“Wormholes. The scary place that even Nullbears are wary of,” as Brother Grimoire puts it. For those willing to brave the darkness, lucrative opportunities abound in wormhole space. But like the fiercest of pirates, it’s earned its reputation as a place of danger, misadventure, and skulduggery.
In wormhole space, Sleeper-infested hacking sites are the least of your worries. There are plenty of other hazards to be wary of, and you could really use some advice to avoid them. Enter the Just About EVE Online veterans and their navigational advice, from the basics of wormhole class identification to an especially sneaky ratting technique. Read on for some essential guidance to maximise your chances of survival and success. Fly well.
Know your wormholes
Wormholes are divided into six classes, C1 through C6, with the higher-numbered classes indicating increased danger within. A C6, for example, is classed as ‘Deadly Unknown’. Expect to find high-threat NPC sites and/or other environmental dangers on the other side.
Contrary to some new players’ assumptions, you’re far from blind when entering wormholes. Visual clues ranging from wispy rings surrounding the wormhole to the nebulae visible within grant vital insights into what you can expect on the other side.
Understanding these clues will eventually become second nature. But until then, you need to work out how to identify them. Two Just About EVE members submitted excellent videos showing how that’s done.
First up, it’s JAKEL33T’s shorter video, which comes complete with the wormhole identification infographic shown above. It’s a great cheatsheet and comes in 1080p, so we recommend making it your desktop background if your heart is set on becoming a wormholer.
JAKEL33T admits that he’s learning as he goes along. And that’s what makes it such a helpful tutorial; you can watch Jake judge mass and identify colour tones in real time. He flies his Covert Ops Buzzard - you’ll understand why that’s a wise decision later - and tests wormhole after wormhole while talking through the exact steps you’ll need to follow to become a wormhole navigation master. Original post
Jake’s video is part of his Wormhole Wanderer seriesTalking of wormhole navigation masters, Wadd Enderas’s guide - the second in a series called Wormhole Workshop - is no less than Jake's. The first 15 minutes are dedicated to wormhole identification techniques, with a section on deciphering the information shown in the wormhole overview. That’s followed by a rundown of every major class and size of wormhole, with handy timestamps down in the description if you want to learn more about a particular type of wormhole. Original post
Wadd flies a cloaked up Astero and takes viewers through the A-Z of wormhole identification.Bookmarks and breadcrumbs
“Don’t forget to bookmark your home hole. I’ve been guilty of this more times than I care to admit, and it gets a little embarrassing.” Brother Grimoire - original post
When it comes to naming your bookmarks, like sneezing or making cups of tea, everybody has their own unique way of doing it. As per bookmarking gas harvesting sites, the most important thing is to have a system.
“Use a naming convention for your bookmarks. This is worthy of its own guide, but if you’re the scanner in your corp, you make everyone’s lives easier by making notes others can understand.”
If you’re lacking inspiration, greybill has a system covering both pings and anomalies that makes a lot of sense.
“For pings at gates and wormholes, I use the following scheme: [GATE-ID/NAME] @[DISTANCE in km] [DIRECTION] Here are some examples: M-MD31 @400 top FDZ-54 @300 side, or C1a ABC @200 below” Original post
The advantage of greybill’s system is that it allows for multiple bookmarks at the same gate, structure, or wormhole while simultaneously granting the ability to discern and relay directions to friendlies: “I have a ping on the M-MD31-gate at 400 km above.”
Greybill’s system changes when it comes to direct naming of cosmic signatures. They recommend logging them by their type and their ID. So a gas site might be ‘Gas1 ABC123456789’ while a class 4 static wormhole would be ‘C4 static XZY987654321’.
Once named, you can compare the alphabetical ID of the signature with the probe scanner window. That way, you can discern which signatures have already been bookmarked and therefore don’t need scanning.
If you have another system, we’d love to hear about it in the replies section. But as far as wormhole bookmarking is concerned, that’s about it apart from one final piece of housekeeping… your housekeeping. Here’s greybill again with advice on how to stop bookmarks becoming cluttered and outdated.
“Set your bookmarks to automatically delete after two days. Such ‘housekeeping’ methods can improve group gameplay quite a bit.”
