Wormhole Exploration for Beginners
This will be a post aimed at new players, who
want to have a go into wormhole space. I try to included some basic
tips and fittings that even a player who is on day one of his Odyssey
will be able to use and enjoy.
Disclaimer, you might die and get podded. Don't
fly what you cant afford to loose, update the med clone.
First of, a bit how my start in exploration went.
When I started to play EVE on my trial way back when in early 2012
(you can get a free 21 day trial with the link on the top-right) I
soon realized, I wanted to explore, but I didn’t quite know how and
what. Wormhole space sounded very interesting and also scary. I had
done the tutorials, and after some problems learned how to scan a
signature in about 20 minutes. My first one took way over 2 hours, so
don’t despair if it seems all a bit hard at first. It will get
easier with some practice. I found an wormhole in one system close to
my home but I was to afraid to go in it. When I later found the
courage to give it a go it was gone.
My fear at that time was more of the unknown, then
about loosing a ship in there. I then read up on w-space a bit and
found a good scanning tutorial. Since they changed scanning it should
be even easier to get into it. My path strayed a bit after that, I
mined for new ships, nearly quit because of the boredom then went and
applied to eve university, had a blast there and later joined a wh
corp.
Equipment & Skills:
You could use any ship really for the first steps,
even a noob frigate. It only needs to have a core probe launcher to
find signatures. But the exploration frigates have a bonus and this
will make scanning a whole lot easier. They are: Magnate, Heron,
Imicus and Probe.
Depending on which race you started out with, you
will already have one of these from the tutorials. A basic fit for
the Magnate:
[Magnate, Basic Scanner]
Local Hull Conversion Nanofiber Structure I
Local Hull Conversion Nanofiber Structure I
Local Hull Conversion Nanofiber Structure I
Local Hull Conversion Nanofiber Structure I
Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I
Scan Rangefinding Array I
Scan Rangefinding Array I
Core Probe Launcher I, Core Scanner Probe I
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]
Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
[empty rig slot]
This fit will only require these skills:
Amarr Frigate I (16 minutes, 40 seconds)
Hull Upgrades I (16 minutes, 40 seconds)
Afterburner I (8 minutes, 20 seconds)
Afterburner II (38 minutes, 50 seconds)
Afterburner III (3 hours, 39 minutes, 30 seconds)
High Speed Maneuvering I (41 minutes, 40 seconds)
Astrometrics I (25 minutes)
Mechanics III (3 hours, 39 minutes, 30 seconds)
Jury Rigging I (16 minutes, 40 seconds)
Astrometric Rangefinding I (1 hour, 6 minutes, 40
seconds)
Astrometric Rangefinding II (5 hours, 10 minutes, 28
seconds)
Total time: 16 hours, 19 minutes, 58 seconds
You should already have the Frigate, Afterburner and
Astrometrics skill if you did the basic tutorials. Mechanics and Jury
Rigging is needed to fit the rigs, which will give you a massive
bonus to scanning. You can go without but finding signatures will be
much harder. Last optional bit is the Scan Rangefinding Array I, it
takes 6h to train, but it can help scanning. Have a look at the
scanning tutorial I linked earlier for more skills and modules.
So if you go without rigs and the array you can fly
the ship in 6h, with an afterburner even less. Be sure to buy extra
core scanner probes, sometimes you can loose them and they are cheap.
I usually carry 2-3 set extra. So if you really want to go after
things fastest way possible, use the scanning frig, an afterburner
and a probe launcher, it will work! Other races frigates might have a
different slot layout but will work the same to fit.
The ship and modules should run you at about 1,25mil
ISK. If the modules you find in the new player system are very
expensive, check the market close by, nothing on this ship should be
more expensive then 150000 ISK.
Basic Wormhole Mechanics:
So you have the ship and
you know how to scan, but what is wormhole space like? It is quite
different from the High Security Space you have been in so far.
Before you undock, make sure you have everything fitted and working
on the ship, you could also buy insurance if you feel like it. Make
sure your clone is up to date and covers your skill points.
These are the four basic
things you need to know about w-space.
First it has no concord,
it is 0.0 security space. That means that everyone can shoot you and
they won't get concorded or loose security status, like in High-sec.
That means also that everyone will shoot you! Assume no one friendly.
It also means Bubbles. Warp Disruption Bubbles are anchored/
launched/activated Spheres that prevent you from warping while you
are inside them. If you get caught in one of these and enemies are
close they will catch you easy.
