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How to Scan Signatures in EVE Online

Probes, signal strength, and getting to 100% - the exploration and wormhole basics.

A Nexum wormhole guide

Almost everything worth finding in EVE - wormholes, data and relic sites, gas clouds, hidden combat pockets - starts as a cosmic signature: a faint red dot the game won't let you warp to until you scan it down. Scanning is the skill that turns those dots into places you can go. This guide covers the gear, the workflow, and how to read what you find.

What you need

To scan cosmic signatures you need a ship with a Core Probe Launcher fitted and a set of Core Scanner Probes loaded (Combat Scanner Probes work too and can additionally scan down ships, at a small strength penalty). Beyond that, four things make scanning faster and easier:

• Astrometrics and its support skills (Rangefinding, Acquisition, Pinpointing) - more signal strength, faster scans, tighter results.
• Scanning rigs and upgrades - Gravity Capacitor rigs and a rangefinding array add strength.
• Sisters gear - the Sisters Core Probe Launcher and Sisters Core Scanner Probes give a strength bonus over the tech-1 versions.
• An exploration hull - the Astero and Stratios have built-in scanning bonuses and cloaks; any covert-ops frigate is a strong starter.

None of this is mandatory - a basic launcher on any ship will scan - but strength is the difference between resolving a tough wormhole in two passes and fighting it for ten.

The scanning workflow

Open the Probe Scanner window (Alt+P). Every signature in the system shows as an unresolved dot with a percentage. The loop is always the same: cover, scan, narrow, repeat.

1. Launch your probes. In space, launch the scanner probes. They appear as a movable formation (a cube of 7 by default) with a range slider.
2. Cover a signature. Drag the formation over one unresolved signature and set the scan range so the cube comfortably surrounds it. Hit Analyze (scan).
3. Read the result. Each scan returns a signal strength (a percentage) and a result shape - a large sphere when the location is vague, shrinking toward a single dot as you close in.
4. Narrow. Re-center the probe formation on the new result and roughly halve the scan range, then scan again. Strength climbs each pass.
5. Resolve. At 100% the signature identifies its type and becomes a warpable result. Warp to 0 for wormholes; a safe range is fine for sites you plan to scout first.

Reading what you find

When a signature resolves, its group tells you what it is:

• Wormhole - a connection to another system. Warp to it and read the name (a type like N062, or a K162 exit) to learn the destination class, mass and lifetime.
• Data / Relic - hacking sites; run the containers with a Data or Relic Analyzer for blueprints, materials and salvage.
• Gas - gas clouds you harvest with gas cloud harvesters (big in wormhole space).
• Combat - hidden pockets of NPCs. Cosmic anomalies, by contrast, already show in the probe scanner without any scanning.

For wormhole mapping, the wormholes are the ones you care about - each is a doorway into your chain. See the wormhole types and statics list for what each code leads to, and how to map a wormhole chain to turn a system full of holes into a live map.