Originally by: Jimer Lins

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Originally by: Sol Star

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Thanks a ton guys, that was very helpful.

BTW Jimer, I have already watched your vid

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I hope it was helpful. ;)

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I do have another question however. What is difference between a cosmic signature and a cosmic Anomaly? Noticed in other threads mentioning about a bug that is bringing up anomaly's as unknowns. I just don't know what an anomaly actually is.

Thanks again.

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A Cosmic Signature is what you look for when seeking Exploration sites, such as hidden asteroid belts, hacking, salvage sites, gas clouds and complexes (the ones with warp gates).

A Cosmic Anomaly is the signature you should look for if you want the newish "Encounter" sites, which you can find with both probes AND the onboard scanner- the one every ship gets. These are small, non-gated one-"room" encounters you can go asplode a few rats. Sometimes they escalate to higher-level sites, which can be fun and lead to good loot.

These used to both be lumped together as "Unknown" sites, both detectable as "Cosmic Signature". This made it impossible to tell if the multispec hit that said "Unknown" was for an Encounter site, an Exploration Site, or both. Most explorers aren't looking for the encounter sites, they want the harder complex sites.

So after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, CCP changed the scan system and moved the Encounter sites to "Cosmic Anomaly" types, in theory keeping them from coming up on probes when searching for "Cosmic Signature".

This worked perfectly, EXCEPT for the Multispectral Probes. So now, if you get an "Unknown" hit on your multispec probe, it could still be for either encounter or exploration content.

However, you can also detect Cosmic Anomaly sites on the onboard directional scanner.

If you REALLY want to be sure no Encounter sites are polluting your scan results, warp to each planet and do a quick 360 at max range with "Use Overview Settings" UNCHECKED. If you find any "Cosmic Anomaly" entries, you'll have to clear them out and try another multispec probe to be sure if there's a true "Unknown" site somewhere in the system.

Most people don't bother searching for Unknowns these days because of this. There's a fix promised in Rev 3.

I have theory as to why it only got fixed with the standard probes and not multispecs, which is that multispecs aren't chance-based, so they just do a direct query of what's there at the end of the scan time. The others go through a different process, and the filtering is done there for the signature types. Since they use different processes to obtain the data, the fix for the regular probes got missed with multispecs.

Just a theory, but it fits the available facts.

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