A tour of the most valuable bodies near you, in the order that flies best — and back home if you want it.

1 It plans stops, not a destination.

THE OTHER TWO here, to there THIS ONE a circuit of bodies worth scanning The value is in the scanning, so the route exists to put good bodies in front of you. Take a Detailed Surface Scanner. Without one, most of what it sends you to is worth a fraction.

2 Three dials, and each one trades against the others.

STOPS how many systems it sends you to 10 out of the box RADIUS how far out it may look for them 500 ly out of the box WORTH STOPPING the floor a body must clear to be included 500,000 cr out of the box Raise the floor and you must widen the radius, or there will not be enough bodies left to fill the stops.

3 Coming home is a choice, and it is on by default.

COME BACK ends where it started, so you can sell to the same cartographics DO NOT leaves you at the far end, covering more ground per stop Ticked out of the box, because unsold scan data is worth nothing at all. Untick it when you are already heading somewhere and want the scanning on the way.

The details

The card called Road to Riches on the Routing tab’s Plan page, and the plot_exploration_route tool behind it.

What you fill in

Box What it means Out of the box
Stops How many systems the tour visits 10
Radius (ly) How far from the start it may look 500
Least worth stopping for (cr) The floor a body must clear to be included 500,000
Come back to the start Whether the last stop is where the first was Ticked

It starts from where you are. There is no destination box, because there is no destination — the route is the point.

The three dials pull against each other

Raising Least worth stopping for does not make the route more valuable on its own; it makes the pool of candidate bodies smaller. If the pool goes below the number of stops you asked for, the only way to get them back is a wider radius — which means longer legs between them.

The shape that usually disappoints is a high floor and a small radius: a short list of enormous payouts scattered so far apart that the flying costs more than the scanning earns.

Take a Detailed Surface Scanner

The figures a route quotes assume you will map what you arrive at. Honking and flying on earns a fraction of it. Directive 47 does not check whether one is fitted, so this is the one piece of preparation the plan cannot do for you.

What it is worth is an estimate, and estimates go stale

Body values come from what the service knows, and a system somebody scanned last week is a system whose first-discovery bonus is gone. A route is a good list of places to look, not a promise about your balance.

It is a job, and it can be refused

Like the Neutron Plotter, this is submitted and queued rather than asked and answered, with a ninety-second budget. A Road to Riches loop came back on the first poll when measured on 2026-08-14. Past the budget the answer says so, and says what to change: fewer stops, or a smaller radius.

The tool schema and the service it calls are on Route planning — one page for all three planners, because that part really is shared.