Wormholes are temporary high-risk pockets that tear open at random in the galaxy's deepest space. Fly your bow through the portal and you drop into a sealed pocket full of rare ore, derelict wrecks, and angry pirates — then you have to get back out before it collapses on top of you. It's the only source of a few endgame materials, so the trip is worth the danger.
Wormholes spawn only in NULL zone (Wild Drift, §c red) — never in CORE, MID, or FRONTIER. The galaxy can hold up to 3 open at once.
They open on a slow, random cadence: on average about one every 2 hours server-wide. There's no schedule you can camp — the spawn rolls each minute, so a wormhole can appear anywhere in NULL at any time. When one opens, every online player gets a chat (or, for the rarest tiers, an on-screen title) announcing it and the sector it opened in, so you can choose to chase it before the window closes.
A wormhole also paints a purple pin on the regional map at its entry portal for as long as it stays open, so once you know one exists you can navigate to it.
Wormholes are not persistent — a server restart wipes any open ones, and the cadence starts fresh from cold.
The entry portal sits in normal space (a ring of themed blocks). To go through, fly your ship so its bow crosses into the portal opening — the same "nose into the ring" mechanic as a warp gate. You don't need a command; proximity does it. A transit flash plays, and you drop into the pocket just past the exit portal on the far side.
After any transit you're locked out of both portals for 5 seconds, so you can't bounce straight back through by accident.
There are six wormhole types. They all share the same loop — mine, salvage, fight, leave — but differ in how long they stay open, how hard the collapse hits, how thick the pirates are, and what loot the pocket holds. Rarer types open far less often, last a shorter time, and bite much harder, but carry the best rewards.
| Type | Rarity | Window | Collapse hull bite | Pirate density | Roughly how often |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wisp Drift | Common | 45 min | 10% | Low | Very common |
| Aurora Rift | Common | 30 min | 20% | Medium | Common |
| Solar Wake | Common | 20 min | 30% | Medium-high | Common |
| Magnetar Storm | Rare | 15 min | 40% | High | Uncommon |
| Event Horizon | Rare | 10 min | 50% | Very high | Rare |
| Void Singularity | Legendary | 10 min | 60% | Extreme | Very rare |
The "pirate density" inside any pocket is the galaxy baseline multiplied by the type's own multiplier — a quiet Wisp Drift is a few stalkers, an Event Horizon or Void Singularity is a swarm. Bring a shield and weapons, or expect to die.
The pocket itself is themed per type (soul-sand valley, warped forest, basalt deltas, the End, and so on) — purely cosmetic, but it tells you at a glance which type you're in.
A pocket is a self-contained field of content scattered around the exit portal. Three things to harvest:
Every wormhole seeds a cluster of asteroids made of crystal.wormhole_shard (Wormhole Shard) — mine them exactly like normal-space rocks with your mining laser. Higher-rarity pockets carry more shard asteroids and richer ones. Pockets also mix in some ordinary tier ore (iron/copper up to platinum/iridium depending on the type), so you can top up your ore hold while you're there.
Wormhole Shard refines 2 → 1 into alloy.wormhole (Wormhole Alloy): two shards in, one alloy out, in a Refinery module on a roughly 12-second batch. Wormhole Alloy is only obtainable this way — there is no vendor that sells it and no other recipe that produces it, so every bar of it traces back to a wormhole run.
Each pocket is pre-seeded with derelict wreck hulks scattered around the exit portal — a "graveyard" of husks. Salvage them with a Salvage Arm module the same way you'd strip any wreck. On top of the standard salvage stream (structural plating, power capacitor), wreck holds carry type-flavored cosmetic blocks and, in the rarer pockets, a chance at Earth Artifacts.
Anything you don't salvage is destroyed when the wormhole collapses — the wrecks don't survive back into normal space.
Voidborne pirate ships spawn throughout the pocket, scaling up in tier and number with the type's rarity. They're a genuine threat, not flavor — clear them, outrun them, or tank them while you work.
When you're done, fly your bow back through the exit portal. That clean exit drops you back into normal space near the entry portal — and pays the run-completion reward.
The completion table is rolled per type. The richer pockets can hand out:
component.void_fragment — the combat-side T5 gate materialThe completion reward is paid once per run — looping in and out through the portals will not re-roll it. The rewards land in your personal inventory (overflow drops at your feet).
The lower-tier pockets (Wisp Drift, Aurora Rift, Solar Wake) pay little or nothing at the exit — their value is the shards you mine and the wrecks you salvage inside.
Earth Artifacts (earth_artifact.minor, earth_artifact.major) are collectibles with no use other than selling — and no source other than wormholes (completion rewards in the high tiers, plus wreck-cache drops). They sell to vendors for a lot: a minor for 80,000 cr, a major for 400,000 cr. Think of them as a rare credit faucet for surviving a dangerous run.
Every wormhole is time-limited. A boss bar shows the countdown to collapse for everyone inside; it shifts purple → pink → red as the window runs down, and the last 60 seconds turn red and segmented as an "out, now" warning.
If you're still in the pocket when it collapses:
So the core tension is the same every run: stay longer to mine and salvage more, but leave on your own terms through the exit portal — limping out at 1 HP into a hostile NULL sector with nothing to show is the failure state.