All-Out Guide to Wormhole Gas

by Mussah Yacoub

Introduction

Gas huffing in wormhole space can make you some decent money with a reasonable skillpoint and isk investment. The main skillbook costs 24m ISK and it takes about a week to train the skills to 90% of maximum efficiency. With the normal skills listed here, I can make a mil every 30 seconds huffing c320. And once you’ve huffed the gas, you don’t even need to haul it out - you can sell it for cash in our wormhole using our buyback program.

Overview

External Resources

“X Up for Ninja Huffing” Spreadsheet is designed for pilots to enter their personal huffing rate (in m3/s) and then x up if they are coming on the fleet. This allows a given fleet composition to clearly see:

  • The relative value of the gas sites in a given wormhole (huff the highest ones first)
  • Which cloud should be huffed first inside a given site (green then yellow then red)

If you want to use this spreadsheet and are not a member of All-Out, be nice and make a copy of it on your Google Drive for use with your group of pilots.

Rykki’s Guides: Wormhole PvE has a Gas Sigs tab which shows, for each site:

  • Kind/number of rats
  • Incoming DPS numbers
  • Blue loot value
  • Estimated total gas value

Fuzzworks Gas Page has a table of all gases (both wormhole and k-space) showing up-to-date values from Eve-Central:

  • m3/unit
  • ISK/unit
  • ISK/m3
  • ISK/Venture

Wormhole Gas Sites

Every site contains two clouds of different kinds about 50km apart.

The first time a pilot initiates warp to a freshly spawned wormhole gas site (the moment the little pop-up with the name of the site appears for him) an invisible timer starts in the site. At some point between 15 to 20 minutes later, the site rats spawn.

Once the rats are killed in a wormhole gas site, they do not respawn. (Unlike many k-space mining/huffing sites.)

Ninja Huffing

Your goal is to huff as much value in gas using Ventures as you can before the site rats spawn. When they show up, you get the hell out of dodge.

As a rule of thumb, the more Ventures you bring to the site, the more money will be made (the number of Ventures needed to completely clear some sites in under 20 minutes is ridiculously high). If a high-value gas site is found (one that contains Core in the name) and no one online is capable of clearing the rats, it’s worth pinging in Slack and giving people some time to form a fleet to ninja it. Ninja-ing a Core site with one or two people is a waste of good gas.

Pre-Warp Check

  • Make sure you are not about to enter a Ordinary Perimeter site:
    • These do not have the 20 min rat timer
    • There are sentry towers that alpha Ventures as they warp in
  • Make sure you have a 5MN MWD of some kind fitted
  • Make sure you have two Gas Cloud Harvesters fitted
  • Make sure you have Harvestable Clouds displayed on one of your overview tabs (it’s under the Celestials tab)
  • Make sure everyone in fleet knows which cloud is higher value and should be huffed first (see the “X Up for Ninja Huffing” spreadsheet in the External Resources section)

Clearing Rats

Your goal is to clear the rats from the site completely, loot and salvage them, and then huff all of the gas at your leisure. Note that clearing rats and huffing in a fleet will make you less money than doing all of it solo (compared to ninja-huffing where it literally doesn’t matter how many other people there are).

  • All 5 Perimeter sites are found in all classes of wormholes. They can be soloed in a confessor.
    • The Ordinary Perimeter site has sentry towers with low DPS but high alpha. Start (and stagger) your reps while in warp to the site and establish transversal ASAP.
  • Both Frontier sites are found in C3 wormholes and up. They can also be soloed in a confessor with good piloting.
  • Both Core sites are found in C5 and C6 wormholes only. These are dicks to clear. Refer to experienced players for more information about necessary fleet composition.
    • The Instrumental Core site is the only one that scrams. All other sites you can warp out of freely.

For more detailed combat information, refer to “Rykki’s Guides: Wormhole PvE” in the External Resources section.

Skills

If you made your character after September 29th, 2015 (when starting SP was buffed to from 50k to 400k), then you already have Mining Frigate I and Mining III trained. Time estimates below are made assuming this is the case for you, and you are on the default 20/20/19/20/20 remap and have no implants.

Minimum Skills

21 hours to train from scratch. You should take some time to train this just so you don’t get left out if we find one of the super valuable clouds and run a fleet for it.

