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[Saede Riordan]

http://riordansramblings.tumblr.com/post/52736208111/saede-riordans-guide-to-wormholes

Suddenly the illusion of solitude shatters. Slender, articulated obsidian shapes slide toward you from the surrounding darkness of space. Your sensors scream claxons into your auditory cortex as the drones’ targeting systems lock onto your ship. You are not alone. Perhaps you never were.

Introduction
The purpose of this guide is to provide a set of introductory material to the would be explorer of Anoikis. It is not entirely comprehensive, and more in depth information exists on Evelopedia once the basics are understood. With this guide, one should be able to navigate Anoikis and utilize the static network to its best effect. While the mechanisms that allow Anoikis to function in the manner it does are still not fully understood, but understanding how the network functions, we may be able to better learn to use and control it.

Unknown Signature: Unstable Wormhole
The first thing that a wormhole explorer should know, upon landing on grid with the stable spacial distortion, is the basic mechanics behind which wormholes operate. Armed with this understanding, the explorer will be able to make a fairly decent assessment of what is on the other side, before even jumping through the hole. First, the show info will tell you a great deal, between the show info, and the view through the wormhole, a well trained explorer will be able to say with some accuracy where the wormhole is going. You will want to memorize the appearance of each class of wormhole system, as well the appearance of various nebulas from various regions in New Eden. C1 and C2 space are both blue, though C2 space is much more bluegreen, C3 is milky white, C4 is yellow and green, C5 is orange and black, and C6 is orange and red. Next, its important to determine the type of wormhole that one has found. There are three types of wormholes, and numerous sub-types. But we will just cover the three basics.

Type One: Static Wormholes
You will never find a static wormhole in Known Space. A static wormhole is a stellar topographical feature of each system in Anoikis, an outgoing point defect capable of condensing into a wormhole when a vessel lands on grid with it. Every system in Anoikis has one static wormhole, and Class 2 systems have two statics. C1s, C2s, and C3s have Known Space statics, C4, C5, and C6s have statics to other systems in Anoikis. A static is an outbound wormhole. It begins in the system your are in, and upon landing on grid, coalesces into the traversable spacial anomaly. Prior to the first vessel warping there, the wormhole remains unspawned, it does not exist at this point, and has no corresponding hole anywhere else. It is just a potentiality, triggered by the ship’s warp. Once formed it remains open for 24 hours, then closes, as soon as it closes, a new potentiality will form again. The wormhole is static, meaning it will always exist in the system, either spawned or as a potential. A static will always connect to the same place. A static to lowsec will always open up somewhere in lowsec, a static to C4 will always open up into a C4 system. The static of a system is often what determines its value.

Type Two: Wandering Wormholes
Wandering wormholes are the second type of wormhole, they begin life as the same potentiality as a static, however, they wander, popping up in places randomly. There are wanderings from Known Space to Anoikis, wanderings between regions of Known Space, wanderings from Anoikis to Known Space, and wanderings from Anoikis to Anoikis. These wormholes allow us to bypass the static network, taking a shortcut directly to our destination.

Type Three: Wormhole K162
Wormhole K162s do not begin as an unformed potentiality. They are the ‘exits’ to statics and wanderings. When someone warps to a wormhole and causes the spawning of a wandering or static, a connecting K162 opens. A K162 may thus be thought of as not a wormhole itself, but one side of a higher dimensional structure. Jump through, you’re still looking at the same wormhole, just from the far side. However, this is important, because if a wormhole is a K162, then you know you didn’t open it, someone else opened it from the other side.
The last thing to note about the wormholes themselves is the Polarization Timer. When you jump through the wormhole, your ship will begin to build up a ‘charge’ that will finish building when you jump through again, if you do so quickly. Once you have jumped in and out of the same hole once, your ship becomes polarized, preventing it from jumping through the wormhole a third time for 2 minutes and 30 seconds.
Oh, and make sure you bookmark the wormhole before jumping through.

