Yesterday was pretty quiet

What can I say? Not every day is action packed and full of excitement when you're living in a wormhole. Our neighboring C2 was, once again, colonized and empty of any combat sites. Our low sec exit was pretty deep into low sec. Since we had no need to do anything in K-space, anyway, we didn't find a reason to leave. I came home from work at lunch and found that a perimeter checkpoint had spawned. This was my chance to try out my shiny new Apocalypse. So away I went to see how fast I could knock it out.

I've got two accounts and two characters that I use in the hole. They're both pretty equally skilled at combat. One flies Amarr. Gragarius flies Caldari. For a while there I was running my Amarr pilot in a Harbinger while Gragarius flies his drake. I can not speak highly enough of the drake. If you're a newbish pilot just thinking about getting into wormholes then get into a drake first. The passive tank on a drake absolutely cannot be beat by anything that's within reach of a new pilot. My Amarr pilot in his Harbinger would have to warp out within just a couple of minutes of being targeted by sleepers. With Grag I can just ignore him and not worry about anything in a C2 breaking his tank as long as I follow the spawn triggers correctly. I did lose a Drake in the first week that we were in the system but it was right before an unscheduled downtime and the ship was replaced. Of course, now I wish that I hadn't even bothered putting in that petition because CCP took back my insurance payout and gave me a Drake that's in the middle of empire where I'll have to go out of my way to get to it.

Anyway, back to the Apocalypse. As usual I warped in with Grag and started chipping away at the sleepers. When I got close to the sirius towers I warped my Apocalypse pilot in on top of them so that he could start burning them down right away. The plan worked well and I had the site cleared and salvaged inside of 40 minutes. It usually takes me close to an hour when I'm solo. The biggest improvement of the Apocalypse over the Harbinger was that I could actually tank the sleepers. It still doesn't tank anywhere near as well as the Drake and by the time the site was done I had almost no cap left but with the Drake there it worked rather well. There's no way I could solo these sites in the Apocalypse, though. The sleepers neut so my cap would be toast long before I could kill everything. Those huge battleship guns can't hit the frigates, either. The Apoc is nice to speed things up but my Drake ended up doing most of the damage. I'm sure that if I devoted a lot more skill to my Amarr pilot that he'd be able to handle these sleeper sites easily by himself but he's my industry/mining character so that's just not feasible right now. After clearing the site I grabbed my Coercer and had everything salvaged and looted within five minutes. It yielded 8 melted nanoribbons along with everything else so I was happy. I'm not complaining about making 50 million isk in 40 minutes.

Anyway, back to work I went. I was hoping for another sleeper site last night but it wasn't in the cards. I got home from work and found nothing new. That same lowsec wormhole was still there, though. The real reason that I bought the Apocalypse was because we don't have another effective wormhole closer in the hole. So I fit 7 1600 mm plates and went to town on it. Within half an hour or so our exit was critical. I decided not to risk another jump. We had two untouched grav sites in the system, though, so I hopped in my Covetor to do some mining. Another corp member had already started on it the night before so I polished off the bistot rock that was still there and got a good start on the crokite before logging.

Sleeper Sites for Newbies

Being the born again newb that I am I had long since forgotten many of the things that I used to know inside and out over my long hiatus from Eve. While a lot of it came back quickly it's given me an interesting insight into what kind of questions a newb would have that other blogs and guides tend to gloss over. These are the people who I'm looking to help with some of my posts. Hopefully I'll be able to explain things from a different perspective that will make it easier for people who have no clue what they're doing to understand.

When you're scanning down a wormhole system you'll get a few different types of signatures. Gravimetric sites are asteroid belts. Ladar sites are gas clouds. Radar sites are combat sites with special cans that you need the hacking skill and a codebreaker to access. Magnemetric sites are combat sites with special cans that you need the archaeology skill and an analyzer to access. The other type of sigs are unknown. These can either be wormholes or combat sites. The unknown combat sites will show up at 100% signal strength as long as a probe is in range. Your ship scanner will also pick these sites up if you're within range of one or more. These sites are the bread and butter money maker for any wormhole explorer.

