September 7, 2024

My Biggest Exploration Holy Grail

I wasn’t in the mood to mine or rat, so late yesterday I decided I would spend some time doing what I love best – exploring wormholes. No pressure, no obligations – I headed out in my trusty Helios, ship of choice. The path was simple. I jumped into a C2 with a C5/null connection, from there headed to the C5, and in the C5 I found a C1/3 (by description) that only allowed the smallest of ships to enter. I typically have very good luck with these, and this was no exception. It ended up being a C13 shattered wormhole, with a C6 and a nullsec static.

There had been no deaths in the system since early August, and there was no one around judging by the plethora of sites available to scan. I went to work, I scanned down 10, completed the relic/data that I wanted, and then would scan another 10.

On my second pass, I happened to notice a particularly difficult site – and when I saw the title was displayed, I gasped. It was my holy grail of exploration. The Silent Battleground. I had never come across one before in all of my travels and I was EXCITED.

Silent Battleground is a very rare data site found in shattered wormholes.

The silent battleground contains 20 relic and data cans scattered in 60 km radius, with no Sleeper rats present. It must be scanned down and requires decent skills to do so. Failing the hack twice does not blow up the can. The data cans contain data cores, and the relic cans contain T3 manufacturing components such as Intact Power Cores. Early reports suggest that this site operates on a timer and will explosively despawn after some time, though dealing no damage. This timer should be longer than 30 minutes. 3 hacking ships should be able to clear the entire site before this happens, however.

At the centre of the silent battleground is a wrecked Revenant, suggesting an unexpected historical Sansha’s Nation presence in these shattered wormholes. The wreck cannot be salvaged.

I set to work. I tagged anything with a value of less than 2m ISK with a 0 so I would know to leave the cans alone. I’m not certain what the timer was exactly, but I had enough time on my own to complete the entire site. A word of warning, the items you find take up a LOT of room, so I ended up jettisoning cans into space filled with my loot, and just took the most valuable with me. When the site vanished, the cans remained. Then I finished scanning down the rest of the data / relic sites and by the time I looked up from all of the treasures I had found – it was 3am, and I had to get up at 7am. It was absolutely totally and completely worth it. I also forgot to get screenshots of all of the loot I found, and I just took the one below when I was part way done.

Wow. It was so quiet and eerie floating around from can to can. I took so many screenshots, and I just had the best time. I think I yelled out loud when I finally completed scanning the site down, it was by far the most difficult site I’ve scanned and I was incredibly proud.

Fly safe o7

Nomadic Gamer