Scanning the darkness
Scanning effectively involves more than just spamming a single button. This is EVE Online, not Mario Party. Here are Melicien Tetro’s scanning hotkey crib notes:
Double-clicking will flip the axis
‘Ctrl + mouse wheel’ will increase or decrease scan radius
‘Alt + mouse wheel’ will increase or decrease probe spread
‘B’ to analyse
‘V’ to scan
Of course, these are customisable, so find a layout that works for you. Speed and efficiency are your friends when danger lurks nearby.
Learning the flow of Anoikis
“It can seem really abstract, but learning where people are going to be and why is the key to safe and effective operations, whether that’s offensive or defensive.” Melicien Tetro
You would be wrong to assume safety in a lower-class connection like a C1 or C2. Melicien Tetro points out that their relative distance to K-space makes them the ideal hunting ground. Then there’s the ‘C5 Highway’, which will turn any unwary traveller into roadkill. “If you’re on it, you need to know where you’re going, or you will be run over.”
The complexities and subtleties of wormhole space are rabbit warrens in and of themselves (on several levels). Lessons are best learned through practice and exposure, though Melicien Tetro notes that third-party mapping and intel tools like Pathfinder and Galaxyfinder can do a lot of the heavy lifting. In Just About EVE Online’s second Kenny Rogers reference of the week, Melicien Tetro continues:
“The nuances of Anoikis navigation go deeper and deeper. Know when to roll ‘em, know when to hold ’em. Complete hole control is considered best practice, but it requires many hours. Sometimes, it’s more operationally sound to just run. No amount of security will protect you completely, but having some security will often prevent a forced retreat. Strike a balance.”
Brother Grimoire’s three survivin’ and thrivin’ wormhole tips
“1. Always bring a cloak. Opt-in local chat means nobody knows where you are unless they can see you on-grid or via their directional scanners. A cloak will negate the latter. 2. Position yourself wisely while hacking. I love this trick; it’s gotten me out of a few close scrapes, including one where three guys decloaked and dropped a warp disruption bubble. I advise that you orbit the container you’re hacking at 2,500 metres. That way, as soon as you see a hostile, you can cloak up and steer to safety. Most ships have a targeting delay, giving you a crucial window in which to escape. 3. Use a third-party wormhole mapping tool. Tools like Tripwire and Pathfinder are invaluable resources for tracking both what’s ahead and what’s behind. Use them whenever possible.”
Rolling, rolling down the wormhole
To ‘roll a wormhole’ is to send enough mass through it that you breach its capacity and sever its connection.
A ‘static wormhole’, aka a ‘static connection wormhole’, aka just a ‘static’, is not a wormhole that always spawns in the same place. It’s a wormhole that will always connect to another wormhole space system of the same class. A C5 static wormhole will always lead to another C5 wormhole system. When it respawns, it will link to a different system, but it will, again, be another C5 wormhole system.
Rolling a static wormhole has different consequences than rolling a non-static wormhole. When non-static wormholes are rolled, they collapse. When static wormholes are rolled, they collapse and then reopen to new systems. This has certain advantages.
Kane credits Reddit user vaminos while promoting a method of “making your wormhole your personal safe space”, and a gainful safe space at that. You’ve heard of Danger Mouse? This is safety ratting:
“It’s not about moving from wormhole to wormhole. It’s about farming Drifters, wormhole gas, and wormhole Sleepers. If you’re risking billions of ISK in an area of space without local chat, you need to know your mechanics.” Kane Carnifex
The method is all about keeping the wormhole to yourself. Here’s how it works:
Start by rolling your static wormhole. If nobody warps to it, it won’t spawn an exit hole for hostiles to enter through, giving you dominance over your area of space. If someone warps to a static wormhole but doesn’t enter it, the wormhole’s lifetime will start ticking down. Once that lifetime is at 15 hours, the hole starts trying to respawn on its other side. But you’re still left with a safe window in which to rat.
Be warned, if someone leaves from your side of the wormhole, then all of the rules above can be disregarded. So if you’re not ratting alone, make sure you’re ratting with a good communicator.
“You don’t need to D-scan if nobody can enter your hole.” Kane Carnifex - original post
While ratting is never completely safe, Kane’s ‘just keep rollin’’ technique is certainly savvy.
NB Some text has been edited for grammar and brevity. You can find the submissions in full at the original bounty post.
Image Credit: Razorien on Flickr
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