There are three types of sleeper sites that you'll commonly find in C2 wormholes. I've been in a lot of them and these are the only three that I've seen show up in class 2s. The list of possible sites gets longer as you get into higher class wormholes. The sites also get more difficult. The ones that you find in C2s are pretty easy to solo as long as you're aware of a few things. The types of sites that you'll find in C2s are Perimeter Hangars, Perimeter Checkpoints and Sleepless Data Sanctuaries. They all have static spawns. Here's what you can expect from each.

Perimeter Hangar:

These are the easiest combat sites. As long as you follow the spawn triggers you should be able to solo them pretty easily in a drake or an equivalent ship (other battlecruisers are not the equivalent of a drake when it comes to pve btw). If you can't solo these then don't even bother trying to solo anything harder. Killing the last ship in the "trigger group" will spawn the next wave of sleepers.

Spawn 1:
3x Awakened Patroller (Trigger)
2x Emergent Watchman

Spawn 2:
1x - Sleepless Watchman
2x Awakened Escort (Trigger)

Spawn 3:
1x Sleepless Escort
2x Awakened Escort



Perimeter Checkpoint:

These are a fair bit harder than the hangars. The two sentry guns hit pretty hard and they have very good tracking. They have a low rate of fire, though. If you can't tank the guns and all of the ships at once then just lure the ships out of the range of the sirius guns (100 kms), kill all but the trigger ship then go back in and kill the guns. Make sure that you don't lure the ships out too far or they'll boomerang back to their spawn point. Everything else should be pretty easy once the guns are taken out. The sleepless patroller hits pretty hard and he likes to kite. Make sure that when you see it spawn that you don't let him fly out of your range.

Spawn 1:
3x Awakened Patroller (Trigger)
2x Emergent Patroller
2x Sirius Sentry Tower

Spawn 2:
2x Awakened Patroller (Trigger)
2x Awakened Escort

Spawn 3:
3x Emergent Patroller
1X Sleepless Patroller

Sleepless Data Sanctuary:

These are the hardest of the three. They have three sentry guns which can make short work of anyone who doesn't have a rock solid tank. Follow the same strategy that you would in the Perimeter Checkpoint if you have to. Just make sure that by the time you spawn the Sleepless Outguard that everything else is cleared. It hits VERY hard and can take a real beating. It's also got ridiculous range. Then again, if you can't tank it while you're trying to get into range from 100km out then you won't be able to tank it long enough to kill it.

Spawn 1:
3x Sirius Sentry
2x Awakened Escort (Trigger)
3x Emergent Patroller

Spawn 2:
1x Sleepless Escort (Trigger)
4x Emergent Escort

Spawn 3:
1x Sleepless Outguard

Here are a few tips that might help you out. First of all set bookmarks. This is very important if your next target is well outside of your range and you can't tank them indefinitely. The entire time you're closing they'll be able to shoot you but you won't be able to shoot back. Bookmark a wreck or an asteroid or something close to your target, warp out and warp back to the bookmark.

If you wait too long to warp and you start to get in serious trouble then launch some drones. Sleepers will usually target new targets pretty quickly. This can be the difference between getting out with your ship and getting blown to bits right before you go into warp.

Watch your directional scanner constantly. Set it to max range at 360 degrees and hit scan every minute or so. If you see a ship that you don't recognize then warp to a safe spot. If you see combat probes then do the same. If you don't have a pos in the system then use your directional to make sure that your exit is safe. Other players are a much bigger threat than a sleeper site and if you've got a ship that's capable of soloing these sites then it will probably be worth more than the loot and salvage from one of these low level sites. I'll have more later.

