Because it’s fun!
Wait, you’re still here? Fine, fine.
Exploration has a lot of things going for it that make it a very attractive “starter career” in EVE Online and an easy recommendation for new players who don’t want to run missions or stare at rocks all day (staring at antivirus nodes all day is much more engaging).
Because it has a low barrier to entry
For starters, exploration has a very low barrier to entry. So low, in fact, that you can start doing it with a day 1 alpha character with minimal skill training. You also get a free exploration frigate from your starter Career Agent missions (which you should absolutely do: finishing all 5 career mission chains only takes a few hours and gives you a decent starting supply of ISK and ships with some standings thrown in). Career Agents aren’t the focus of this guide and it’s easy to find resources on completing them (or just ask in the ingame Rookie Help channel if you have any questions), but here are some tips anyway:
- The 2nd and 5th missions of Soldier of Fortune require losing a ship (please read mission instructions!), so get insurance before you go in. The 2nd mission just requires you to fly an empty ship given to you into a structure that explodes, while the 5th mission requires you to destroy 1 rat (NPC) and then die to reinforcements. It’s possible to cheese the 5th mission by destroying the initial rat while aligned out, warping off before the reinforcements lock you, and coming back in an empty ship, but your fit’s going to be so cheap that it’s probably not worth it. Just don’t carry around anything you don’t need for the mission.
- While you can only complete each Career Agent chain once, you can still access any other career agent and run their missions too if you want to, even if they’re from a different faction. However, this gets tedious and isn’t really useful unless you’re grinding faction standings for a trade character or something.
- If you do decide to run multiple sets of Career agents, you can speed up the Explorer chain by waiting in one of the sites that drop the certificates you need: the can will refresh over time with a new certificate, so you can get as many as you want from the same site and instantly complete the relevant Explorer mission from the next agent.
- If you get locked out of Career Agent missions by accident or due to a bug, file a support ticket and a GM will fix it for you.
- You don’t have to build most of the items needed for the Industrialist missions; you can just buy most of them off the market if you want. You still have to build the Civilian Shuttle though.
After completing the 5 starting Career Agent chains, you can get right to exploring in the T1 (Tech 1) exploration frigate provided to you. Between Career Agent and AIR rewards, you’ll have enough ISK to replace the first few exploration frigates you lose (and you will lose them, we all do). If you want, you can also do the Sisters of EVE epic arc for around 20 million ISK more, but it isn’t that necessary. So to summarize, you can easily start exploring with a fresh character on your first day playing the game.
Exploration also has a uniquely low barrier to entry because you don’t need expensive equipment or a lot of skills to do almost everything that an experienced player can do. As a day 1 character, you can already scan down and run most exploration sites. Sure, a better-equipped player might scan sites faster, have a higher success rate hacking cans, and escape from trouble more easily, but you still have access to nearly all of the same content and can still make hundreds of millions of ISK from a single can.
Because it pays well
Along with having a low barrier to entry, exploration also pays really well, especially for a new player. You can easily make tens or hundreds of millions of ISK from a good site and head home with a cargohold worth billions. And thanks to how cheap starter exploration fits are, you can easily make enough ISK to cover any losses starting out.
Because it’s engaging
Exploration directly combines PVE and PVP- you’ll be scanning down and running sites while trying to not get caught and killed by other players. You also learn useful PVP skills even if you’re not looking for a fight: using dscan, reading the map, avoiding and escaping from camps, playing around people hunting you, reading local, and analyzing killboards are all skills you’ll learn by just exploring normally.
It’s also easy to keep exploration fresh and avoid burnout. You can explore in different areas of space, try new sites, test out different fits, fly blingier or cheaper ships, and adjust how much risk you want to take.
Because it scales well
Exploration might have a low floor to get started, but it also has a very high ceiling. With a moderate amount of skill training and additional ISK investment, you can start using Tech 2 Covert Ops frigates to scan sites faster and move around much more safely. By dumping hundreds of millions of ISK into a Zeugma integrated analyzer and Blackglass implant, you can brute-force nearly every hack in the game with impunity. With a large amount of additional training and ISK, you can start using Tech 3 Cruisers to run combat sites in addition to more standard data/relic ones. When it comes to exploration in EVE, it may be easy to get started, but you’re never really finished.
Because it’s flexible
A neat thing about exploration is that it doesn’t tie you down to a specific area or time window (it wouldn’t exactly be “exploration” then would it). Only have half an hour to play? That’s fine, just scan some sites and log off! Up for a long roam? That’s fine too! Shorter play sessions of course make you more susceptible to bad RNG in terms of finding good sites, but when it comes to not having to worry about getting some fun out of a short play session, exploration’s almost as good as abyss running.
None of this is to say that exploration’s without downsides, of course. Finding good sites is very luck-dependent, even if there are ways to work around it. You might make 200 million ISK from a single Sansha relic site, or you might jump through wormholes for hours and find nothing. Though we’ve gotten some new exploration ships and toys like interdiction nullifiers over the years, exploration sites themselves haven’t had a major change since Ghost Sites were added roughly a decade ago, and the hacking interface is even older than that. While you can explore very successfully even with low skills and cheap equipment, there’s a good chance that you’ll fail harder hacks or get beaten to sites by more expensive ships.
It can also be really frustrating to lose a full hold of loot to a camp that you can’t get out of as an alpha with no cloak. Not that I’d know anything about that, of course.
However, I can confidently say that the upsides of exploration far outweigh its negatives. It wouldn’t be so popular otherwise! Now that should be quite enough about why to explore. The next part will talk about how to explore, starting with picking a ship to do the job. You know, things that a guide should probably talk about.