It has always been my habit to complete a full survey of a system I was inhabiting. In a busy empire mission-running system, this meant probing out all the abandoned ships, collecting any concentrations of lost drones, establishing probing bookmarks so that all the exploration areas (within 4AU of a planet) could be covered by dropping one flight of probes, that sort of thing.
In wormhole space, it means knowing what your cosmic signatures are, and where they are. Since they change frequently, this is a challenge, and requires constant maintenance.
In Greater Mars, I finally achieved this nirvana this morning. Right now, I know where everything in the system is (unless there are cosmic signatures so faint they don’t reach the .05 probe detection threshold, which I very much doubt but is always possible I suppose).
At the moment I’ve got, and have bookmarks for, 13 cosmic signatures. They break down as follows:
3x wormholes (one to high sec, about to expire; one to 0.0, which I’m about to nip into for a lookaround; and one to unknown space, which I need to check quickly for abandoned ships and such.)
9x gravimetric signatures (hidden asteroid belts). These include one “isolated core deposit” which has tasty roids like gneiss and dark ochre. (There was a small spodumon roid in there yesterday, but I went and got a mining barge.)
1x ladar (gas mining).
I also have one Cosmic Anomaly currently, which I’ll pound flat in a few minutes with my Drake.
This is, overall, a low count; there were more things (especially anomalies) when I first moved into Greater Mars. The operating theory is that they respawn, like all exploration content, across a constellation or region or set of systems; so that as the sites and anomalies I’ve used up have despawned, they have respawned in other wormhole systems where (potentially) nobody has encountered them. This will result, naturally enough, in an incentive for explorers to seek out new and undiscovered systems, rather than camping (as I have been) in the same one for days and weeks on end.
Sites do despawn, eventually, even if I leave them alone. All of these sites seem to have a natural lifespan of, roughly speaking, several days.
Entries (RSS)
March 21st, 2009 at 11:44 am
Your blogging of your experiences in W-space has been entertaining, exciting, and informative. Keep it up!
March 21st, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Update, a couple hours later, with respawn rates: I decided to visit all ten of the grav and ladar sites I have bookmarked; I did this yesterday and cleared all rats, so this gives us info on respawn. In (I’m guessing) about twenty hours time, rats respawned at two of ten sites.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I reallly admire your play-style, as I’ve said before. Something I’ve never asked is do you use an active alt?
March 24th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
There’s just enough roleplay element to this blog that I prefer not to comment on that question directly, if you’ll pardon the omission.
March 25th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
No pardon needed: the question actually felt a little wrong when I asked it.