The first couple of weeks

We've been in the wormhole for a couple of weeks now. For the most part it's been uneventful but we have had a few incidents. The first night after we set everything up we started doing some mining. Within a few hours a group of reds found our hole and started harrassing us. We made it to the POS before they tracked us down and they left shortly after. They found us because one of our members was messing around in the adjoining low sec system. We were tipped off by some of their actions so we had a covert ops ship stationed at the entrance. That's probably the only thing that saved us. Oh well. Lesson learned. Now when we need to conduct business outside of the wormhole we get in and out as quickly as possible and we don't do anything in the adjoining system.

We have two static wormholes in our system. One is a C2. The other goes to low sec. We've had no luck with the adjoining class 2. Every single system that's opened up has been settled and they're always cleared of sites. Unfortunately, ours was crammed with about 30 sites when we first settled it. I say unfortunately because for the first few days we always seemed to have other people from the adjoining wormhole in our hole going after our sites. We've got good friends in our alliance who like to pvp so getting enough ships there through the low sec exit to chase people off hasn't been a problem. We've lost two covetors because of this, though. I lost one the second morning that we were in there. My CEO lost one a few days later. Both times we were mining solo. Both times the aggressors came through our C2 exit. Both times we were checking our directional scanner at least once a minute. Someone with good skills who knows what they're doing can have your ship scanned down and bm'd in under a minute. Make sure that probes show up on your overview. Scan constantly. Be aligned and ready to get out of there fast. We use covetors because they're cheap to replace, they mine almost as fast as hulks, sleepers don't respawn in wormhole space after you take out the initial spawn and we have hauler alts so the extra cargo capacity doesn't matter.

We've had a few other interesting encounters. One day I ran across a mining op in the adjoining C2. With no one else around I decided to leave them alone. A few hours later I hopped back on and went to check on them again. This time my CEO was on so away we went. The op was gone but now there was a scorpion and a bc (can't remember what it was) flying around. I launched some probes and waited. Sure enough, within a few minutes they warped to the wormhole where I was probing from. I fleeted them and they turned out to be nice enough. After a short conversation I offered to take them to a high sec exit that we had in our wormhole. So I warped to the wormhole and the guy in the bc followed me. The Scorpion pilot, on the other hand, decided to follow my CEO....who had warped to our POS. Somehow my CEO managed to offline enough stuff before she warped in that she made it out OK. After that little scare we got everyone out of there safe and sound. The high sec exit closed behind the scorpion and everyone was happy.

So far this little venture has turned out to be pretty profitable. Now that we have the spawn triggers down we clear the sleeper sites easily. With the hole mostly cleared out besides the 2 or 3 sites that spawn daily we seem to have fewer neighbors bothering us. Now we're talking about trying our hand at reverse engineering, invention and t3 manufacturing. Having our defenses online 24/7 seems like a waste of fuel since no one ever bothers our POS.

Introducing...me

I've been playing MMOs since '98 when I was first introduced to UO. Over the years I've tried just about everything. I've had very successful crafters in multiple games. I've always loved PVP even though I've never been that good. I've always been good enough to compete but never good enough to excel. Exploring has always been what really captures my interest, though. I had runebooks full of runes to anything that was even remotely interesting in UO. I'd spend days running around aimlessly in Asheron's Call just to try to find interesting and unusual landmarks. Back when SWG was a new game I spent most of my time surveying and harvesting and ended up with a collection of the best resources possible up until I quit. I learned how to wall jump in WoW just so that I could get to places that I wasn't supposed to get to. I've always been the type that loves to push the limits of a game and find ways to excel at things that others can't be bothered with.