  • Gas Cloud Harvesting I (8m, 20s) (24m ISK for skillbook)
    • Mining IV (20h, 41m, 49s)

Normal Skills

7 days, 3 hours to train from scratch. This should be your norm if you intend to make any regular money off ninja huffing before you have the combat SP to be able to clear sites (Gas Cloud Harvester II huffs twice as fast Gas Cloud Harvester I, so your profit per time spent doubles).

  • Mining Frigate III (8h, 36m, 40s)
  • Gas Cloud Harvesting V (5d, 22h, 13m, 20s) (24m ISK for skillbook)
    • Mining IV (20h, 41m, 49s)

Advanced Skills

18 days, 15 hours to train from scratch. Your huffing rate increases by 5% per level of Mining Frigate, but most wormholers don’t want to spend that kind of time training a mining ship.

  • Mining Frigate V (11d, 20h, 10m)
  • Gas Cloud Harvesting V (5d, 22h, 13m, 20s) (24m ISK for skillbook)
    • Mining IV (20h, 41m, 49s)

If you actually train this far, you might as well go all the way and train up a Prospect while you’re at it (about 30 days from scratch). This doesn’t make you huff any faster than a Venture, but it doubles your available cargo capacity and allows you to memehuff certain sites without clearing rats by sigtanking with its sig reduction bonus.

Fitting Your Huffing Ship

You will use a Venture, or if you want to train for a month for a small improvement and a lot more ISK on the field, a Prospect. These are the only ships with role bonuses to gas harvesting. Two harvesters fit to these ships have the yield of four harvesters fit to any other ship.

Example Fit

[Venture, Gas Huffer]

Nanofiber Internal Structure II

5MN Cold-Gas Enduring Microwarpdrive
Scan Rangefinding Array I
Scan Rangefinding Array I

Core Probe Launcher I
Gas Cloud Harvester II
Gas Cloud Harvester II

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
[Empty Rig slot]

Hornet EC-300 x2

Core Scanner Probe I x8

Essential Modules

  • 2x Gas Cloud Harvester I or Gas Cloud Harvester II. The T2 version makes you money twice as fast.
  • 1x 5MN Cold-Gas Enduring Microwarpdrive, 5MN Quad LiF Restrained Microwarpdrive, or 5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive. When ninja-huffing, you need an MWD to travel between the gas clouds; an AB is too slow. And while you are huffing, it is a lot harder for a cloaky hostile to catch you if you are orbiting the cloud with your MWD active.

Optional Modules

High Slots

You have space to pick one of the following:

  • 1x Core Probe Launcher I and 8x Core Scanner Probe I. A mantra of wormhole space is to have a launcher and probes with you at all times. This is my preferred choice. However, if you choose these and then bad boys show up to your huffing op, you will have to bounce from bookmark to bookmark until they get bored or you will get combat probed and killed.
  • 1x Basic Cloaking Device I or Improved Cloaking Device II. This allows you to run to your safe spot, cloak up, and wait indefinitely for any bad boys to go away before you try to escape or keep huffing. However, you have no probes - if you are forced to sit cloaked long enough your exit will close, you will be trapped, and you will need to self destruct and lose your cargo to get out anyway.

Mid Slots

You have slots to pick two of the following, but you may not have enough fitting space for some combinations:

  • Medium Shield Extender or variant. Gives you buffer to survive a volley (from players or sleepers) on your way out of the site
  • Adaptive Invulnerability Field or variant, or other damage-specific shield hardener.
  • Prototype ECCM Magnetometric Sensor Cluster. Makes you harder to combat probe.
  • Any of the scanning upgrades: Scan Acquisition Array, Scan Rangefinding Array, Scan Pinpointing Arragy. These will make it less soul-crushing to probe in a venture.

Low Slots

You have one low slot:

  • Warp Core Stabilizer. This means a hostile has to have 4 points of warp disruption to pin you down. T1 is cheap, T2 lets you lock faster and farther (important to consider when under the time constraints of ninja huffing).
  • Damage Control. Gives you more EHP if you’re slow getting out of the site.
  • Nanofiber Internal Structure II makes you burn faster inside the site and align faster to get out of the site.
  • Inertial Stabilizer II makes you align even faster, but makes your sig bigger (faster to get locked and easier to get hit).