Suitcase Challenge Day 18: My First C13!
stargrace 
For exploration purposes, I stick to the C1-C3 range of wormholes. I’ve entered a few C4/C5 but don’t stick around as there is usually someone living in them (or someone being evicted). I prefer to keep a low profile, especially since I am casually living in a wormhole myself, out of an Orca I have parked at a safe. This week I managed to find myself in my very first C13 wormhole – which is a version of Shattered that only allows small size ships to pass through. Thankfully the Helios I’ve been using to explore fits that qualification no problem. There’s no moons and all planets are shattered in these WH, which is pretty, but useless for anything like PI.
The wormhole was filled with signatures. My usual method is to scan the entire hole and then proceed from there – but if there’s a site I want, I’ll stop scanning, go do the site, and then return to scanning. I’ve already posted about using the ‘perch’ method, and then I turn these perch bookmarks into a safe bookmark after the site has expired. This C13 had 7 relic/data sites for me to complete, and in about an hour I had 270,000,000 ISK in value in my ship. I never saw another soul, whether it was because of the C13 status, or because it was close to downtime, I’m not sure. My usual game play happens around 5am my time (Atlantic) until 7:30am, and then I get another hour at the end of the day. Some days I’m not in the mood for exploration, or there’s no good sites within range, and in those instances I’ll spend the last 1h before I go to bed doing something with guaranteed ISK reward, like ratting.
I haven’t been selling my exploration loot because I’d like to use it for crafting. In specific, I can save almost 100m ISK by crafting myself a zeugma analyzer instead of buying one off of the market. The thing is I’m not so certain I want to justify the additional ship value by adding one. I certainly won’t bother on the Helios, but maybe for the Stratios so I can free up the mid slot. I’ll probably sell the other two (the bpc comes with 3 runs). In any case, it was a very exciting morning, I ducked into the ice field just to nose around, and then spent some time jumping from hole to hole to find one that had a static HS connection.
I’ve finally gotten the hang of using pathfinder – and I love it. I tried Tripwire briefly, but didn’t really understand anything about it at the time, so I’ll try that one again when I’ve got some free time, but pathfinder makes mapping very simple. It tells me statistics about my wormhole at a glance, and you can see the C13 I went through, along with the connections it had. These connections of course won’t be the same any more at the time of this post, they change every 24h roughly, which is why mapping can sometimes be a bit of a pain. I just like knowing the path back home (you can also flag WH as EOL so you avoid it if required) and I like knowing what connections I can count on. I can also usually figure out if a WH is going to be busy or not based on those connections and where they’re at in kspace.
Any way, it was a great day for exploration, and my little helios has paid for itself over a few times now with plenty of profit to spare. This little ship might not be able to do any combat, but some days, that’s exactly what I’m looking for.
Fly your way. o7