A few years ago I was introduced to Eve. Several old friends were just getting into it. It was a cool game. The universe itself was huge. I loved the idea of the game only having one server. The sheer number of things to do was overwhelming. I started out the way that a lot of people do....by mining. It wasn't long before I got a second account to train a hauler alt. It was going great until mining started getting old. I tried some missions but it was the same thing over and over and they didn't pay much. I made some money hauling but at the time there was no "warp to 0" so it took forever to get anywhere. Ratting was a joke. My ventures into low sec always had the same result...with me in my pod. Finally after a few months of doing little more than burning rocks my online time had basically dwindled to nothing more than learning new skills. It didn't take long before I just gave up. I popped in during a couple of free trials to update my skills, burn some rocks and run some level 4s with friends but the game just never caught my interest again. Until a few weeks ago.

I had tagged along on enough level 4s that I could do some level 2s. My occasional skill training had paid off with one character who's just a couple of weeks away from flying a Tengu and another who can fly a hulk (even though I can only afford a Covetor) and build/refine efficiently. Within a couple of days of being back an old friend gave me a makinaw that had been sitting in empire for at least a year. Another old friend shot me 40 mil so that I could get into a drake. Soon I was ice mining on one account and running missions on the other. The level 2s were a snoozefest in the drake and after just a few days of that I still couldn't pull level 3s so I got sick of it. Then I discovered probing. In no time I was getting faction loot in complexes, hacking radar sites and exploring wormholes. At the same time I had joined Sardeukar Enterprises. With Hulkageddon going on I didn't want to mine in empire or semi afk mine ice in my mak so I hit a couple of grav sites in wormholes. I made some good money there and was lucky enough not to run into anyone else. Then my CEO started talking wormhole exploration. He told me what he wanted and luckily I had already found us one that fit the bill. Unfortunately, we couldn't set up the POS until the next day. So I volunteered to stay inside and scan down a new hole the next day without having any clue that there might not be another high sec exit anytime soon.

So the next morning I logged on. There I was in my drake fit with a probe launcher with barely enough skill to use probes in the first place. This was only the second or third wormhole that I'd been in and besides the tutorial video on how to scan I had done very little research on the topic. My exit was gone and I didn't expect to see anyone on until the evening. To pass the time I cleared a couple of sleeper sites but I quickly ran out of missiles. With nothing better to do I finally decided to start scanning. No one had told me how bad of an idea it is to try to scan down a wormhole in a drake with next to no probing skill. Usually I do my scanning in a heron but I figured that I'd be better off in a ship that could handle some combat.

So I launched a probe, set it to 32 au and let it fly. Nothing. Hmm.... After moving it around a bit I finally found a spot where I got a few hits. I started scanning down one of the sigs. It was a grav site but by the time I got my scan radius down to .25 au I could only get it to about 80% or so. Oh well... I didn't need a grav site, anyway. So I started scanning down the next sig. By the time I got THAT one down to .25 au I knew it was a wormhole. Unfortunately the max signal I could get was 75%. Now I was sweating a little. It was at that point that it occured to me that the heron has a nice 50% scan probe strength bonus. So I started asking questions in alliance chat. That was also the first time that I'd bothered doing any research online. I was not reassured when I realized that I might not be able to scan my way out.

By now my probes only had about 20 minutes left before they'd go poof. Worried that I might not be able to pick up the signal again I started messing around with the probe positioning. Scan...70%....scan.....78%.....scan....80%. Now I was getting somewhere. Scan....no scan signals detected. Shit. Eventually, I managed to scan it down to two dots. Crossing my fingers I rolled the dice, picked a dot and piled the probes on top of it. 99.9%. Hrm. I tweaked my probes around a bit...99.9%. Damn. With just a few minutes left on my probes I was already trying to figure out how much it would cost to replace my drake and my implants. Then I nailed it...100%. YES! I quickly recovered my probes and went to check out my exit. It ended up spitting me out in .4 space within a few jumps of Dodixie. From there I bmd the low sec side and booked it home to start packing.

Long story short everyone got on that night, it turned out to be exactly what we were looking for (a C2 with a static low sec exit that occasionally opens to .5) and we moved in immediately. That was a week ago. We've had a few adventures since then and I'm sure that there will be plenty more in the future. I'll be sure and tell you about them later. IB TLTR