Wormholes are one of the strangest system types in New Eden. They are dangerous, unpredictable and random. They can also be the safest systems you ever pass through. Some of the best PvP in EVE can be found here, where Wormhole mass restrictions limit attackers and a lack of local means anything can appear (or disappear). A week of nothing happening can change with one lucky directional scan hit that spies you a Tengu.

There’s a vast difference between pillaging/roaming wormhole space and actually living there as well. Having lived  in a Wormhole for close to 2 months now, I feel it’s time for a brief TNE article on living out of a POS and my d-scan being my best friend.

Wormholes are grouped by class, with Class 1 having the easiest sites and Class 6 having the hardest. The class of a Wormhole also affects the mass restrictions leading to it – I believe Class 1 wormholes can’t even allow Battleships.

My corp/alliance lives in a Class 5 Wormhole with a Class 4 static. This means that at any one time, there will be a wormhole leading from our space to a Class 4 wormhole. Class 4s are good for running Anomalies (most can be done with 3 Tengus) and often connect to other wormholes, which is good for hunting. However, C4 wormholes are probably one of the worst for PvP since they never have a wormhole leading out to normal space (known as “K-Space”) which means there’s normally not a lot of through traffic.

That’s enough background stuff. What’s it like actually living here?

Firstly, it is important to remember we are not a big WH alliance like K162. We’re pretty average, I’d say, but we don’t go on massive null-sec killing roams.

Secondly, my alliance is primarily US based, whereas I’m EU. This means I’m usually the first around after Downtime and do a lot of the initial scanning.

To start, living out of a POS is an odd experience. We rely on each other for ammo and mods if someone runs low until we can do a market run, and we don’t have all our ships to hand. I have to open 2 separate windows to board a ship and then another two to fit. I have to go through the hassle of dragging bookmarks from my folder to my cargo before I can put them into a Bookmark can (note: corp bookmarks don’t help alliance members)

A typical day involves me checking notes to see if our current static should have died out, then launching probes at one of my many safes, and scanning down todays wormhole “constellation”. My day could easily end here. Many scan trips have revealed something constellations with not a single tower, leading out to a dead area of nullsec. However, just because the WH constellation is dead at 2pm does not mean it will be so at 5pm. Many times a new wormhole has appeared, spitting out a scout for us to shoot or follow home.

Upon finding a new wormhole, the first thing to do is hit the directional scan and look for ships and towers. Second is to bookmark the return wormhole. Only then to I break my initial decloak and recloak off the wormhole.

If there are ships on scan, my first task is to establish whether they’re at a POS and whether they’re piloted. If there is indeed a POS and forcefield on scan (the forcefield indicates the POS is online) I use d-scan to pinpoint the moon it’s at, warp to it and bookmark an observation point. These bookmarks are the only ones I save from each day.

More often than not, ships on scan are empty at a tower or piloted at a tower unmoving. It’s when there’s a ship on scan *not* at a tower or other probes are seen on scan that we actually perk up and start prepping the PvP ships. Probes on scan usually results in us plonking a scout on our new inbound wormhole to see what is being used to scout (shiny T3 scouts are fun to explode) and anything else results in further scouting to establish what we field and if we even have the numbers to field a force. There’s usually only 3 or 4 of us max in my timezone, so we have to judge our moves well.

The removal of the “Jump” API in Wormholes has changed my scouting quite a bit as well. Whilst before I could check to see if someone had jumped into or out of a Wormhole (and therefore judge a wormhole’s lifespan or the systems’ activity) now there is that little extra “unknown” factor to scouting. Whilst a pain, this makes perfect sense.

Once we’re done scouting, if the Constellation appears empty we usually take the time to run some sites in the Class 4 static wormhole, or even run Capital escalations in our home. Both make decent ISK and allow me to buy new ships to scout or PvP. If there’s no sites to run, we try to collapse the wormhole to spawn a new one. This is usually achieved relatively easily, so long as we’re on the ball. Once a new wormhole is spawned, it’s back to square one, as it were.

And then we start again.