Exploration:

The first step is to press V to get the location of StarDock, and
other important information on the game.

Once you have the sector to StarDock, you may use the CE command 
to shoot E-probes into the farthest sectors. Once probed, those 
sectors will be included in the explored database.

When you've used your probes, go out and do some manual 
exploration with the Holo Scanner. Again, a helper does this 
automatically. It will automatically holoscan any unexplored 
sector it comes to.  Those holoscanned sectors then go right 
into twhelper's database.  By the end of your turns for the day, 
you will have a good bit of the universe explored, and have 
accumulated a nice chunk of cash by trading on the way. Once 
you make it back to Stardock, spend most of your cash on more 
probes, and shoot them at that time. It might be a good idea to 
keep a little bit, say 50,000 credits, in the Bank at StarDock 
for a rainy day.

The goal is to get as large a percentage explored as quickly as
possible. You can probably explore at least 75% of the universe 
in the first 3 days.

At the end of each day's turns, you will want to be sure your 
experience points (XP) is under 1,000 so you'll still be safe 
in fedspace.  See the section on XP and Alignment tricks to 
reduce your score. Remember, the score is worthless to you at 
this point. What good is it if you get killed and lose your 
ship and cash?