couple of closing comments. If you're having trouble positioning your probes, put them all on the same plane, and position the camera above them.

If you get down to .25 AU's and you still do not get a 100% hit, you're going to need to boost your scan strength. Get better skills, a covert ops ship, a sister's launcher, implants or move your probes closer to the hit. Or all five.

Most sites still spawn within 4 AU's of a celestial. CCP has said they can spawn outside of 4 AU's and I have confirmation from others that it is possible.

Please check this post for links to other material, should you need it.

If you have any questions, post a comment and I'll try to answer it, and add it to the guide if I can.

Good Day.