Wormholes

Wormholes are cosmic signatures in EVE Online that connect two systems of space. These can be used for transporting fleets, logistics, and exploring the universe.

The connection part is interesting, but there is not much to talk about there. We are more interested in talking about wormhole space, a completely separate experience of EVE Online.

We’re going to be going over the fundamentals of the wormhole experience: the core mechanics you need to understand, the differences between wormhole space and the normal EVE Online experience, and the culture of the wormhole space community.

Buckle up, let’s go!

Fundamentals

With wormholes, there’s a lot to unpack. To make this consumable by the average EVE Online player, I’ve decided to boil the fundamentals into three areas: environment, mass, and connections.

Environment

In this section, we’re going to talk about the environment of wormholes. This includes a general overview of wormhole space, and some of the new things that you will encounter.

Overview

When you enter a wormhole, it’s important to understand that you can go one of two places: known space and wormhole space. Known space is what you’re used to: highsec, lowsec, and nullsec. But wormhole space is something completely different, and is commonly referred to as j-space, w-space, or Anokis.

Wormhole space is marked with a -1.0 security status, and the systems will have a J at the start of them, followed by some numbers. They also have an associated class: C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, and C13. In a nutshell, the higher the class, the harder the environment.

Alongside the class and security status changes, wormholes can have system effects, influenced by a star in their system. For example, a Wolf Rayet star will give the wormhole a system wide effect bonuses to ships with small guns and armor. These add significant depth to wormhole combat, because a fleet of large ships can be obliterated by a handful of frigates.

Sleepers

Wormholes are inhabited by sleepers, which are essentially the rats of wormhole space. They are much more challenging than normal pirate NPCs, and pack more utility like neuts, webs, and scrams.

Instead of ISK bounties, sleepers drop blue loot which is sold to highsec NPCs for ISK. Usually you make significantly more per site in wormholes, but resources are more limited than nullsec.

Sleeper salvage is used to produce Tech III cruisers.

Additional Cosmic Signatures

There’s a large number of new cosmic signatures you’ll encounter in wormholes, such as new data, relic, and gas sites.

While scanning in wormholes, you’ll find data and relic sites with prefixes like Unsecured and Frontier, these are sites protected by sleepers and provide different loot required for Tech III production. Be careful, you’ll likely die unless you’re prepared!

Gas sites in wormholes are great income for new players, and are harvested by Ventures with Gas Cloud Harvester I’s (or II’s, if you’re fancy) equipped. The gas is used in hybrid reactions, which, surprise, is used in Tech III production.

Fun Fact: you can produce any Tech III module or ship without leaving a wormhole.

Mass

Wormholes are connections between two systems, and these connections have mass restrictions and mass limits. This is the most crucial part of wormhole travel, otherwise you’ll likely get stuck on the other side.

Mass Restrictions

Mass restrictions affect the size of the ship that can pass through, so that you don’t have capital ships passing through C1 connections.

Class	Size	Ships that can travel
C1	Medium	Battlecruisers and below
C2	Large	Battleships and below
C3	Large	Battleships and below
C4	Large	Battleships and below
C5/C6	Very Large	Capitals and below

By right clicking a wormhole and displaying its information (show info), you’ll be able to see the mass restriction for a particular wormhole. Sometimes, you’ll see small holes, which means that only small mass ships can pass through them.

Mass Limits

Mass limits restrict the amount of ships that can pass through, so that a fleet of 1000 can’t immediately travel across the universe.

By right-clicking a wormhole and displaying it’s information (show info), you can view a message that displays what the current mass limit of a wormhole is.

Not yet disrupted	50%+ mass left
Disrupted, but not to a critical degree	10-50% mass left
Critically disrupted	below 10% mass left

Rolling

Rolling a wormhole is a term that you’ll likely hear in a wormhole or nullsec corporation, and it involves ramming ships through a wormhole to close the connection.

Different types of wormholes have different mass limits, check EVE University’s great table for this.

Tricks

There are lots of tricks that players can use to abuse wormhole mass restrictions and limits, mostly around a handful of ships. Since there’s no reason not to mention them…

• Heavy Interdiction Cruisers have a mass module that makes them as small as a frigate.
• Ships like the Nestor have base mass reductions, allowing a battleship to fit through holes that it shouldn’t.

There’s likely a few other tricks out there, but these are ones you’ll see a lot.

Connections

If you haven’t caught on yet, wormholes are connections between two systems, but there’s some interesting flavor in wormhole space that relates to these connections.

Statics

Wormhole systems are guaranteed to have a type of wormhole that always exists in the system, although the destination it points to is constantly changing.

These are called statics.

For example, a class 1 wormhole can have a high security space static, which means that it will always have an exiting wormhole to high security space. When that connection dies, a new one will spawn.

Something to note is that statics are lazily implemented, and the other side doesn’t spawn unless certain conditions are met. There’s more about this that you can dig up, but ultimately if you don’t warp to a freshly spawned static wormhole, the other side is spawned by chance. This means that a freshly rolled wormhole system can have no entrance for hours.

Classes and Statics

Statics are generally determined by the class of wormhole, although the specific of the static can vary.

Class 1	Static to known space
Class 2	Static to known space and wormhole space
Class 3	Static to known space
Class 4	Static to wormhole space and wormhole space
Class 5	Static to wormhole space
Class 6	Static to wormhole space

Culture

The culture of wormhole space, to me, is one of the most interesting parts of EVE Online. Most wormhole locals operate by upholding space bushido, creating content for others, and supporting the community.

Space Bushido

This is a topic that could take pages, but ultimately space bushido is treating others with respect, maintaining the integrity of wormholes, and giving content to others.

It’s the wormhole space honor code, and not following it will get you on the eviction list of others.

Creating Content

Wormholes are hard, and wormhole space is a very small community of the EVE Online playerbase. Due to this, a large part of space bushido is always giving a fight, regardless of the outcome.

Integrity of Wormholes

Generally, wormholers want to see more people joining the wormhole space community and providing content. Thus, you’ll see the community rally around small groups getting evicted, and teaching the will of Bob.

Who is Bob? The wormhole space god, don’t read into it.

Reminders

Here’s a things that I want to leave you on.

• Wormholes have no asset safety, if you kill a citadel (or lose a citadel), it drops all player assets.
• Sleeper sites are amazing income, but nothing will beat the scalability of nullsec. Supplement your wormhole income with nullsec alts, if you are after riches.
• Wormholes have the best PI in the game, their truesec is -1.0.
• Thera is the only named system in wormholes, and the only system with an NPC station.
• Nullsec relic and data sites spawn in C1, C2, and C3 space. They’re great income.

Welcome to wormholes!