Guide: Directional Scanning

I need a sign to let me know you're here
All of these lines are being crossed over the atmosphere
I need to know that things are gonna look up
'Cause I feel us drowning in a sea spilled from a cup
Train - Calling All Angels

One of the most important skills for any PvPer to have is the correct use of the directional scanner to find targets. So lets get you started on the road to that. I'm going to assume two things here. One: You've read the Safe Spot and Overview guides. Two: You'll be setting up scanning safes just off of planets instead of on them.

Lets begin. First, make sure your overview tab includes ships. You can later set up an overview tab just for scanning if you like. For now we're going to use a standard PvP overview setting(indicated by the yellow arrow). Click the scanner button, indicated by the white arrow.


One you've done that, make sure you can see brackets in space. Most of the time they clutter up my page. In fact, you can turn them off if you know a huge fleet battle is about to take place. It will save your computer having to load hundreds of brackets when you land on grid. However, for scanning, we'll need to be able to see where objects are in space, so we'll need them on. Click on the small triangle in the upper left hand side of the overview window(indicated by the red arrow). Once you've done that, scroll down and make sure that "Show all Brackets"(indicated by the white arrow) is on.



Next up, you may notice your directional scanner isn't set up for very long ranges. It can scan up to roughly 14 and a half AU. The exact number of kilometers is long and hard to remember so we'll cover that next. There are five items here of note:

The Directional Scanner Tab: Indicated with the white arrow. You must be on this tab to use the directional scanner.

Range: Indicated with a red arrow. The next step will tell you more about this.

Use Active Overview Settings: Indicated by the yellow arrow. This should be checked, assuming you're using your PvP overview tab.

Angle: Indicated by the blue arrow. Initially kick this to 360 by sliding the bar all the way to the right. We'll worry about narrowing it down later.

Scan Button: Indicated by the green arrow. Click this when you're ready to scan.



Rather than trying to figure out how many kilometers you'll need to input here, just put zero's in after a 1 until it won't take anymore. Then click on something else.


It will automatically display the maximum range at that point. Now do a scan.


A lot of stuff comes up, but we're going to take a trip to a planet with a lot of belts and take a look around for this exercise. It looks like planet five here fits the bill.


Warp to planet five, but create a safe just before you land. Then warp to that safe. How to do so is covered in the safe spotting guide.


Once you've done that, take a look around you with the scanner. If it's a highly populated high sec system, you'll likely see a lot of stuff. This is a good way to practice.


Alright, we're close enough to the planet for the belts to be distinguishable in space, but we're going to have to narrow our angle down if we want to search each one separately. When you have stuff to look at in space, like belts, a 30 degree angle is almost always sufficient to locate your target. Seldomly will you need to switch to anything but a 30 or 360 degree scan. Use your own discretion to discover when you might need to use a different number.


Belt two seems to be empty. Notice how my ship is pointing in a random direction. An often made rookie mistake is assuming your ship has to be facing the thing you want to scan. The D-scanner will make a scan in the direction your camera is pointing. This allows you to switch quickly to other objects and make a new scan.


Belt one seems to be empty as well. Darn.


Well, looks like belt eight's got a retriever in it. Lets narrow the search down a bit just for fun.


He still shows up on a directional scan at 15 degrees. Sometimes it can be beneficial to uncheck the "use active overview settings" box once you have a target narrowed down to check for moons and PoS's. Just make sure to turn it right back on.


If you warp in on the belt and the target is there, you've done it right. I suggest training on mining ships in high sec, as they likely won't warp out before you land. That can be frustrating when you're still learning, because you assume you did something wrong, when in reality the target just left before you got there. If worst comes to worst, try again till you get it right. Then keep doing it till you're confident.



There are very few good PvP groups that will take a pilot that cannot use the directional scanner. If you're actually fast, and good with it, you can very quickly get a handle on the situation you're in. Those kinds of people are generally highly sought after by good PvP groups. Hopefully this gets you on your way.

A bit of advanced info for those that want to know how far away something is:

149,597,870.7Km = 1AU
299,195,741.4Km = 2AU
448,793,612.1Km = 3AU
598,391,482.8Km = 4AU
747,989,353.5Km = 5AU
897,587,224.1Km = 6AU
1,047,185,095Km = 7AU
1,196,782,966Km = 8AU
1,346,380,836Km = 9AU
1,495,978,707Km = 10AU
1,645,576,578Km = 11AU
1,795,174,448Km = 12AU
1,944,772,319Km = 13AU
2,094,370,190Km = 14AU
2,147,483,647Km = 14.355AU

Guide: Safespots

A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.
William Shedd

Read this and this before using this guide. You will need to have set up your overview properly for this to be of use.

So you jump into a system and you're just off a gate. Enemies are in hot pursuit, and you need to give yourself enough time to formulate a plan. You need a safe spot. It's alright, everyone gets into these situations sometimes. I don't blame you.

First, warp to a planet at a distance that isn't 0:

Then, open up your people and places window by clicking where I've put a white arrow.
Click "Add Bookmark"
Now, at this point, wait until you're in warp, preferably a few seconds in before you hit ok.
You will be given a safespot somewhere between the points you've warped from and to:
Once you land, immediately right click in space and warp to your newly created safe haven:
You'll shortly be in warp to your new safe spot:
Once you land, look around. Depending on where you've made it, you may see a lot or nothing at all. You may make as many safespots in a system as you so desire. Just be sure to keep them clearly labeled.
To ensure a clear labeling, assuming you didn't have time to name it while you were warping, just open up your people and places again. Then right click on the bookmark you made. In this page, any bookmark that belongs to the system you're in is green. Once you right click on that bookmark, you can edit it or even delete it.
Once you're done, take a look at it. Each bookmark has a row of identifying information. You can sort them by that information. That includes jump(distance from your current system), Sol(System it's located in) and more. The best organization I can imagine is to sort it by the names of the systems they're located in.
Remember, any point to point safe is in what's called a "travel lane". That means people can sometimes see you while they're in warp. To keep them guessing, once in your new safe, pick a new celestial object and make a new bookmark between it and your current safe. Now you've got one out of the path of a celestial. You'll be much harder to find there. When warping to a celestial you can also create a bookmark just before you land, giving you a very close spot to use your directional scanner from. That'll be covered in the directional scanner guide.

Finally, no safe spot is completely safe. Some are however, safer than others. Any spot more than 15 AU's from another object is not easily found directional scanners. Such a spot will give you even more safety. It will generally also require a bit more time to probe you out. That's another thing, in any safespot you can be probed down. It can happen quickly. Be on the lookout.

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.