Second, there is no local
chat list with players in system. So you never know who is around and
watching you. Local chat only gets active if you speak in it, you
will reveal yourself to everyone but you still wont see anyone there,
so don’t do it if you want to be hidden.
Thirdly, wormholes
work different then gates to travel through them. There are some
important rules you need to remember, the first is to bookmark the
wormhole on each side. So bookmark the one you found on the outside.
Then you need to click it on the overview and open up info on it.It
will tell you about its status.
Wormholes have a
limit on time and mass. If time is up, it will close, also if big
ships with mass jumped through them, they will collapse and close.
Avoid these wormhole keywords if you seem them in the description:
“Critical" or "reaching the end of its natural
lifetime". Critical means there is very little mass left on the
wormhole and even a frigate might collapse it. A cruiser most
certainly will.
Reaching the end of its natural lifetime means, that
there are 4 hours or less (the less part is important) of life on the
connection. It might collapse any minute. They also look different in
space, they wobble faster and look shaky.
If you see a wormhole with these it is a risk to
enter and you might need to find another way out.
So the next thing you can see from the description,
it will give you a number, like k162 or c125.
These descriptions tell you about the destination a
wormhole leads to. A k162 is the most common, because it is the exit
of another wormhole. So its always k162 on one side, it also means
someone opened that wormhole from the other side.
Here is a website that lets you identify the wormhole
class and static:
http://www.wormnav.com/index.php
You can type in the static there, for example c125
and it will tell you the wormhole connections time and mass and
system where it leads to, go and try it out for c125.
Back? So you now know that a c125 is a class 2
wormhole connection with 16h time and 1 million mass. Wormholes have
different classes. A higher class means more mass and time and
usually harder sleepers. Sleepers? Yes, sleepers. The npc rats of
wormhole space are very dangerous and in every anomaly. Even mining
grav sites can have them. They will kill your frigate easy. They wont
pod you and they wont be on wormholes, so that’s something.
Have you noticed the description also gives away a
bit more? If you see a k162 you don’t know where it leads to from
wormnav, but the description will say something like unknown parts
of space. This means it leads to a class 1,2 or 3 wormhole. Dangerous
unknown is 4 and 5. deadly unknown is a class 6 wormhole. And
sometimes wormholes just lead to lowsec or another highsec system or
even a nullsec system.
Here is a more in-depth article about
wormholes: http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Wormholes
The forth item you need to remember is the wormhole
timer. A wormhole will only let you jump through twice, then you have
to wait 5 minutes until you can jump again through the same wormhole.
This can be used to catch you for example. If you are in w-space and
enter a wormhole, see enemies, jump back then you are polarized,
meaning you can not jump back into this wormhole for the 5 minutes,
so you are stuck on the other side if you get warp disrupted. The 5
minute timer is called polarity.
There is no aggression timer on wormholes, so you can
be shot on one side, jump and they can shoot you on the other side
right then and there. On gates they have to wait 1 minute until they
can do that.
Many times the timer is said to be 4 minutes for
jumping wormholes. But that is false. It is actually 5 minutes. You
already take a few seconds of that timer when you jump and load grid,
waiting out the session change timer etc. So it looks like less then
5 minutes.
What can we do in w-space:
The basic things you can
do in w-space, if you are brand new is explore, you can scan sites
and other wormholes, look for inhabitants and enjoy the scenery,
wormhole space is quite beautiful:
You can also do risky
stuff, like I did in my other story, steal wrecks for example. All
you need is some will and blatant disregard for your ship ;)
Remember a frigate is
quite hard to catch, you are by far faster then anything into warp
and speed. So you can outrun enemies, if they are in bigger ships. It
is however also fragile so dont hesitate to warp off or run away. Its
like a rabbit, hard to catch easy to kill.
There is one important
tool I need to tell you about before you jump into the wormhole
(finally! Ugh, wont Kara stop blabbering on!)
Dscan as we call it. The
directional scanner is your way to success and keeps you safe. And
your enemies worried! :) Every ship has a dscan and it works like a
sonar in space, pinging a whole sphere around your ship for other
ships or stuff. It works together with the overview. Open it up with
Alt-d. It is right next to the probe scanner window.
