During last five weeks I have learning basics of exploring. I wanted to know how easy (or hard) is to find sites and how much ISK you can get with a decent amount of time spent a each week.
During that time I found total 145 signatures, six radars, three magnetometric and eight gravimetric sites. As expected radars were most profitable on hi-sec space and quite much time I spend also to mining few gravimetric sites while doing something else. If you calculate probability to find a radar site on my test it was less than 5%.
What a learned? I learned that exploring can be very profitable and I gathered more money (or loot anyway) than I gathered before during my short career. So I would say it IS profitable for newbies also. All sites which I visited were easy to handle even with a small frigate so you don’t need expensive ship and big guns for those.
My loot value is somewhere between 94-120M ISK but we will see in a future how it sell. I’ll start to sell it piece by piece. It is though pretty far from PLEX price, so with this knowledge, I would like to say that it will need way more hours to gather 350M ISK in a month for a ‘free’ subscription…and with that amount of time spend to game I’m not sure if that anymore fun or is that wise. Spending 15€ or less to pay subscription is easier.
One point I’ll have to say though that my testing was not optimal if you think about time I spend. If you strictly scan down lot of sites and ONLY visit radar sites you can get better profit for you time. But I wanted also check out other site types, learn and use a time when I can’t play 100% of my time and concentrate to the game for mining.
Testing period was small and it is too early to answer the question “How much playing time it would take to get 350M ISK?”. If you want to calculate it based with my luck, you need about 24 radar sites. This is based the fact that my loot value from radars was about 88M ISK and that dived to six, it’s about 15M per site. And if it would be 24 sites and to find radar site it was about 4% of the total sites you need to find 580 signatures. Depending your luck and scanning skills it would take time. I don’t say it is impossible because so many have done it, but either my luck on this test was bad, I was on bad region or it just takes lot of more playing time.
I also spend a little money during this test to skills and got some bounty money, but if you consider loot value those both, it was so small amount of money.
In a future I’m definitely continue exploring and my next goal is start checking also unknown sites and learning those. For that I’ll have to buy a new ship and fit that. I got some great setups and ideas from community but I’ll think I’ll start with Vexor first to learn things. Reason for that is that my current skill set support that ship and fighting setup best.
Send comments using in-game mailing system if you have something to ask and donations are also welcome if you liked this blog series. I might continue this series if there is enough interest among community. But who knows if I continue blogging again and share my experiences along the way while flight to unknown sites and explore low sec space, even if nobody care, just for fun.
Happy hunting everyone and see you in game!
Afterburner
Caldari Battleship
Medium Hybrid Turret
Kernite Processing
