Life in a Wormhole: Valuable Resources #eveonline

Apparently, one of the things that happened while I was putting together how-to scanning videos was CB’s triumphant return to the wormhole. When I log in, he’s already online, tucked into a new mining barge and tearing shiny hunks of ore out of innocent asteroids.

This time, however, he’s adopting Gor’s “relay mining” practice, which involves mining until your hold is full, then jumping back to the safety of the tower to dump it off.  I’m given to understand that the process also involves some sort of bookmarking method that means the ship never stops moving at any point, even while mining — basically the two of them are doing Top Gun-style flybys on the asteroid field, filling up their hold in a single pass and warping off just as they reach the outer limit of their mining lasers’ effective range. Gor tried explaining the set up to me the day before, and I got lost somewhere around the second sentence, but CB apparently grasped the concept immediately and was already implementing by the time Gor was done talking.

Just goes to show you who the real industrialists are in this corp, and who is just killing time until the next sleeper enclave pops up. At least I’m good at scanning.

While CB acquires eve-tangible goods to haul to market, I’m testing out a few tips gleaned from some of our more intangible resources. Life in a wormhole has been an eye-opening experience for all of us, not least of all Gor who, while a veteran EVE player, hasn’t spent much if any time in wormholes.

We do a lot (and I mean a LOT) of reading and research when we’re offline, trying to get a handle on everything we need to know to keep from immediately getting squished. Some of those  include:

• A Guide to Player-Owned Structures. As hard as our first night setting up the Tower was, it would have been a hundred times worse without this (and several other) guides explaining how everything should be done for best effect.
• Living in a Wormhole, from the Eve University Wiki. I’ll always be loyal to my Online University of Celestial Hardship crew, but Eve Uni has had a long and respectable life as a corporation dedicated to teaching new players everything they can about everything there is to know within EVE. Doesn’t matter if it’s trading, industry, PvP, or mission running — they’re training material is top notch, and I say that as someone who gets paid to design training material for online consumption. This page covers the basics, and covers them quite well.
• Killing in the Hole, a Guide to wormhole PvP. A more recent find, perhaps most valuable to us for knowing what sorts of things visiting predators will try, but it’s also got a lot of good information on the basic mechanics of how wormholes work and how not to paint yourself into a corner when the time comes to heat the guns up.
• Tiger Ears – an online journal of a pilot in wormhole space. Penny is much less an industrialist and more of a PvP enthusiast, but nevertheless I find the posts incredibly educational, entertaining, and interesting. Sometimes, the post shows me something I need to watch out for when dealing with potential predators in our wormhole; sometimes they give me an idea about something I can try when it comes time to blow up a vagrant in our system; and sometimes they’re yet another tip about how to improve my scanning skills. In all cases, they’re a bright spot in my GReader stream.
• Dude, where’s my wormhole? – A post by Penny’s “fearless leader”, Finn, on how to manually and purposefully collapse a wormhole you’d rather not have in your system. Situational, but no less valuable for that.
• Finally, I do a lot of exploring and mapping as I scan down our new wormhole exits, and when I’m in the midst of those celestial peregrinations, I made heavy use of the Wormhole Systems Database to tell me about whatever system I find myself, Dotlan to give me an idea of the level of recent activity in both our wormhole and any connecting systems (it helps to know if there’s been a lot of violence in a system I’m about to explore), and Wormnav to tell me what I should be looking for in a system before I launch my probes.

That said, the best teacher is experience, and not everyone can figure out how someone works by reading about it — they have to suffer though their own personal learning curve to finally figure something out.

Case in point: I ask CB and Gor whether the scanning videos I put together helped them out at all. CB says that he’s never been able to learn anything from watching videos, and Gor said he thought they were good, but they didn’t help him at all.

Gor goes on to explain the method he’s using to get successful hits on his system scanning, but the pain it inflicts on me causes a ringing in my ears that drowns out the last half of the explanation. I comfort myself in the knowledge that, if pressed, they could both find their way back to known space.

And that I’ll never need to watch them doing it.

Sometimes, that’s the best you get.