Moving into a wormhole: picking a home, anchoring, staying alive

Most "should I move into a wormhole" threads get the same three answers: don't, join a corp first, or live out of a POS. This page is the other half. If you are going to do it, here is what the data says about picking the hole, the exact anchoring sequence, and the habits that decide whether you stay.

The short version

1. Pick the static before you pick the system. It decides your traffic, your logistics and how hard your front door is to close.
2. Watch the hole before you move anything in. Somebody may already live there and simply be offline.
3. Stage out of something cheap first. A small POS or a single ship you can afford to lose, not your whole hangar.
4. Anchor when the hole is closed and quiet, and be online for all three vulnerable windows.
5. Keep a way back in. Characters logged off inside the hole, with probes, are what stop you being rolled out for good.

Picking the hole

Almost every C1 and C3 has a single static, and in both classes it always goes to known space. The class pages show exactly how the statics split, from the static of all 2,556 systems we hold. For a C3:

A few systems have two statics, so the shares add up to more than 100%. Mass and lifetime come from EVE's official data for each wormhole type.

What that means in practice:

• A high sec static is the easiest to supply and the hardest to shut. Anyone in high sec can find it, and at 5,000M kg it takes roughly seventeen rolling battleship jumps to close. That is a long time to have your rollers sitting on the hole.
• A low sec static is the common choice, and there are a lot of them to pick from. Your hauling runs through low sec, and 3,000M kg is a much shorter roll.
• A null sec static lives 16 hours, not 24, so it refreshes on its own more often.

Effects matter as well. About two thirds of C3s with a single static have no system effect at all, and those are the easy default. The C3 class page has the table, and each row opens the matching systems in the system finder, so you can shortlist a home in one click.

Before you commit to one, open its system page and follow the link out to its killboard. Recent kills with structure losses, or the same few names dying there week after week, tell you it is lived in.

Watch before you move

Community advice is consistent on this, and it costs nothing: put a scout or two in the hole and watch it for a few days before anything valuable goes in. Players who live in a hole are often offline, and the tell is the same names turning up again a day or more apart. Bookmark safe spots while you are there, and practise logging off safely in space. Grade C: this is practice, not mechanics.

POS or Astrahus

You cannot dock at a POS. You store ships in its Ship Maintenance Array (20 million m³ of assembled ships) and items in a Corporate Hangar Array (1.4 million m³, seven divisions). Anyone with access to the array can board the ships in it. A small tower costs roughly 80 to 90 million ISK a month in fuel on the EVE University figures. When it is attacked it drops into reinforced mode for as long as its Strontium Clathrates last, anything from none up to three and a half days, which you set.

An Astrahus is a real station. You dock, you get a clone bay, fitting and storage, and it tethers you while you sit next to it. It is 8,000 m³ packaged, so it fits in a blockade runner. It cannot be anchored in a shattered wormhole, and that includes Thera. Unlike a POS it does not defend itself: a structure fights only with a pilot in the control seat.

The pattern players describe most often is both: a small POS as the staging base while you move in and anchor, then the Astrahus once you know the hole.

Anchoring an Upwell structure, step by step

This is the part most people get slightly wrong. There are three windows where the structure can be destroyed outright, not two.

1. Place it. It must be at least 1,000 km from any other station, structure or asteroid belt.
2. First 15 minutes: vulnerable. Anchoring has not started yet. It can be killed outright.
3. 24 hours: anchoring, invulnerable. Nobody can touch it. Everyone who rolls into your hole in that day can see it, though.
4. "No core": vulnerable again. When anchoring finishes, the structure has hull only and can be destroyed immediately until you insert the quantum core. Be online the moment the 24 hours are up.
5. Insert the core. Dock, take control of the structure, open its inventory and drag the core into its core bay.
6. Second 15 minutes: vulnerable. The repair timer runs, still on hull only. This is the window a patient visitor waits for.
7. Low power. It is up, with shields and armour.
8. Online a service module with fuel blocks in the fuel bay (enough for three days of that module) to bring it to its normal state.

So plan around being present at the start, at the 24-hour mark, and for the 15 minutes after the core goes in. Community advice is to start it when the hole is as closed as you can make it (static only, every other connection rolled) and to time the finish for a quiet hour. Treat the structure as spent money the moment you drop it, and do not fill it with everything you own.

Living there

Scan every day. New signatures and anomalies spawn daily. Signature IDs stay the same across downtime, so bookmark and label everything once, and each day you only have to scan what is new.

New signatures are new doors. The exit side of a wormhole (a K162) does not exist until someone on the far side warps to the entrance. So a signature you have never seen before can be someone coming in. Roll it or watch it.

Keep the hole closed when you can. Roll the connections you do not need and keep your static in a known state. Our rolling planner works out each jump for you, and the rolling guide explains how it is done.

Keep a way back in. The worst outcome is not losing the structure, it is being locked out. Several experienced players say the same thing: keep one or more characters logged off at safe spots inside the hole, in ships with a probe launcher, so there is always someone who can scan the new exit. If you are ever stranded anyway, EVE-Scout Rescue (Signal Cartel) runs a free rescue line, and their caches of probes and a launcher sit in most wormhole systems.

Run planetary industry. Wormhole planets are mostly unclaimed. Customs offices in wormholes are NPC by default, so there is still a tax. The PI planner takes any J-code and ranks what to make there.

Know your sites. Every class page lists what spawns there, with rosters and the damage to expect: C1, C2, C3.

Sources

• Anchoring sequence, placement rules, Astrahus size and the no-shattered rule: EVE University wiki, Anchoring structures (revision 231216).
• POS storage, fuel and reinforcement: EVE University wiki, Player-owned starbases (revision 224283) and Living in Wormhole Space (revision 230316). Fuel costs are their figures and move with the market.
• K162s appearing only on first warp, and daily scanning: the same two EVE University pages.
• Static shares: our per-system statics (whdbx, cross-checked with anoik.is, see sources and thanks). Mass and lifetime: EVE's official ESI data, retrieved 24 Sep 2026.
• Scouting first, POS-then-Astrahus, and logged-off characters inside: repeated advice from experienced wormhole players, not official mechanics.