It will look something
like this:
You can scan like I did
there in all directions, or you can narrow it like a cone (ice-cream,
I should eat ice-cream) to scan almost anything down. It wont show
you cloaky ships, but everything else will be there, with the limit
of 14,4au. Together with the map of the solar system it is a powerful
tool. Here is a good guide how to use it, play a bit with it in
highsec and see if you can find miners at belts, watch a station
undock etc:
http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Directional_Scanner_Guide
So you jumped into the
wormhole and bookmarked it. I hope you did? Do it, make it a habit.
Don’t move! If you
don’t move or activate a module you get 1 minute invulnerability to
check what is going on. So for a bit you are perfectly safe.
Hit dscan, if there are
no ships you are good to go for now. Jump range for wormholes is 5km.
So if you are under 5km you can enter it, gates are 2,5km and
stations 500m.
If you are unlucky and
there is someone right there with you, just jump back to highsec, you
can wait on the wormhole and see if she/he follows. They cant do
anything to you in HS. Just don’t jump right back in, or you get
polarity and might get killed.
So if no one seems to be
there and dscan shows no ships you are pretty save. Well relatively,
there might be cloakys watching you :) but that is half the fun.
We will now make a midway
safe-spot. Pick a planet far away and warp to it at 100km. While in
warp open the bookmark system (maybe you have it still open from
saving the wormhole?) with alt-e and places → add location. It
will pop up a window, just hit submit. Congrats, you just made
yourself a save-spot no one can warp to but you for now.
If it didn’t quite work
the first time, try it again warping to other planets. Avoid Moons
and signatures, I will tell you later why.
So if you got the
safe-spot, warp to it. Keep watching dscan. If you see combat scanner
probes, warp off to another safe-spot further away. Or you can keep
moving in your frigate with the mwd. It will be very hard at 3km/s to
warp right on top of you and catch you in time.
So now that we are
reasonable safe we can scan signatures in the wormhole, maybe there
are more wormholes to explore, higher class wormholes or nullsec
systems to find. Or maybe you find a ladar site to gas mine later
with a venture and the whole system is so quiet you can risk it. This
can be quite profitable. I know the gas mine skill book costs an arm
and a leg when you start, but it will yield much more isk then any
mining you can do. Also some gas sites are in HS, so go look for
those also. Since wormhole anomalies are so different to HS ones you
can check here what you will encounter:
http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=WormholeSpace
So you see even a normal
grav site will have bad sleepers that kill you... But a secret, ladar
sites will spawn the rats after 15 minutes. So you can suck gas for a
bit and when they appear just warp away. Beware of those with
sentrys, they will spawn right away.
Most times you have time
enough to warp out with a frigate if you land and warp off right
away. I wouldn’t bet on it tho.
Warping to a site at
range (100km) is also ok, but sleepers have also quite the range, so
be careful. They will go after you. And even the frigates pack a
punch. You can kill easy wormhole sites in a very well tanked cruiser
or better a battlecruiser. Frigates and Destroyers will die.
So we have established
Sleepers bad! Why are moons bad then? Moons can have a POS, a Player
Owned Starbase. This is where wormhole dwellers like me live, because
there are no stations in wormhole space. So we bring our own
stations, complete with ship hangars, module bays, guns, warp
disruptors, shield and even pleasure deck. I also have a corpse collection there...
They look like this,
maybe you have seen one in HS at a moon:
Here I am watching a POS
from some wormhole corp. You can see it has guns around it and
someone is inside. The POS can shoot you and lock you with warp
disruptors in w-space.
They can also do that in
NS or LS, so be careful not to warp to one with your fragile frigate.
In HS you will be fine tho, you can have a look around and explore
them.
Later on with a cloaked
ship you are able to watch a POS in any space safely, and see what
people do there.
Fly a bit around in the
wormhole, explore and go sightseeing, there are some nice planets in
w-space and you can even dare to try to warp at range to sites and
bugger off after a very quick look. Might also work at POSes, but you
have been warned, more then land, and right away warp off is not a
good idea. Better to watch them from afar with dscan. :)
So this concludes a first
introduction to exploration in wormholes, next time I will tell you a
bit how to make isk in w-space. This will also be for a bit more
advanced players, but I will included a training program to get you
there.
In the meantime, don’t
be afraid, like I was, poke around and try mad stuff, you will learn
a lot and many skill that is applicable in every day eve life. If you
know how to scan and dscan, you can be a valuable scout for pretty
much any fleet for example. Many skills in EVE are not character
based, learning the mechanics and workings will keep you safe and
help you have fun.
For questions and
comments either pm me in game, or write me here on my blog.
Have fun!
