Apocrypha and Probing

My girlfriend was nice enough to loan me $100 to get a new graphics card so I could play Eve Online and test out the new Eve expansion.

First thoughts: I like it

The ships are so much more detailed with the premium graphics client (I had to optimize the graphics for performance, but the graphics still look good compared to the old client)

I’m glad I spent an hour and a half downloading the premium graphics now. Otherwise the patch for Apocrypha would have been a bit larger.

So after doing a mission and having some dinner, it was back to Apocrypha, this time to check out the new probing system. While much improved, it can take some time to get used to. I had to read the tutorial to find out how it all worked (at one stage I was getting a red ring, and I had no idea what it meant). My first try at probing took a good couple of hours, but I managed to find a Guristas combat site and this:

It’s a little dark, but that glowy thing to the right of my ship is a wormhole. Yep, I found my first wormhole on the first day I played Apocrypha. I told my CEO I’d found something unknown that was of the group unstable (that’s how it came up in the scanner), he thought it was a combat site. I thought to myself “Why would a combat site be unstable?” I didnt go through, but as I wasn’t going to go through, I didn’t bookmark it either.

Stupid mistake.

As it was now an hour from downtime, I decided to log off and take a break. A little after the server came back up, I decided to find the wormhole again and, at my CEO’s insistence (it was more of a gentle push to find out what ore lay on the other side), I went through.

As soon as I got through, I warped to the nearest planet in case some unfriendly came through and decided to pop my ship. That would not have been good, being stuck in wormhole space with no way out. Dropping a core scanner probe, I set the distance to 32 AU to find out what lay there. 17 signatures came up. I decided to track down a gravimetric signature. What I found wasn’t really exceptional, but there were ores that are generally only available in low sec. There were some high sec ores, but not many. After that, I decided to warp back to the wormhole and back to empire, in case the wormhole collapsed, leaving me to find another wormhole.

So, back in empire, I bookmarked the wormhole I just exited and warped off. I decided I would try and track it down following the tutoral I just read. It took me about half an hour, but I managed to track it down.

Now that I know what I’m doing, finding wormholes (or any other hard to find signature) will be easy, with a little practice (and patience).

Until next time

Lord Yu