so ive been licensed about 18 months now and just recently got my HF privileges sorted out and i have been having an absolute blast just working random stations on 20m and 40m. someone at my club mentioned DXCC and i kind of went down a rabbit hole reading about it this weekend.

so if i understand it right, i need confirmed QSOs with 100 different entities - and entities arent always countries which is where it gets a little confusing to me. like wake island counts separately even though its US territory? and some places that used to count dont anymore?

im also seeing WAS and WAZ mentioned a lot and im not totally clear on how those relate or if most people chase all three at the same time or focus on one first. i guess my real question is do people usually just log everything and apply later or is there like a strategy to it. also is lotw basically mandatory now or do people still send paper cards. i have a few qsl cards on the way already from some contacts in japan and germany but i havent set up lotw yet which i probably should do

Welcome to the rabbit hole, you may never come out haha. You've got the basic concept right - entities are ARRL's definition and yeah it gets weird, Bouvet Island counts the same as Germany even though one has basically nobody on it and one has thousands of active hams. The entity list is on the ARRL site and worth bookmarking.

As for WAS vs WAZ vs DXCC, most people I know just log everything and let the credits accumulate naturally. WAS is all 50 US states which sounds easy but Alaska and a few others can take a while depending on where you live and what bands youre working. WAZ is 40 CQ zones worldwide, that one gets tricky because some zones are just not very active. DXCC is kind of the big one that most HF ops eventually chase.

Lotw - yes get it set up sooner rather than later. Paper cards are still totally valid and some DX stations only do paper, but a lot of the big DXpeditions upload to lotw pretty quickly and it saves you a ton in postage and bureau wait times. Getting your account set up takes a few days because of the certificate process so just do it now while youre thinking about it.

yeah the entity thing tripped me up too when i started. basically just trust the ARRL entity list and dont overthink it. one thing nobody told me early on is to make sure your callsign info in lotw matches exactly what you submitted or your credits wont confirm, learned that the hard way after like 6 months of wondering why my confirmation rate was so low lol

also if you worked japan you probably got JA stations which are pretty common but still fun, and germany is DL - those will be easy confirms on lotw probably. some of the rarer ones you might be waiting on paper qsl for a long time or paying via the bureau. the dx cluster is your friend for finding new entities when you need specific ones