Wormholes

Prior to becoming a part of The Skunkworks I spent most of my time as a solo explorer, daytripping into wormholes. It was profitable, educational, fun, and you meet a surprising number of friendly people if you know how to not be an idiot. I've made a lot of references to my days of doing this, but have never really written any sort of guide. This shiny new forum has inspired me. Disclaimer: this is a bit disorganized and probably incomplete, but I'm writing on a whim to start discussion.

I got my start just daytripping lower-class wormholes that I found in highsec. I made good isk, learned some lessons, and became quite adept at it. Then I decided I'd try living in one. Here's the problem: I didn't want to bother with a POS. For a solo player, that's just a magnet for your stuff getting blown up and/or stolen. My solution? Be a nomad. Roam from wormhole to wormhole, scouting and properly reseaching new holes before entering them.

What I'm not going to talk about: survival in w-space and fittings. If you don't know to hammer d-scan or you can't fit a Tengu for C3 solo work, you probably need to learn that first. This is about mobility and exploration. And I'll only say this part once: use safe spots, don't log off at celestials. Don't blame me if you lose expensive stuff because you couldn't bother to spend two minutes setting up a proper, hard-to-find safe.

To start with, you need the right tools. Obviously you'll need a PvE ship for shooting sleepers. T3s are hands-down the best ship for this job. I use a Legion because f*** missiles, but the Tengu is the best choice from a min/max perspective. You'll also need to salvage and loot everything. Sleeper sites can be rather expansive, and a Noctis is the obvious choice here. That covers your PVE activity. Put a probe launcher on both so that losing one means you can still get out of the hole with the other.

Now, you can get by with these two ships being flown by two different characters on the same account. Shoot sleepers with one, bookmark the wrecks, and then come back with the other and loot/salvage. This makes you more vulnerable, though, as you'll be logging in and out in ships not suited for the PVP that could fall in your lap at any moment. So I'd suggest multiboxing and having at least a second account with an orca pilot.

This is my orca's fit: a large hull repairer, a large armor repairer, a T1 cloak, a 100mn MWD for fast warps, and warp core stabilizers. I use the SMA to store a mix of ships not in use. Here's what I would suggest you enter the hole with:

A recon ship of some kind (I use a pilgrim). A recon showing up on d-scan in a wormhole has the nice effect of making people safe up rather than go hunting. Solo recon ships are rare in w-space and they'll assume it's part of a gang, either scouting or late on the cloak button. This is the ship I would log out in, so that I could cloak immediately upon logging in.

A covert ops ship. This should be something any of your pilots can fly, including the orca pilot. It would be risky, but if the worst happened and your orca were stranded in a hole with all your other alts podded out, you could wait for a quiet time and eject the frigate and scan down an exit. Alternatively, a covops alt.

The noctis and PvE ship, of course.

I multibox three accounts. One would be the orca pilot, the second would be the noctis/covert ops pilot, and the last would be my main combat pilot. I would log in the covops first, scout the hole and look for sites and wormholes. If I found that the hole was safe and profitable, I'd log in my main (flying the Pilgrim) and the orca pilot, reship from the orca and cloak it up. My noctis has a cloak as well so that I could keep it safe from scanners until needed. I would work sites and salvage them as quickly as I could, knowing I could return to the orca and reship quickly if things went bad.

Hint on salvaging: If you're running anomalies and have a cloak on your noctis, you can verify an anomaly has collapsed before warping by attempt to warp while cloaked. If the anomaly is still there, you'll get the information window on it as well as the notice that you can't warp while cloaked. Allowing the anomaly to despawn before warping to it makes your noctis harder to find and allows you to verify that there aren't any cloaky ships hiding and waiting for your salvager. I lost my first Noctis to a bomber hanging out in a site I'd run.

Orcas can fit through C2 holes and larger. C1s are only suitable for daytripping if you bring an orca. Scout out new wormholes, check them on wormnav for suitability, and migrate frequently. Creating a pattern of behavior in one system is a good way to attract unwanted attention. It's possible to use an Orca to close a C2 hole to get a new one, but it will take time and multiple round trips. If you're determined to do so, I'd suggest setting up a safe spot near the hole and warping the orca to it to cloak up while you wait for polarization to clear.

I made billions of isk doing this casually. If you've been daytripping wormholes for a while and are tired of prowling for hours in k-space looking for a decent hole, try going nomad. It's fun, it's dangerous, and it's something not many other people do. There are no logistics (other than resupplying with ammo and selling off your loot), no politics, no having to share. It's just you and whatever you can find to shoot.

Thank you for this information. I have an Orca alt finishing up training soon. I was intending to use her to swap ships in space during wartime, but since I'm no longer at war this looks like a fun way to make use of the character and ship.

Ima spend my next few days looking for you.

thank you very much for this. i was playing around with this idea for almost a year now and your writeup gave me some valuable hints.

Props for being brave enough to do something like this mate. Need more people like you doing crazy fun stuff like this.

Do you think the Noctis is enough better than a looting destroyer to justify the cost? Helped a corp mate a while back hit a Noctis that was cleaning up after a Tengu, we scored all his NR and he had to eat the 65mil for the ship as well.

Haha mail me then, I'll help you figure out if it's viable.

Excellent.


I had vague, half-formed thoughts along these lines - you've crystalized them nicely.

Confirming that. Cloaked ships no longer stop a site from despawning. Was changed a few months ago.

I sat cloaked in a site for over an hour recently. Iit didn't despawn. v0v

edit: it's still good practice to let the site despawn so that people warping to anoms can't find your salvager that way.