Illusion of Solitude: Exploring and Surviving in Anoikis
Upon crossing the threshold, its important to take in as much information as you can, while your gate cloak is active. First, check overview for people who would shoot at you, if they are there, jump back through and run away. Second, check for ships on directional scan. Then you’ll need to make a bookmark on that side of the hole, get off the hole and cloak up. Being uncloaked alone in Anoikis is generally considered a bad idea.

Once safely in system, do a lookup using a tool like wormhol.es. Putting in the locus signature will give you a wealth of information including the system class, the static, any system effects, planets, moons, and possible occupancy. Its a very useful tool.

If a system is clear of hostiles, there are all manner of things to do in system, and most of them can be found with a core probe launcher. Gas clouds, Data and Relic sites, mining sites, deadly nests of sleeper ships, abandoned capsuleer towers, and other, stranger things have been found lurking in the dark. Before you do anything, you should map all the signatures. All of them. This is so, when a new K162 appears in your system, you can catch it straight away. Its often easy to recognize a K162 just from the signature names. After downtime, the signature names all roll so their three letter sequence of [XYZ-123] will sync up with the last or last two of the letters. So after downtime, all the sites will share the same last letter, and often the same second to last letter. A new wormhole will have a totally random signature, making it stand out.

When doing anything in Anoikis, the first thing one must understand is that the illusion of solitude is just that, an illusion. At any moment, a Proteus could decloak on your venture and utterly ruin your day. There is no local, thus no way to truly determine if a system is empty or not. If you miss a recon that cloaks as soon as it gets off the wormhole, you might miss it on the 2-3 seconds it would be able to be picked up on your directional scanner. You are never alone. For this reason, Anoikis is never safe, it is often less safe then 0.0, where at least you know immediately if someone is trying to kill you.

The directional scanner will invariably become your primary intelligence tool, and clicking the scan button every few seconds should become rote. Wormhol.es also includes a d-scan tool that gives you distances in kilometres for the distance in AU, making it easy to figure your distance from a given ship, and by narrowing, you may be able to pinpoint a vessels location fairly quickly.

The flip side to this is that someone else can do the same to you, so get used to hitting d-scan every few seconds and have it open. You will also want to make sure its not cluttered, and shows probes.

Surviving in Anoikis requires a fairly high degree of paranois, and constant mashing of the directional scan, knowing the few seconds you don’t are enough time to slip fifteen T3s and recons into your system. Sooner or later, you will lose a ship. These risks can be mitigated by flying with friends, watching directional scanner, and always being prepared for a fight. Flying alone in Anoikis will get you killed, likely fairly quickly. So always have backup, always have friends with you, and be ready to run at the first sign of trouble.

Fly safe New Eden, the universe is a lot bigger, and a lot weirder, then we could ever have thought possible.

[Ollie]

As smf doesn't give me the option to like this anonymously, I'll have to do it publically.

Nice simple, beginner's guide - might contact you about reposting some of its key points to our corp site once I have a chance to get that setup?

[Saede Riordan]

As smf doesn't give me the option to like this anonymously, I'll have to do it publically.

Nice simple, beginner's guide - might contact you about reposting some of its key points to our corp site once I have a chance to get that setup?

sure ^_^

[Templar Ordo]

I enjoyed reading this. Highlights the mysterious background of wormholes, and describing at the same time.

Good work, Saede.

[Utari Onzo]

As a fellow wormholer, I fully support this guide.

[Saede Riordan]

This guide is actually kind of out of date. I didn't fully understand polarization mechanics when I wrote it. I should probably give it a re-write.

[Utari Onzo]

This guide is actually kind of out of date. I didn't fully understand polarization mechanics when I wrote it. I should probably give it a re-write.

Still more information then you can get out of the official wormhole forums. 80% of the replies to very common asking for help threads are troll posts, 10% are 'use google' and only the nugget remainder are generally helpful.

I'm also happy to help out on information on higher class wormholes if people are interested in what we do in those.

[Ché Biko]

Ché Biko's Guide to Wormholes until you've read Saede's:

[Anyanka Funk]

Why join a wormhole corp if you stay out of wormholes?

[Ché Biko]

 
Who stays out of wormholes?